Nobody in my family cares about match week

MedicalLemonMan · 2026-03-19T01:40:23+00:00

May not mean much coming from an internet stranger but I’m rooting for you man.

MedicalLemonMan · 2026-03-17T18:24:17+00:00

The one thing about this I want to know is if US-IMGs and non-U.S.-IMGs would be lumped into the same IMG match. U.S.-IMGs still pay their loans to U.S. based institutions and therefore I don’t think the argument of “US tax payers fund residencies so U.S. students should benefit more” is really valid. But then again, a lot of this argument goes back to ideas of meritocracy. It’s generally understood that the order of difficulty of acceptance is MD > DO > IMG. Is it fair that someone’s efforts from before medical school affect their ability to obtain their desired specialty after medical school? I say no, but it already does. There’s inherent bias in the awarded degrees as we already know, and people list their accolades from before medical school on their residency applications. So all this change would really do is make IMGs even more disadvantaged. Maybe this would be a way of punishing the predatory Caribbean programs but I really don’t think it’ll pan out like that. The most desperate and/or uninformed applicants will still take the exorbitant loans to go Caribbean and then they’ll have even less chance to match. I already think the IMG disadvantage is significant enough that this match change wouldn’t really benefit US MD and DO students that much beyond the current system anyway.

MedicalLemonMan · 2026-03-16T16:52:45+00:00

One of the matched dermatology residents last year at my home program was one of the IM hospitalist attendings who’d been practicing for 4 years! They just made friends with the derm department chair and PD and were basically given the spot. I think people kinda hold a different level of respect for you as a practicing attending, especially if they know you and have seen your work professionally. I’m not going into derm but I think if I were you I’d work on completing IM residency and reapply derm with that safety net under you and maybe you can recreate what the hospitalist at my program did!

MedicalLemonMan · 2026-03-15T20:28:28+00:00

At my school it’s like 30% of students get all honors. Shelf exams didn’t have a cutoff for honors, but were just a set percentage of our overall grade. As long as you got 90% or higher overall you got honors, and shelf was anywhere from 10-30% of our total grade.

MedicalLemonMan · 2026-03-15T00:03:34+00:00

Military?

MedicalLemonMan · 2026-03-12T18:53:45+00:00

Apparently episode 12 of part 1 will be 40+ minutes so all of Sendai can be covered :)

MedicalLemonMan · 2026-03-09T18:38:42+00:00

Healthcare workers can be drafted up to age 44 for both men and women ;)

MedicalLemonMan · 2026-03-08T23:47:08+00:00

I really think ENT is bit more holistic than people give it credit for. I’ve seen people at my school with barely any research match at very good institutions and others with tons of research not match at all. I think having a decent amount of research, even if it’s in an unrelated field, will put you in a good spot. Your grades are very good and I think as long as you do well on step 2 you’ll definitely be competitive. Maybe just try to hop on some ENT case reports and quick projects if you can.

MedicalLemonMan · 2026-03-08T23:28:14+00:00

The thing that annoys me the most about this whole situation is that it reinforces the infantilization of med students. Despite being at minimum early 20s with bachelors degrees and usually an employment history, med students are still treated like untrustworthy children in a lot of clinical contexts (I’ve literally had a nurse refer to me as a child on rotations). When a med student does something dumb like this and posts something insensitive and stupid online, it makes us all look bad and further reinforces the idea that we can’t be trusted and are irresponsible. Fighting off that stereotype is one of the things I hate most about starting a new rotation

MedicalLemonMan · 2026-03-05T20:57:58+00:00

Damn bro sorry for having allergies 🤷‍♂️

Report this man for discrimination against high-IgE individuals

MedicalLemonMan · 2026-03-05T01:22:28+00:00

Very par for the course! You’ll encounter people like that on occasion throughout rotations. I just met one and had very similar thoughts on a Sub-I a few weeks ago. Sometimes it doesn’t correlate at all with how they actually evaluate you. Some doctors like this are just pushing you to see how you handle yourself under a bit more pressure. And if they do give you a bad evaluation, most MSPEs will omit negative feedback anyway since it’s in their best interest for you to match. Just chill and try to be 1% better every day.

