The Darkest Year Of Medical School

Students come in altruistic and empathetic. They leave jaded and bitter.

Next month, your future doctor will take the first steps into clinical medicine. I am not talking about the first day of internship (though that also happens on July 1), but the monumental transition that medical students make at the halfway point of medical school from the classroom years to the clinical years.

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It is the moment these students have been waiting for. One would think that the third year of medical school would be a crowning achievement—the donning of the white coat, the grasping of the golden ring after many years of striving. And in some ways it is. The learning curve is voraciously steep as students soak up clinical knowledge at an impressive rate.

However, there is a darker side of this transition to clinical medicine. Many of the qualities that students entered medical school with—altruism, empathy, generosity of spirit, love of learning, high ethical standards—are eroded by the end of medical training. Newly minted doctors can begin their careers jaded, self-doubting, even embittered (not to mention six figures in debt).