Erratum

I've lied to you all, and I'm sorry.

At the beginning of this year, I wrote a column advising undergrads to rethink their reasons for attending medical school. The thrust of the article was that med school is expensive and difficult, and that if you're not getting into it for the right reasons, you'd be better off not getting into it at all.

So here's a revision: Medical school remains expensive, and it can be difficult, but it's also the most fun I've ever had doing something that I could legally do in Singapore. Seriously. (What can I say? I love importing chewing gum.)

This isn't something I anticipated being true when I started two years ago. It isn't even something I anticipated being true when I started my clinical rotations eight months ago. But it is true.

And here's the point: I thought I had all the answers about why I wanted to go to medical school before I got here. I thought I'd want to "think about all the reasons I wanted to be a doctor in the first place" and "remember those reasons when I was frustrated by the emotional and physical difficulties of second year," but as it turns out, my life isn't one giant cliche.

The reasons I thought I wanted to come to medical school bore some resemblance to the things I love about it, but not as much as I thought.

When I was interviewing to get into medical school, I used to give some variation of this answer when asked why I wanted to go to medical school: "I want to be a doctor because I want to help people in a particularly meaningful way. When a person is sick, a little part of him dies temporarily. By being a doctor-healing people both physically and spiritually by providing competent and compassionate care-I can bring that part of a person back to life."

It's a good answer, and I continue to believe in it.

I love talking to my patients about their lives outside of the hospital. The war veterans with their stories of battles in faraway lands. The elementary schoolers who told me about watching "SpongeBob" and "Clifford the Big Red Dog."

Mostly, I love the fact that I know nothing about being a doctor and-the obvious corollary-that I have so much to learn. I love learning about the diseases my patients have, how to treat them and what the evidence for that treatment is. I love grand rounds, and attending rounds, and all the academic discussions that fill up my day.

A lot of my friends strongly dislike the same things that I love. And a lot of those things that they love (the operating room, the rush of saving a patient's life) are things that I'm not totally keen on. But almost all of us found something.

So here's some advice: If you want to go to medical school, you should have a lot of reasons for doing it. You should like science and you should like people, and you should be the type of person who never forgets that every day is a chance to learn something new. You should have enough of a sense of superiority to never let how little you know get you down, but you should be humble enough to know that everyone in the hospital (even the patients, especially the patients) can teach you something you didn't know. You should be self-motivated enough to take control of your own education, but trusting enough to recognize that those teaching you know what you need to know better than you do.

You should be smart enough to listen to everyone's advice, and smart enough to know that a lot of it should be discounted.

Alex Fanaroff, Trinity '07, is a second-year medical student. This is his last column of the semester.