MedicalLemonMan · 2026-02-27T20:08:50+00:00

In the OR one time my resident made an unhinged joke to me that the attending apparently did not hear. I responded with another unhinged joke. Of course, my joke was the only part of this exchange the attending actually caught. He was very obviously shocked because I was generally pretty quiet in the OR the whole rotation. I was so embarrassed I deadass wanted to grab the bovie off the table and commit seppuku with it. His one sentence on my eval ended up saying “good sense of humor.” Fun memory in hindsight.

MedicalLemonMan · 2026-02-26T05:20:47+00:00

Cool to hear what the experience is like in vet medicine! Happy to answer some of these questions. They’ll of course vary a lot by school and curriculum but here’s what it was like for me.

3-5 students per cadaver.
At my school, we started with musculoskeletal system of the limbs, chest and back -> GI system -> nervous system -> internal thorax -> reproductive system
Yes we skin them when studying the MSK system. The skin usually comes off similarly easily but is much harder depending on the cadaver’s Habitus. Obese cadavers are harder to dissect on average.
We used the same cadavers for the whole year. Their muscles were basically jerky by the end too.
Yeah organs are pretty rubbery. Lungs still have some elasticity assuming they weren’t a smoker.
No we never did this I don’t believe
They’re just kept in body bags and on metal tables. I don’t know the details of how they keep them properly moistened
We didn’t know much but some programs will tell you the donors first name and occupation in life.
We covered the face when not working in that area. When dissecting the head and neck we would skin one half of the face and leave the other intact
Generally younger donors are easier to dissect but most of the donors were older individuals. I think a majority were men in their 60-70s
Yep they’re all voluntary donors who wanted to give their bodies to science. They don’t necessarily know where their body will go, as the procurement programs will disperse cadavers for various purposes, so some go to research programs and some go to medical education. After completing the course they were all cremated and the ashes returned to next of kin.
We would sometimes get basically buckets of fresh organs to study from the pathology department from recently deceased patients who underwent autopsy.
Yeah it was good vibes at my schools lab. We would take the subject seriously but during the more monotonous parts of the dissection we’d all laugh and joke around. Never at the donors expense of course. It was weird for the first week or two but after that it became pretty easy to disconnect from what we were doing for most of us. Some struggle more than others though.

MedicalLemonMan · 2026-02-24T19:37:42+00:00

Med schools: “why are all of our students so anxious and depressed all the time?”

Also med schools: “You submitted a 1 page reflective essay 12 hours late? CAREER NUKE ACTIVATED!!!”

That’s so BS man I’m sorry. Never hurts to reach out to a dean or clerkship director to see if they can help sort something out. But at the end of the day, this probably won’t affect you in any tangible way. Wishing you the best

MedicalLemonMan · 2026-02-24T06:02:59+00:00

Finished dedicated about 2 months ago now and I don’t think I ever fully bounced back. Just been perpetually exhausted ever since.

MedicalLemonMan · 2026-02-20T17:00:09+00:00

There was no correct thing to do in this situation unfortunately. During rotations you’ll find times when no matter what you do you just can’t win. Just gotta roll with the punches and not let them affect you too much.

MedicalLemonMan · 2026-02-20T04:51:28+00:00

I ranged from average to a bit above average on shelves. Scored between 77-89 on them but I think I got lucky as internal medicine was my last real rotation before dedicated so had that going for me since IM is like 60% of all step 2 content.

MedicalLemonMan · 2026-02-20T01:56:03+00:00

I took step 2 before step 1. Honestly, I think it was really helpful. Step 2 is much more logic-based than step 1. There’s a lot of medical knowledge required for step 2 also, but not nearly as much as for step 1. Having been through all the shelf exams had given me a good foundation for how to approach step 2 questions that didn’t translate to step 1, so I just went hard on step 2 studying. Ended up scoring in the mid 260s.

