Second-year, here we come!

We are approaching the end of our first year of medical school. This has good aspects and bad aspects. Well, to be honest, the good out weighs the bad by a fair bit!

The good things I am personally excited about are as follows:

a) I will no longer be a first-year! When people ask what year I am in and I say, "first", I die a little inside from the shame.

b) There will be new first-years, and they won't be us! Hahaha!

c) I will feel a lot more comfortable in my role as a medical student than I did at the start of first-year, and start to get into the substance of the course more. A lot of the first year is working out which way is up, while trying to juggle a million things at once. The juggling will get harder, but at least I will know my way around!

d) I am one year closer to not being poor. I love working. I love earning a full-time wage. I love being an employee. Nothing quite beats the feeling of pride that you get every time you get that newly-minted hospital ID badge. I get so excited when I have to go to security/admin to get the photo! With time it gets a beating and resembles me less and less every year, but I still love my ID badges. There have to be more people out there than me who feel this way!

e) We start to get into the actual pathology a lot more in second year! This is very exciting for me, and many other people. As interesting as homeostasis and normal functioning are (and yes, they are what we aim for!), I find it fascinating to see what can go wrong with people. Frankly, I am surprised that our average life expectancy is so high!

Bad:

a) Exams are going to get much meaner and nastier and will also examine things from first-year. My brain may not be big enough.

b) The opportunity for work will diminish slightly each year. Luckily my better half seems to get small raises semi-regularly, so now we just have to keep interest rates down and we will be fine. Oh, and I am also a gunner at cooking rice and beans, or rice and veggies, and other meals that don't cost the earth.

c) We get new PBL groups. This may actually be good or bad. As much as I hated PBHell, I was with a pretty nice group of people.

d) I am a little bit closer to shutting down this blog. Australian hospitals are VERY strict about their doctors not blogging. It is a BAD move career-wise to be caught writing a blog. I never write about anything involving patients (as much as some people would like to read it, I'm sure) because I KNOW it could come back to bite me in the buttocks in a massive way, but even with this policy firmly in place, it would be a bad idea.

So now all I have to do is survive to the end of the year. However, I think I am close enough to safely get excited about next year!

Please excuse the spacing at the bottom of this post. Blogger won't let me fix it for some reason. Sorry.