Andrew Franklin

Medical school is a demanding beast, relentless in its expectation of its subjects to apply themselves fully and continuously for excessive periods of time. Its demands at the peak of study can be considered to bear on fringe of the impossible or even the absurd. Medical school takes away, but it also gives back. The conventional argument of enduring such an unbalanced existence is that we are all working towards our dreams, our sacrifices now will equate to our future success and ultimate contentment. While this belief holds true and enables us to persist with the continual reassessment of our worthiness as future podiatrists there is something else, something more simple and delightful that medical school gives back.   

They don’t come by very often (and first years, they will be sadly taken from you in the 2^nd semester), but when they do, the only proper thing to do is waste them!  I am referring to those little nuggets of time when all is well, when we can sit and watch mindless TV just because we can. When we are not consumed by the unyielding notion that we should be perpetually studying and time simply loses its importance. It’s the weekend after exams and apathy should not only be tolerated but also indeed celebrated. For that brief moment we become the common man and woman, a weekend becomes the justified rest stop for the arduous endeavors of the previous five days. It provides us a window of a previous life or perhaps even a future life and then just like that it disappears once again.

So medical school will provide us with a wonderful profession, a great career full of great challenges and experiences but lets also acknowledge those blissful pockets of guilt free laziness that blesses us every now and then along the way. 

Exam Week...

Spoiler alert, OCPM has the best test schedule of any school I have ever been to, hands down. 

I'm pretty close with my family and as such we spend a lot of time on the phone talking about things that are going on in each other's lives. Coming in to this week I knew my family was getting worried seeing how this week sparked the beginning of my first grad school exams. As families often do they call when big things are going on and if they want to know how you are doing and so on and so forth. 

Just to be clear I do love their phone calls and all their well wishing, it has done me good so far and I'm sure will continue to benefit me for many years to come. 

When they call and ask how tests are going I say,"Great," and they ask, "So, what tests do you have this week?" Then, when I say I have 5 tests this week there is a long silence on the phone...followed by, "How are you handling it all?"

Truthfully, it's a pretty great system. For the exams, you have one class's exams per day, and then a day's rest in between tests to really focus on the next exam. It's fantastic! In undergrad I had what seemed like exam after exam, and most classes gave a test every other week, so I was swamped. So to only have one week every month and a half and only one class's exams per day it really gives me a chance to get a good grip on my class, internalize the information and commit it to permanent memory. 

I'm not going to lie, the exams and classes are hard, but OCPM has really found a way to ease the pressure a little bit and really help the students get a grip on the material and be able to do the best they can.