by Adam Ruben
Q: You spend a weekend in the woods doing “trust falls” and arts-and-crafts projects with your classmates as though you were still eleven years old.
A: Networking.
Q: During the busiest part of the semester, you take a trip to Aruba with several members of your class, where you drink frozen cocktails on the beach for a week and read Us magazine.
A: Networking.
Q: You attend your Accounting professor’s mother’s funeral.
A: Networking.
Q: After robbing a casino, you embark on a cocaine-fueled murder spree, capping hookers and scattering body parts across the Gobi Desert.
A: Networking.
Q: You eat a peanut butter sandwich.
A: You’re hungry. And maybe the peanut butter sandwich knows a guy who knows a guy who could get you a job.
Mnemonic Plague
Medicine is all about helping people. And apparently there’s no way to help people quite like rote memorization of massive, unpronounceable lists. (Every med student knows the Hippocratic oath: “Above all, memorize massive, unpronounceable lists.”)
For example, you may find it’s important to memorize the names of all the nerves in the wrist—because you never know when a patient might say, “Help! I have a kind of cancer that kills me only if someone doesn’t name all the nerves in the wrist!”
Some say the best way to study medicine is to familiarize yourself with the basic concepts so that you can apply this knowledge to similar situations. Bullshit. While you’re off using what you’ve learned to save someone’s life, your classmate and competitor will be down the hall reciting another massive, unpronounceable list while both doctors and patients applaud her diligence.
Luckily, medical students have pioneered many memorization tricks. Choose your favorite:
Flash Cards
Flash cards are so convenient! If you write on each card one name or fact you need to memorize, all you need to do is bring a refrigerator box full of cards with you wherever you go. Then, during a particularly boring surgery, whip out your box and dig through the cards to find the series you want. Simple!
Mnemonic Device
Though there are many variations, a common mnemonic device involves using the first letter of every item in a list as the first letter of each word in an easily recalled sentence. For example, you can remember the names of all the bones in the human face (Mandible, Maxilla, Palatine, Zygomatic, Nasal, Lacrimal, Vomer, Inferior Nasal Concha) simply by remembering the following sentence: “The bones in the face are the Mandible, Maxilla, Palatine, Zygomatic, Nasal, Lacrimal, Vomer, and Inferior Nasal Concha.”
Mnemonic devices are also commonly used to remember how to spell words such as mnemonic. Here’s a good one: The word starts with M, and M stands for “Maybe you should just look elsewhere on this page, because the word is correctly spelled there.”
Johnny Mnemonic Device
Why stay up all night memorizing when you can wet-wire 320 gigabytes of data directly to your brain?
Photographic Memory
If someone tells you, “I have a photographic memory,” that’s code for “I’m a dick.” Sure, memorizing pages and pages of text at a single glance is useful, but even more useful—in terms of graduating from med school with your friendships intact—is pretending you can’t.
Clustering
Scientific studies have shown that people remember data best if it’s broken into conveniently sized clusters. Thus, if you’re trying to memorize ten ways to treat a myocardial infarction, just memorize three now, three more in a few months, and promise yourself to study those last four at some point in the future.
The Brady Bunch Method
Remember that episode of The Brady Bunch in which Greg and Marcia help Jan study for her science exam? They teach her that “a primate has the size and shape of a monkey, a man, or any old ape.” Jan thinks this memorization technique is neat-o! You can use it, too, provided you’re trying to remember what a primate is. It doesn’t really work for anything else.
Rhymes
These are fun. Rhyme the condition you’re trying to diagnose with its recommended course of treatment. For example, “If the patient has cervical cancer, radiotherapy is the answer.” Caution: Never recite these rhymes aloud while treating an actual patient, especially one with cervical cancer.
Association
This technique relies on the thoughts that naturally flow from one item to the next. For example, if you can’t remember what to prescribe for Lyme disease, say to yourself, “Lyme makes me think of lemons, which make me think of the song ‘Lemon Tree,’ by Peter, Paul, and Mary, which makes me think of their song ‘Puff the Magic Dragon,’ which makes me think of the cartoon version voiced by Burgess Meredith, who was in True Confessions with Charles Durning, who was in Starting Over with Kevin Bacon, and bacon isn’t healthy, so now I’m thinking about doctors, who are also called ‘docs,’ so I should prescribe doxycycline.” By this time, the patient is dead, but that’s hardly the point.
Cheating
Anatomy exams are particularly suited for writing the names of body parts directly on your body, since you’ll always have it with you. Unfortunately, this technique may not work if you’re studying internal medicine.
ER = BS
There are many reasons to go to medical school: the ability to heal, the personal pride, the staggering salary. For most med students, however, their motivation is simple: they want to be Dr. House.
