Private school is weird, stop 'guiding' me so much people.

Sometimes I forget that I'm going to a private school. I've just always kinda clumped medical schools all in the same category, without differentiating between private and public. If anything, I've just categorized them as California schools and then all the other ones. It's weird. I knew going into this that med school was going to be different from undergrad and a lot harder, so I appreciate a support system and working in small groups. This, however, is overkill.

This is my 3rd week at school. The first week was an 'orientation' week, where people talked at us all day and we were supposed to socialize at night. Apparently, we were supposed to remember all those people that talked at us, because they later sent us an online evaluation form to fill out. Every daytime session was listed with a numeric scale and a comments section. We had to fill out the comments section for every single one. I eventually gave up and started to put 'I don't remember' for most of them. . .because I didn't. They all just kinda blurred into a vast nothingness. That's how useful that was to me.

Last week, we took the course on medical decision making, which actually wasn't that bad. The only annoying thing was that they kept alluding to the second and third part of the course which we take later. . .so it kinda felt useless, but it was new enough that I was ok with it.

This week, we're starting all of our 'real' courses, except for the labs. We have 2 hours of structure-function/basic science lecture every day. We have a patients, physicians and society (PPS) course twice a week and a course where we do case studies twice a week. So today we had the PPS course. They broke us into small groups of 9-10 people, and each group has a doctor that's leading it. We're doing ethics. I have no problem with ethics. But when we take 20 minutes to designate 'rules' of discussing ethics for our own group. . .I get kinda annoyed. And then when we spend another 20 minutes discussing 'What is ethics?' when the instructor told us all what this class was about in the beginning, I get pretty frustrated. And when they assign us a short essay to write about one time I've lied and been lied to and how I felt. . .I want to shove a spoon down someone's throat. Please. . .stop babying me.

Our class of 170 is also broken down into 4 different colleges. Each college is lead by a doctor that is supposed to be our mentor. It's really cool and really weird at the same time. It feels like some weird private school crap. We had a one-on-one session today, and he asked me if I had any questions about the curriculum or exams or anything. I guess I just don't know what to do in that situation. I think I said something like, 'Exams are hard, right?' Seriously, I don't get what I'm supposed to do there. It's the third week of school. They've been telling us over and over that they're taking it slow and easing us into it. What am I supposed to ask here? Perhaps I should be more interested in case I need more recommendations when applying for residencies. . .but I don't wanna.

I guess all the support is a good thing, but I am a little too independent I think to really enjoy some of this. I guess soon enough I'll be too engrossed in my work to really care, but let's get started with some of this work, shall we?

To make up for the massive ranting. . .here's a picture i took of the city while walking along the lake. Sooo calming. . .