Say Anything – Clerkship Evaluations and Grades
How many evaluations are there about you? Dozens? Hundreds maybe? Some are down on paper- hurriedly scribbled and passed into your hands. Most are no doubt floating around in the ether of cyberspace, 1’s and 0’s representing a collective opinion of critics and evaluators. Some criticism—perhaps the worst kind–exists only in our minds—words engraved so deeply on our gyri they buzz like gnats on quite nights when you’re trying to fall asleep.
We learn early on that feedback and constructive criticism is an important and vital part of training to become a doctor. And while that may be true, it doesn’t change the very real problems with trying to sum up 8 weeks of hard work on an evaluation—much less an evaluation that impacts our chances at residency.
I’m on Internal Medicine at the moment. Overall, it’s been good. I like most of the people I work with, the patients are interesting and for the first time in a long time, I feel like I’m getting closer to becoming a doctor. My time on the wards is a mash-up of rounds, being asked questions I don’t know the answers to (and a few I do), presenting patients, examining people, lunches at the cafeteria downstairs, on and on, around and around.
I have never given of myself like this before. Mind, body, spirit, blood, sweat and tears- I’m all in. And getting up at 4:30am is just the start. I am emotionally involved, not only do I worry about how my patients are doing and about their diagnosis and their lives—I am also emotionally connected to the people I work with. I want the interns and residents and Attendings—heck even the other med students to like me. As you can imagine this leads to a great deal of over thinking, always on replay in the background of my mind.
“Was I weird? Oh my God, I was weird.”
“Ugh, that’s not right. It’s the lung, not the kidney. Dumb. So dumb.”
“Should I go see this person again? Should I ask first? No. Wait. Maybe I’ll Google it.”
The last 8 weeks on medicine has been a journey like no other. I’m a wards warrior.
There have been highs and lows, death and tragedy. Really fun days that inspire me and leave me wanting more and days where I barely have the energy to be in the hospital and long to return to the comfortable safety of my bed.
I—like all of my classmates worked as hard as I could on this rotation. And at the end of it, our time, our energy, our hearts will be judged. A reckoning of sorts to be filled out by the residents and attendings. They can say anything they want. We’ll never know who wrote what—although it’s often not hard to tell. It’s tough to offer yourself up to judgment like that looking back on all that we go through on a rotation. Harder still when our evaluations culminate in a P on our transcript. That’s it. Just one letter indicating that you can move on to the next thing.
Being a medical student means that we are constantly judged and measured and tested. The things that we do and say are carefully scrutinized—by ourselves first and foremost. Although we also fill out evaluations of attending doctors, they never seem to hold as much weight as the other way around. Our grade depends on what people say about us—and while we have precious little control over what that may be—is hard to offer yourself up for judgment when we’ve already opened our hearts and our minds to this experience. It’s scary. And I imagine this feels similarly to what a patient in the hospital may feel–vulnerable and at the mercy of others.
There are limits to how much weight one person’s opinion should hold. So Dear Reader, the next time you are reading someone’s thoughts about you remember the wise words of the food critic Anton Ego from Ratatouille.
“In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little, yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so.”
Go boldly forward friends. Give of yourself fully. Do not be constrained by the judgments of others, or haunted by the words of critics and evaluators past. Fall asleep peacefully by putting words that have been said about you to rest. And may your last thought before drifting into dreams be, “I worked as hard as I could.”
About the author:
Fiona Scott is in her third year of medical school. Before she became a wards warrior, she earned degrees in public health, epidemiology and health informatics. She is an editor at MS Press– a national forum for medical student writing and the author of the blog Nerd’s Eye View.
We have organized a special discount code (SCOTT20) for Fiona’s followers to receive 20% off of any subscription, including the already discounted package of six shelf exams during July 2016.