Hello! Right now, you must be feeling a little nervous about stories/rumors about what clerkship in ASMPH means. Maybe you're a little afraid of what will happen next. Well, I'm here to let you on a little secret...
All your fears? Your nervousness? Your insecurities?
You have a right to be afraid. To be nervous. To be insecure.
Clerkship is not something you can picture completely. It would be a time of firsts. The first time you have a 24 hour duty. The first time you will do an NGT. The first time you will insert. All of those things, you will experience. You will fret about them. You will be nervous whether you could do them or not. The training with dummies and with friends that the school will give you? It might help. But when your in clerkship, there's no pretend. There are no test dummies to go through or friends that won't get angry. This is it.
You will learn the more practical sides of the hospital. You will know how important the interactions between a nurse and a doctor can be. Your books will not tell you on how to deal with the hospital staff. It will not tell you how to deal with difficult residents, consultants or nurses. It will teach you about the intricacies of the hierarchy system and how much some people take a stock in them.
You will know more about your friends. How they deal with stress and how incompetent some of them are. They will grate on your nerves and test the limits of your friendship.
You will know more about yourself. How you cope with stress; with adversity. You will learn how much you can take. You will learn your breaking point; your limits. Eventually, you will learn to balance everything. But it takes a while.
But I envy you. We had no one to turn to during this clerkship. We had to build our own bridges with the interns and the residents.
But you have us.
We will be interns by then. It's not much of a consolation I know. But we are all you've got. We can be your safety blankets even if we had none. You can approach us and we will try to help.
So, finish all these classroom stuff and join us.
We will be waiting.