Sorry to break it to you, but House is a fictional character. His hospital is a made-up hospital. And you won’t find its location, “New Jersey,” on a map.
But we’ve all grown up watching medical melodramas, from the highly technologically advanced “computer diary” on Doogie Howser, M.D. to the rampant affairs and comas on General Hospital to the episode of Chicago Hope in which a six-fingered man kills Jeffrey Geiger’s father. (Does anyone get that?)
Before you commit to med school, read these ways your real hospital will differ from those on television—and get yourself 10 cc’s of truth, stat!
In real med school:
The moment they meet you, patients do not tell you their life stories, and their personal conflicts do not aptly mirror your own.
By the end of your first year, you will not likely have slept with half your colleagues.
Most nurses do not dress like whores.
Babies are born in the Obstetrics Ward, not haphazardly in the Obstetrics Ward Hallway or the stalled Obstetrics Ward Elevator.
Visitors with weapons may not come and go at their leisure.
Real hospitals average surprisingly few hostage situations per year.
Patients typically do not stay in private hospital rooms big enough for them to wrestle with their inner demons.
Your hospital administrator is probably not Dustin Hoffman in drag. (But if it is, then, man, that is one nutty hospital.)
Volunteer staff cannot access any medicine they choose.
Secretly switching two patients’ charts will not automatically switch their treatments.
The On-Call Room is not specifically designated for doctors to do it with one another.
Scrubs are loose and functional, not form-fitting and sexy.
No one really washes their hands before surgery.
Lolgrads
Kids today and their Web-based humor. If they’re not chortling at Homestar Runner’s latest follies or posting embarrassing stories on FML, they’re reading “tweets” or singing along to Flash-animated cartoons by someone named eBaum. Back in my day, we spent hours waiting for Webcrawler to load in our CompuServe window, and we liked it!*
Here’s a take on the popular Lolcats site, starring grad students. (If you haven’t yet seen Lolcats, go check it out right now. Your advisor isn’t looking.)
And yes, you can have a cheeseburger.
And the Rest
Besides medical school, business school, and law school, there exist a handful of other continuin
g education programs. If grad school gets to be too difficult, you can pursue any one of them—but don’t flatter yourself into thinking they’re any substitute for the rigors of grad school:
The Military
According to one recent TV commercial, enlistment in the military involves scaling canyons while slaying computer-generated dragons. Rigorous, yes, but totally fake—we won the war against the dragons years ago. In reality, rigid discipline, opposition to inquiry, and the prevalence of clean clothes make the military the antithesis of grad school.
Yoga Academies
To call a place where the instructor wears a sports bra an “academy” is, pardon the pun, a stretch. Yoga may present certain physiological difficulties, but grad students are already used to bending over and grabbing their ankles—when the administration fucks them in the ass.
Culinary School
Is culinary school really less difficult than grad school? Judge for yourself:
STUDENT 1: Dude, I was up all night studying for that test on vegetables! What did you get for number six?
STUDENT 2: I got “tomato.”
STUDENT 1: Aw, man! I thought it was a zucchini!
STUDENT 2: I don’t think so. Zucchinis are the long green ones.
STUDENT 1: I thought cucumbers were the long green ones!
STUDENT 2: They’re both long and green.
STUDENT 1: Come on! It’s like they want us to fail!
Pottery Classes at the Y
Grad students learn the secrets of the natural world, the intricacies of the international economy, or the beauty of the printed word. Pottery students learn to move their thumbs in a certain way. Ooh.
Why is so much adult education crafts-based anyway? Is there some nationwide shortage of misshapen ceramics? Do you really need to spend six hours making a kiln-fired ashtray or a mug that’s not dishwasher-safe? And don’t you know what crappy gifts these make? Stop the madness! Say no to pots!
CPR Certification
You sit through one class. Your final exam takes two and a half minutes. And your diploma is the size of a business card. This is not graduate school. (Though, like many classes in which you serve as a TA, it is filled with dummies.)
Obedience School
Uh, this is for dogs.
* We didn’t like it.
7
Let My Pupil Go
GETTING THE FUCK OUT OF GRAD SCHOOL
TOWARD the end of my fifth year, I landed a job interview with a small biotech company. They brought me to their site and impressed me with all the cool scientific robots we can’t afford in academia. As the day drew to a close, my interviewer asked the one question I dreaded.
“So,” she said, “when will you graduate?”
“Well, I’m finishing my fifth year now,” I said naïvely, “so if I start writing my dissertation soon, I ought to be done in just a few months.”
The interviewer frowned. She snapped shut my interview folder, her expression betraying a feeling that she had wasted a perfectly good afternoon.
“We’re looking for someone who can start immediately,” she said. “When you have a solid defense date, call us back.”
