Then suddenly I am on an easier rotation, and I get home at 3 most days, and have hours and hours before I have to go to bed - sometimes I don't even know what to do with myself - I wonder what people who have 9-5 jobs actually do in all that free time they have???
Between Surgery and Radiology (which I am currently on - can be described as sitting in a dark or dimly lit room for hours and staring at internal organs I most of the time can't identify for sure - god only knows why anyone would want to become a Radiologist???) there was a week of school called "Interclerkship Intensive". It was anything but intensive. For most people, especially coming off Surgery, it seemed like vacation - during lectures, I caught up on news and facebook and celebrity gossip (j/k). We also all got iPad minis, which are now sort of replacing paper forms in a way - from now on, all our evaluations, forms and such are going to be on those; we can also access the electronic medical records of our patients on it when we are in the hospital (only the fancy private hospital, Tisch, not Bellevue, of course). The most striking thing about getting them was that about 75% of my class already had iPad minis. An entirely 1st world problem. Even I, who didn't have one, already had a regular iPad, an iPhone, a Kindle, all on top of my MacBook of course. Seems a little insane, doesn't it???!!! Those are the times when I realize just how lucky I am, we all are (everything is relative, I mean one of my classmates' father is on the Forbes 150 wealthiest people in America list) but regardless of all, we are all very lucky.
Then there was a session dedicated to the Meyer Briggs Personality Test , which we all took weeks before and were now given our results in a nicely bound book. It's basically a test that puts people into different personality subgroups based on 4 characteristics: extraverted/introverted, sensing/intuitive, thinking/feeling, and judging/perceiving. I don't necessarily think that all people can be boxed into these categories, and whether your "type" really means very much is another question; however, it was a very interesting session. Most people thought that their types were pretty spot on, and when you think about it, it does explain certain things about people and also about how different people work together or don't work well together.
I turned out to be an ISFJ - introverted, sensing, feeling and judging (btw, judging means systematic, planful, scheduled, methodical, not that they judge people). All of these I thought were generally correct. They also showed us what medical specialties might best fit our personalities, which I think is total bullshit, so I didn't pay much attention to that.
What I also find interesting is that my boyfriend is basically the opposite type in all categories but being introverted. He is often much more logical, reasonable, critical, casual, spontaneous and open-ended than me (btw, I got all those adjectives I just used from the list they gave us with our reports). Sometimes people say that opposites attract, and that might be entirely true. It's also sometimes more difficult to find common ground with people whose personalities are so different from ours. The striking difference between the 2 of us really lies in my methodical planning and his casual spontaneity. Here is how we deal with the world: I am on the left, planning things ahead of time, stressing about deadlines weeks in advance and only feeling better once I got myself on a regular schedule and do a even really think about the deadline until much later and probably spends overall less time stressing about it, but probably much more at the very end.
The only thing I think this means is that it's good to be aware of these things. People from opposite personality types can sometimes seem insane to others. As long as we can accept each other's differences and work with what we are each best at, we will all get along just fine and find that delicate balance between planning and spontaneity.
