The Gunner

Along the lines of the last post, third year is different than the other years in that the rotations are not simply pass/fail but honors/pass/fail. For a lot of students, this is a source of anxiety. We're competing with our classmates in what seems (from this perspective) to be a completely subjective and arbitrary competition. Everyone has different patients, residents, attendings. How can there be any sort of standard or consistency in evaluation? Over the span of 8 weeks, what really differentiates a "pass" student from an "honors" student? We can do our very best and simply manage a "pass," and to some, this feels unfair. The number of honors that can be given is capped, and in a rotation with 4 students, only 1 gets the coveted grade. Although we all get written evaluations, medical students are so focused on the grade that it's the root of our new onset generalized anxiety disorder or obsessive compulsions.

Interestingly, looking at the statistics, more people get honors in more than half the rotations than do people who get honors in a third to a half of rotations (I realize that sentence is confusing). This suggests that the distribution of honors is not bell-curved, and that instead, a minority of individuals get a majority of honors, thus depleting the number of honors available for you and I (I assume that you aren't one of those straight-honors-students since you're procrastinating by reading this blog).

In any case, we all dread the presence of a "gunner" on our rotation, a classmate who strives to make him or herself look good at the expense of the other students. I've heard scary stories, from people pre-rounding on other students' patients to students presenting topics they knew their peers had prepared. It's bad. Personally, I haven't come across any terrible circumstances (and I hope I'm not inadvertently causing any). The truth is, it's annoying to think of these rotations as a competition because certainly medicine is not. From my rotations so far, I realize the importance of collegiality, of helping others, of making others look good, and of appreciating peers for doing the same for you. There's enough learning and patient care to go around, and as long as I have that, I'll pass on the honors.