Survey

Dear Doctor,

Sorry to disturb you from your busy consulting schedules but I would like to take 5 minutes of your time to fill out a brief questionnaire for a research project that I am undertaking in order to pad my meagre résumé.

The central research question is, "How well did your medical degree prepare you for life as a doctor, and how could we change the course to ensure that students in my generation are able to be spoon-fed all the required information so as to learn it with a minimum of effort, preferably so we don't even have to turn off our games consoles?"

To answer this question I have constructed a survey designed to make you feel superior to us as you reminisce about how things were better in "the good old days" and to subtly demean the quality of our education.  Hopefully you will be able to identify the mismatches between the curriculum we are being taught and the real experiences of working doctors, with a view to throwing out all the rubbish that I think sounds too hard to learn and reducing medicine to a shortish handbook of single-page protocols to be followed blindly so as not to crimp my lifestyle too much.

If I can cause a big enough stink with this, and suck up to enough senior doctors, my future career path is assured.  So thanks for your generosity in sharing your wisdom, intellect and education with me.  I mean us.

Question 1: Which parts of the medical course do you think could be chucked in the bin because they are nothing but a vague, hazy memory viewed through the bottom of a pint glass?

Question 2: What extra training would have eased your transition into full-time doctoring?  (This could cover technical knowledge such as the number of a good tax lawyer, practical skills such as how to get the most out of the Porsche Cayenne tiptronic transmission, communication skills such as the best way to humiliate and demoralize medical students, and administrative skills such as ... ha ha, just joking, we all know that administrators have no skills worth mentioning, right? If it's worth doing, a doctor does it!)

Question 3: Do you have any suggestions as to how these deficiences could be addressed with the minimum of further effort from myself, but the maximum publicity?

Question 4: If you play golf, would you be willing to play a round with me in the spring?  You can have as many mulligans as you like and I'll laugh at all your jokes too.

Thank you for your time and relative dimensions in space,

PTR
Medical Student Extraordinaire