Driving back to campus after the interview, I wondered if the job would even be available in a few months, or if I would have to start searching again. As it turned out, it didn’t matter. I remained in grad school nearly two more years.
Then a different deadline loomed. A few months later, my fiancée and I started planning our wedding. We wanted to make sure I’d finish school beforehand, so we set the big date far enough in the future so as to guarantee it. I could envision no sweeter moment than the wedding reception kicking off with the announcement of “Dr. and Mrs. Adam and Marina Ruben.”
I made concrete plans. I discarded the 2005 and 2006 dissertation forms I had foolhardily obtained and picked up the 2007 forms. I told my advisor I’d like to finish a month before the wedding, and he actually gave his blessing, provided all my experiments went well. I booked a three-week honeymoon in Panama to follow the wedding.
“Dr. and Mrs.” That moment would meld the end of grad school with the beginning of real life.
But as the wedding neared, I didn’t seem much closer to graduation. Some experiments went well; some didn’t. Bacteria stopped growing. Proteins wouldn’t fold. I accidentally stabbed myself with a needle containing malaria-infected mouse blood. I wrote the introduction to my dissertation and found myself taking all day to produce one page, since each new sentence required careful rereading of a handful of references.
Then, finally, the joyous event took place in exactly the way didn’t want it to: We were pronounced grad student and wife.
And I went on that honeymoon with grad school half-tethering my attention to a different continent. From the Business Center of the Bristol Hotel in Panama City, I checked my school email account—and learned that, in my absence, a postdoc in my lab had successfully solved the structure of a protein I was working with.
“It’s so beautiful!” I exclaimed to my new bride, rotating the macromolecule in space using software I secretly downloaded onto the Bristol Hotel’s computer. “The inhibitor’s in-dole ring does interact with the S1 pocket. I knew it! It makes so much sense enthalpically!”
I’ll never forget the look on her face. It showed … well, let’s just say it didn’t show “The S1 pocket? Oh, rapture!”
There I sat, hunched in front of a computer, marveling at an enzyme, on my honeymoon—and thinking this perfectly normal. Even worse, I wondered why she wasn’t as thrilled as was.
And that’s when it hit me: I needed to graduate. Now.
The Third Degree: Signs It’s Time to Leave Grad School
Still here, huh? Still in grad school? Yeah, of course you are.
Do your college friends even still ask how you’re doing? Or is the world sick of hearing you say, “I’m so totally completely almost done”?
Look for these signs it’s time to leave grad school:
You know the first name of at least six deans, provosts, or custodians.
You know which water fountains on campus are the good ones.
The younger grad students have started making jokes comparing you to Methuselah, Mike Slackenerny, or that really old Deceptacon from Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.
You have slept multiple nights in academic buildings.
Your first year of grad school is no more vivid in your memory than your first year of high school.
Incoming grad students were born in a year in which you could legally vote.
Your graduate school has automatically added you to its alumni mailing list.
The look on your parents’ faces when they tell their friends about you has changed from pride to shame.
Your funding ran out two years ago—as did your passion for life.
You are reading this book for legitimate advice.
Who’s Who at Your High-School Reunion, and Why They All Look So Damned Happy
Your high-school reunion is a time to eat hors d’oeuvres, mingle with acquaintances you never talked to in high school, and tell each of them the same four or five facts about yourself that they could have gleaned from Facebook.
Really, you go for the food.
Because hearing your former classmates’ accomplishments can feel like the most blatant encouragement to finally graduate, grad students develop a special anxiety around reunion time. While your peers have found their places in society, you still live in transition. They spend their days producing something tangible, while for you, an incisive theoretical argument is something tangible. They work on the twenty-third floor, and you’re in twenty-third grade.
Try telling a classmate about grad school, and you’ll get the pitying look that says, “You don’t understand, do you? You were supposed to do something in the past decade.” But they actually have less to covet than you’d think.
As you grit your teeth, justify why you’ve spent the past several years working on wh
at’s essentially a long book report, and
fill your pockets with hors d’oeuvres, hold your head (relatively) high when you mingle with the following types of people:
THE FINANCIAL CONSULTANT
Hair: Short and stationary.
Smile: Simultaneously soothing and creepy.
Refers to Employer as: Single-word proper name. (“I work at Mitchell.”)
Reason not to Envy: One of the few people who may work longer hours than you do, though he has an in-ground pool to show for it.
THE HOMEMAKER
Muffins: Delicious.
Children: Horrible, ratlike demons who bounce from the walls coated in processed sugar and Ritalin.
Daytime Soaps Watched: All.
Reason Not to Envy: You wouldn’t have been happy doing this job. Seriously.
THE ORGANIZER
