Today’s inane image of the day:
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| One of my favorite study tools… ever: notecards! As you can see, I have begun stocking up. |
I had mentioned in a previous post, I’m going to try to keep track of the number of days that go in to each stretch of my medical training. This first stretch will be my undergraduate medical education (apparently the medical community refuses to let us move up to graduate level until after we have our M.D.). Why did I count today? Well, because I did work for medical school today.
Anyway, since it’s Saturday, I let myself sleep in until 7:30AM [wow, I cannot believe I just said that!] then took it easy in the morning by camping out at Starbucks and people-watching as I completed my anatomy reflective writing assignment. It was a good way to start the morning and sometimes I wish we had class an hour later just so I could have that “me” time in the morning. Alas, class begins at 8AM so that we don’t have to fight with the other Oakland University students for parking.
One of my PRISM assignments was about burnout in medical students (to be exact, it is: “Burnout in Medical Students: Examining the Prevalence and Associated Factors” by Santen et al.) and displayed a diagram with the terms “emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, accomplishment, resiliency, support systems, decreased stress, increased control” all on a weird floating balance beam.
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| Confusing balance beam figure from Santen et al paper. |
First off, I’m all about balance beams and whatnot… but I just don’t get how this works. Obviously I read the paper so it sort of makes sense, but had I decided to skim the paper instead and focus on the diagrams, I would be very confused by this one. It just looks like there’s a lot more weight on the “emotional exhaustion & depersonalization” side of the beam. And this “accomplishment” triangle is just floating on the other side [uhhh is it supposed to be a force in the positive y-direction?].
Regardless of my confusion concerning the figure, I do think it is important to recognize that as medical students we are fighting an uphill battle with emotional exhaustion and depersonalization which ultimately leads to burnout. One of the big reasons I wanted to stay in the state of Michigan was because I knew I had a support system already set-up and that helps in decreasing stress levels. As for the increased control part… well, don’t we all wish we were more in-control of our lives?
Enough procrastinating… time to crack the books open! Oh, and tomorrow’s our Tigers Day Game — so excited!