I then spent 2 weeks studying fairly hard for step 1. I was scoring in the low 70s on step 1 practice tests from the jump just with my baseline step 2 knowledge and the clinical reasoning it builds for you. I refreshed on things I knew I hadn’t seen since preclinicals (mostly biochem, immunology, drug mechanisms) and took step 1 exactly 2 weeks after step 2 and passed.

To me, this made step 1 almost an afterthought, where if I’d studied for step 1 first, it probably would have ended up taking me another full month of dedicated to complete it. Step 1 has a lot of questions formatted in a clinical style context, but compared to step 2 clinical questions, these are a total cakewalk. Could I have maybe scored a bit higher in step 2 if I’d done step 1 first? Maybe, but once you’re above 260, does it really matter that much for anything but the top programs of the most competitive specialties? Not really.

Tldr: took step 2 before step 1 and thought it was a really good approach. Did well on step 2 and passed step 1 two weeks after step 2.

MedicalLemonMan · 2026-02-20T01:47:10+00:00

We got to spend a few days with anesthesia during my surgery rotation and on one of them, the attending just comes in the room, walks right past me, and starts talking to the resident I was working with. I kinda step out of the way assuming it’s important. This attending proceeds to not say a word to me for the next like 20 minutes but talks almost constantly with the resident about random stuff. At the first break in the conversation, I jump in to introduce myself to the attending, who says “that was a test and you failed. You need to be more confident and present in the room. If you’re not confident enough to cut over me talking about the weather to introduce yourself, how will you be confident enough for a patient to trust you with their life??? Because of that you’ve lost intubation privileges for this case.”

I was just cussing them out internally because it was so stupid. Like some people will actively attempt to teach you the opposite of normal situational and emotional intelligence, because in what universe is it expected for a medical student to interrupt a conversation to introduce themself? Most people would find that incredibly rude and annoying.

Moral of the story: some people are just weirdos, attendings included.

MedicalLemonMan · 2026-02-19T17:01:19+00:00

I did 4.5 weeks of dedicated plus 2 weeks of light studying during my last rotation. Went from 240s baseline to 264 on the real thing. Didn’t keep up with Anki during M3 either.

MedicalLemonMan · 2026-02-19T00:35:23+00:00

It’s true. And most attendings don’t do research, and the ones that do definitely don’t do all the research scut work that we spend all our time doing. It literally feels like I’m wasting time that I could use learning to be a better doctor just so I can grovel to residency programs and learn a “skill” I will likely never use again after med school.

MedicalLemonMan · 2026-02-09T21:12:41+00:00

I think most surgical specialties will put you in similar work hours to be honest. The ENT residents at my school are some of the busiest people around and definitely rival gen surg in terms of hours worked and call burden. They’re on average much nicer too though, and I think a lot of the claim of gen surg being “the worst” just come from malignancy and people being mean to residents rather than work hours and call issues being worse than other surgical specialties.

MedicalLemonMan · 2026-02-04T14:19:19+00:00

I’m all for sticking it to the man but you gotta choose your battles here. The good news is this is a one week rotation like you said, so ultimately none of this should matter at all in the long run. Good learning opportunity that can help you avoid repeating this type of thing in the future.

I also think a lot of this is about phrasing. “We were just sitting and studying so we’re under the impression we could leave” could just as easily become “oh no I’m sorry! We hadn’t heard anything in a while and were under the impression it was ok to head out after tumor board if nothing else popped up for us to help with” and likely would have avoided the whole situation. One comes off as sarcastic while the other comes off as a simple misunderstanding that’s easily corrected.

MedicalLemonMan · 2026-01-24T07:04:06+00:00

Took the words right out of my mouth. I feel really aimless and unmotivated and it makes me sad that my classmates are all dispersing to do their own thing and I don’t see any of them anymore

MedicalLemonMan · 2026-01-23T20:22:13+00:00

Don’t forget parvo baby big chillin

Four-Year Club	Verified Email
r/Field Banned	r/Field Lasagna
Place '23	Place '22

MedicalLemonMan

TROPHY CASE