3rd day of 3rd yr

You always hear about how 3rd year can beat your spirit down. Long work hours, only to come home and have to study more; being the bottom of the totem pole (translation: being the convenient dumping ground for everyone's frustrations from the patients to the attendings to the nurses); your own self-doubt in your abilities, etc. I guess it shouldn't have surprised me that 3rd year would be not only an academic and intellectual, but also an emotional and psychological, challenge. Still... until the first beatdown happens, I think it's easy to dismiss all of the above as exaggeration.

Well... today I came home feeling utterly dumb, incompetent, and discouraged. And wonder what I'm doing in med school in the first place, though by now it's consumed 2 yrs of my life and a good amount of debt. Here's hoping it can only go uphill.