Honors, blah.

One of the additional stresses of the second year of medical school at the UW is honors. During the first year classes were just pass or fail. You either got above 70, or whatever the passing score was in the class, or you didn't. Of course, you tried to do the best you could, but there wasn't the pressure of having it labeled on your transcript. However, for second year, most of the classes are scored according to pass, fail, and honors. Honors means very different things in different classes, but it usually means you did extraordinarily well in the class. Usually you have to put forward some extra effort, either writing a paper, or taking a second, harder exam, to qualify for honors. Everyone keeps telling us, "honors don't really matter," and yet, all of us obsessive compulsive med students can't keep our selves from trying get honors. All in all, it results in a very messed up mind thing going on.

Allow me to give an example. In first year if you got 89% in a class you might say to yourself: of course I could have done better, and I always strive for my best, but med school is really hard and I learned 89% of the material in that class! Go me! In second year, when honors is an option, it totally changes the way you think about your grade. For example, in one of my classes I got an 89% and missed honors by 1 point. Instead of congratulating myself on learning most of the material in a challenging class, all I could think was, "I can't believe I missed honors by one point. I can't believe I missed honors by one point." It creates a very frustrating, and to be honest, pretty unhealthy mental atmosphere. sigh. such is life.