Thinking about Thinking about Medical School

In one of my education school classes, I had to read an article called "thinking about thinking", which encouraged teachers to expressly model and instruct metacognition to their students. We were supposed to make our thinking processes transparent, so that students could start to understand and recognize how they store and access information. It's a good idea and lets students and teachers reflect on how they learn and use the information that they pick up.

In the swirl of medical school, I feel fortunate when I have time to think about the thinking that I am doing for my classes. Dogged effort and limitless patience for fine textbook print are considered prime qualities of the medical student, not necessarily reflection or measured responses. So when I read an article from the Brown alumni magazine about Christine Montross, a writer and medical resident who recently published a book about her first year experiences in the anatomy lab, my first question was how did she have time to write anything down during her first year? Shouldn't she have been studying? How did she pass all of her classes when she was spending so much time reflecting on mortality and her cadaver? Owen joked that if I were to write a reflection about this year, it would be a study schedule, punctuated only occasionally by a run or conversation with him. His jab is not far from the truth, and therein lies the problem. Maybe Montross' time writing about her first year made her a better student, more focused, and motivated. It's not that I want to become a writer in the next two years, but taking the time to sift through the piles of information that are tossed upon me, and the myriad experiences in health care settings that I am experiencing at lightening speed would make for a more thoughtful medical school life. Whoever wrote the unexamined life is not worth living could extend their moniker to the unexamined education is not worth undertaking.