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April 18, 2006
Taking Notes In Medical School Lectures
Medical school lectures can be fairly disorienting at times. A lecture may start as a broad overview of a system, and suddenly you find yourself trying to catch up because the lecturer is now talking about the second, no the third of three very important domains of a particular isoform of a particular membrane receptor found only in the first four inches of the duodonum. This is a consequence of the trophy model of presentation. There's an introduction, pillars of the discussion, and the conclusion. The pillars of the lecture, the tenents, the issues, the parts, whatever you want to call them, are logically equal, but must be addressed sequentially. As soon as the introduction is done, wham, you're in the details. Such is the limit of human intellect. Knowing, thankfully, goes a long way toward coping with it. This trophy model is taken to a bit of an extreme by some medical school lecturers because medical school lecturers don't usually lecture an entire course. They lecture anywhere from one lecture to half the class, usually between two and ten lectures. A new lecturer will typically start big and drill down to their area of expertise. So if you have three lectures from a physiologist who specializes in gut endocrinology, expect the first twenty to thirty minutes on the first day to be a general overview of the entire gastrointestinal system. While this is exceptionally repetitive, particularly if the last two lectures were on gut motility, the lecturer sees this as a very quick overview of terribly important material. Regardless, that's an issue to take up with the course coordinator. What you need to do is not start daydreaming about your hot date last night, foreign policy, your navel, or whatever it is you day dream about, and keep your Spidy-sense alert for that first pillar, the first details of the discussion.
Posted by Niels Olson at April 18, 2006 12:16 AM
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