Down the rabbit-hole

So it's the middle of Otago's med school O-week. And I've noticed some stuff that I didn't really expect.

1) Everyone wants to be a surgeon.
So we went round our 'team' and were asked if we had any idea what area of medicine we thought we might be interested in. 9/12 said some form of surgery. I'm willing to bet at least 7 of those people have never been in an O/R ('cept maybe as a patient). It's odd how attractive surgery seems to pre-clinical students. Heck, not going to lie, I quite like the sound of surgery, even if I likely have a totally romanticised idea of what it's all about.

2) Everyone is nicer. The atmosphere in a lecture hall full of meddies is so, so much more chilled and laid-back than being in a health-sci theatre last year. Which is odd, seeing as 3/4 of us are HSFYs

3) The difference between a 'body' and a 'cadaver'. It's odd, if I walked into my flat, and found 40 dead people lying on tables, I'd have a mental breakdown. But walking into the dissection room for the 'clearing of the way' ceremony, it was surprising just how little effect it had on me, because the figures lying on the tables were 'cadavers'. I think this is probably a good thing, I'd rather distance myself a little from the person whose body I'm going to be slowly destroying.

4) There are more people in my class than I expected. And they're not who I expected. In HSFY, you get this impression that practically nobody gets into medicine, so it's kind of almost a surprise to walk into the med class and find ~280 people there. 280 is a lot of people. Also, in HSFY there are all these kids who look like super-smart gunners, and a few who look like jocks who drink too much (I probably look like one of these >.> ). Oddly, barely any of the people I'd picked as 'gunners' in HSFY are there, and *plenty* of the 'jocks' made it through.

5) The lecturers/admin staff of the med faculty don't treat you like you're below them. In HSFY, a lot of the lecturers gave off the impression that they felt that lecturing HSFYs was 'below' them, and it was quite intimidating to talk to them. In med, despite the fact we haven't even had a single lecture of med school yet, they already talk to you like 'part of the profession'. Which kind of surprised me, because I kind of had this impression from med students that superiors talk down to you. Maybe it'll be different when working with clinicians who are forced to teach me, than with those who want to teach me, but for now I'm pleasantly surprised at how genuinely nice the staff seem.

All in all, it's been a bit of an overwhelming couple of days (it's not even over yet), but I'm really, really looking forward to getting into it.