My roommate, also a first year MSIH student, just knocked on my door to ask if I had noticed whether the gate to campus we typically pass through was open when I passed by it this afternoon. I hadn’t wandered close enough to be sure, I told her, but it looked shut down from the street. On most days, we pass through an air-conditioned security office on our way to class, showing our student IDs and opening our backpacks for a cursory search. But since it’s Shabbat, and because we’re somewhere between Yom Kippur and Sukkot, we weren’t sure if that particular security check point would be open.
It’s a pretty trivial detail, right? But it’s the type of question that gets tossed around a lot. As first years, we’re still getting the basics sorted out here, and even though things are mostly manageable, we’re getting a sense of what it’ll be like to be in over our heads. Not in a bad way, necessarily. But we’re taking on a daunting task, and there will be times of uncertainty and struggle. We’ve all managed to find decent housing, but one of my friends is struggling to get an internet connection installed. Another has a defective student ID card, one that won’t magically open doors or unlock gates. My two roommates and I tried a few days ago to replace the ancient, exhausted laundry machine in our apartment, which resulted in a minor holiday-eve plumbing emergency. And another classmate was asking me today if I had a solid sense of how much we need to know about the cytoskeleton.
I had no advice to offer on the cytoskeleton, and I was pretty useless during the plumbing emergency, spending the 30 minutes or so when the water wouldn’t stop coming out of the wall taking photos (one of which I’ve included) and laughing merrily about it (my reaction to too many perilous situations, maybe). But lots of people here have good advice to offer about all sorts of situations. I can easily imagine that question about the cytoskeleton being answered in a half a dozen ways, with some of the experienced MSIH upperclassmen suggesting four extra-curricular textbooks that are guaranteed to have, between them, all we need to know. Another student might suggest a series of videos on the internet, and another will probably shrug and tell us to just attend the lectures and take decent notes. Yet another will tell us that we should be spending the first few weeks of school forming close friendships with our classmates and traveling around Israel, since we won’t have the time for that during our second year. And another student will dismiss that as ridiculous, pointing us instead in the direction of studying daily, even now, for the USMLE exam we won’t be taking for close to two years. In any case, it’s always good to ask questions. But we’re finding that we have more options than we can possible evaluate, along with the fresh requirement of sorting through all of them with a grain of salt at the ready.
So how do first-year medical students make decisions? And now that I’m worried about that, how does anybody?
Science done well seems like it’s mostly right, most of the time, for most people. When your doctor prescribes you a drug, her assumption is that you will react to it in the way that pretty much everybody does. But we all live within an unknown distance of a fault line that runs right through the best of our reasoning and experimentation. People with allergies to life-saving drugs are well within the seismic zone, but the rest of us know it’s there, too. My classmate with the inactive ID card, for example, is having one of those crazy experiences, something slightly outside the realm of the average: after all, the other 36 of us aren’t having the same problem. But she could also fall somewhere else on this crazy experiential spectrum. Maybe tomorrow, she’ll marvel at how lucky she is to find 200 shekels on an abandoned stretch of sidewalk.
Most of us fall somewhere within that average range of experience, most of the time. Most of us will win some and lose some. Which is fine, but we all also have to make predictions about how the future will go: will I make the bus if I run, or should I wait for the next one to avoid the possibility of getting stuck in the rain? If I try this new thing, will I like it, or will I wish that I had stayed with my old favorite? Should I take a risk or play it safe? So it’s not just first-year medical students who might be having a hard time making decisions. We all crave the knowledge of what others are doing, and we all want to learn from their experiences, good and bad alike.
So we solicit advice. These Be’er Sheva supermarkets have better produce and more reliable hours; this coffee shop sometimes gives discounts to students; go out with your classmates every time you’re invited to something – no, wait, stay in and study, because you really do need to know a ton about the cytoskeleton. And with this advice, we make decisions, hoping that we fall into the range of mostly all right experiences that most people have, most of the time.
Or maybe it’s not always like that. Maybe decisions can go one of two ways. You can test drive twelve cars, then go back and pick the seventh one you tried: compared to the others, it was the best option, and you’ve heard a lot of good stuff about this make and model. Or you can fall in love with a car you see on the street one day and put your money down, then and there, trusting in the car and yourself and your capacity for hard work to make this decision pay off. Maybe that’s how you have to do it, if what you’re looking for is something truly spectacular, something entirely outside of the ordinary. Something like a career in international health.
If you don’t know how far you are from that fault line where our experience stops being any decent guide, then you might as well take the leap. And if all first-year medical students, and all people, really, are going to find ourselves in over our heads at some point, at least we can choose how we get there, and who we have beside us.
Anyway, it’s Sukkot break! My classmates are scattered around the country, and indeed the world. I’ve included a picture of the strangely empty Caroline house lawn, one of my favorite campus spots, which I am sharing today with just one cat. It’s a little quiet, but it’s a nice change of pace, too. This is my last blog of the month, so you’ll get somebody else’s perspective on the first year experience at MSIH next week. Thanks for reading! Shalom, y’all!
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