#14: Medical television shows

Medical students love shows that are set in a medical environment. Grey's Anatomy, House M.D., Scrubs, Nip/Tuck, Doctor Who - the list goes on. Med students swallow them up like Skittles. In fact, it has been documented that fully 75% of the increase in medical school applications over the past three years is directly attributable to the surge in popularity of these shows. If you're new in the television business and you're desperate to create a hit show, all you need to do is take a bunch of old jokes from other hit television shows, and recycle them into the setting of a medical environment. You don't even need to worry about medical accuracy, since the majority of your intended audience will never even know if you make a mistake.

One reason that med students like these shows so much is that they get to live vicariously through them. Real doctors do silly things like take care of patients and fill out paperwork, but doctors on television shows spend most of their time making snarky comments at each other and having lots and lots of sex. Doctors on television also never have to face the consequences of their actions (unless their real-life actor does something stupid). Watching these shows gives medical students a socially acceptable way to fantasize of doing nothing all day except acting as cool as Fonzie and having unnatural amounts of sex with marginally attractive individuals.

Medical students also like these shows because they give the students a chance to show off how much they're learning in school. This does let them impress people occasionally, but mostly it lets them feel good about themselves. For example, if one of the actors mispronounces a phrase like "bilateral hyperplasia of the adrenal zona fasciculata" incorrectly, they will be mocked for no less than fifteen minutes. A really serious instance of medical incorrectness can be milked for conversation fodder for weeks at a time.

Non-med students also watch these shows, but mostly because of the hot actors and actresses (Katherine Heigl, I'm looking at you) and the ridiculous situations the actors are put into. Overall, these shows have better plot elements and character development than other typical shows like Spongebob Squarepants or Friends, so it makes sense that they've attained mainstream popularity.

#9: Professionalism

Doctors sometimes do a lot of really stupid shit, like walking into surgery drunk. Medical schools are pretty fed up with this kind of nonsense, so they have become obsessed with teaching their students "professionalism." What this means is that medical schools assume their students are completely clueless when it comes to professional behavior, and treat them like Eliza Doolittle from the play Pygmalion. There is a lot of hand-holding, down-talking, and wrist-slapping involved. This kind of treatment is usually helpful for those students who have been asleep for the last thirty years, or for those who have had the self-esteem portion of their brain surgically removed.

What this also means is that medical schools have zero tolerance when it comes to "unprofessional behavior," and even the slightest mistakes are blown to planetary-sized proportions. For example, forgetting to wear a tie to anything where a patient is present is the equivalent of calling the patient's mother a whore to their face. Even if you have a good reason for not wearing a tie, like being female, even not wearing it once will probably garner you a "Note of Professional Concern" at the least. In fact, the first time you will even hear that a professor has a problem with your behavior is when you receive a such a Note from them. If you find yourself in this situation, your first reaction will probably be that your professors are acting in a hypocritical manner by accusing you of unprofessional behavior when they themselves do not properly express their concerns to you in a respectful, timely, and empathetic manner. However, remember that an important part of professionalism is accepting that your professors can make up rules whenever they feel like it.

Being on time is another big aspect of professionalism. Medical schools like to operate via the maxim of "early is on time, and on time is late", except that this maxim applies differently to medical students and professors. For medical students, the maxim should read: "Early is acceptable, on time is embarrassing." However, for professors and administration officials, the maxim now reads: "Early is pretty close to the time I said I would be there, and on time is up to fifteen minutes past the designated time of arrival." If you keep these principles in mind, you should have no trouble figuring out what you need to do to keep off your med school's shit list.

Mostly medical schools have to worry about all of this professionalism stuff because they know that the field of medicine treats their doctors like crap. In response, doctors turn to things like alcohol and codeine in order to feel less shitty about their lives. Medical schools don't really care if that's how you deal with your issues; they just want to teach you to keep it to yourself and not let it affect the way you treat patients.

#4: Alcohol

Medical students love alcohol. No less than 85% of activities that they partake in have alcohol as a key component, which is probably not that different from most other groups of people. They will use anything as an excuse to get inebriated, including boredom, the end of a sequence, the release of the new Harry Potter movie. If you are thinking of going to medical school, having a hearty love of the bottle and a disregard for the health of your liver is imperative in order to establish yourself in your medical class's social pecking order.

Most potential medical students have already prepared for this situation during college (or high school, for the overachievers). If you fall into this category, congratulations! You are well placed to surround yourself with drinking buddies who you will claim are friends.

However, there are always a few applicants who, for various reasons, do not drink alcohol. This is a straight path to social suicide, so here are a few recommended solutions.

Probably the easiest solution for most is to make up for lost time, and start drinking as soon as possible. Make friends with the alcoholics and follow them to every event they attend (e.g., "Guitar Hero Bar Night Fridays"). When drinking alcohol, go for quantity over quality, as this will help build up both your social standing and tolerance quickly. You should see results within two weeks with this method.

If you don't drink alcohol because of religious restrictions, converting to agnosticism or atheism is your best option. Neither of these religions have any restrictions against anything, so they offer a pretty permanent first step to solving your problem. This method has a secondary mode of action that makes it particularly potent, which is that without the hope of happiness in an afterlife, alcoholism should come fairly easily for you.

Finally, some of you may have moral objections to drinking alcohol. For those of you in this case, your best bet is to consider a different career choice, such as construction, waste management, or teaching. A less popular alternative is nursing (for obvious reasons).

#3: Subject- vs. systems-based teaching

Medical schools like to fight about things with each other. Subject-based teaching vs. systems-based teaching, M.D. vs. D.O. programs, affirmative action vs. racism, etc. The more things that medical schools can argue about, the more types of medical schools there can be. Mostly this allows medical schools to jack up the price of tuition, but rarely, these factors are important to some applicants when deciding on a school.

The distinction between "subject-based teaching" and "systems-based teaching" is confusing to many applicants because the two terms are never properly explained at any point in the application process. "Things not being explained properly" is a recurring theme in medical school and beyond, so those of you planning on going into medicine should be prepared for a lot of it. "Subject-based teaching" and "systems-based teaching" are simply two different ways that medical schools can decide how they want to teach the material. Based on this decision, they then divide up their curriculum accordingly. They like to give these divisions fancy names like "sequences" or "modules", which is done for the sole purpose of making your life a little more confusing. This is another recurring theme in medicine.

Subject-based teaching means that the sequences are based on broad subjects such as anatomy, biochemistry, physiology, and ethics. There is less potential for integration between the different subjects in this form of teaching, so it's good for those of you who survive school by cramming, information-dumping on tests, and then immediately forgetting everything.

Systems-based teaching means that the sequences are based on body systems, i.e., cardiovascular, pulmonary, neurologic, dermatologic, etc. During each sequence, students learn the anatomy, biochemistry, physiology, etc. that is relevant to that system. Because everything is being taught all at once, this form of teaching could potentially do a great job of integrating the material. In practice however, the topics are never integrated properly because the different lectures are taught haphazardly based on the lecturers' availability. Additionally, professors feel less guilty when they ask really nit-picky questions because they assume that at some point you learned everything about the given system. This is a better system for those of you who have already studied medicine.