Put down your pencils

So. I'm done with school.

Breath it in deep. That's the smell of freedom.

Well...I am no more free than I was on Thursday night, on the eve of my final exam. I still have my Comprehensive exam, my USMLE Step 1, the Canadian version of the USMLE that I need to take for visa purposes, my Board exams after each rotation, USMLE Step 2 and 3....maybe a few years of mandatory residency in underserved communities.

But I am no more constricted than I have been for the last few years of my life. I can still quit and decide to become a...'job-person'? 'Not-student'? 'Tax-payer'? Is that what they call people with jobs?

My formal education is over. It's been about 20 years of sitting in classrooms and taking tests. Much of it has left me unfulfilled. A fictional study I imagined for the sake of this paragraph suggests that X% of people wish to excel at a task and build up an identity for themselves, and I am part of that X%. However, excelling as a student of the medical sciences meant that I had to try and remain competitive in terms of applications. That meant trying to take courses in which I had no interest that were deemed mandatory by some committee for most of my adult life. I can say without a shadow of a doubt that almost the entirety of it has been redundant.

Its a bit of a punch in the gut [note: I decided to retract balls, as Y% of my readers may not have testes] to realize that many years of my life has been meaningless in the pursuit of meaning. My own father felt that the compulsory military service in his youth has been a similar waste of the best years of his life, and chose to immigrate rather than have his children go through his own experiences. Strange, that these compulsory prisons follow us so diligently.

Today, I can cover in 3 weeks what would have previously taken an entire semester of undergraduate education. I feel my wits are at their sharpest (or at least as sharp as a wooden knife can get) and my professionalism has never been...professionaler, and my wallet has never been emptier. For a self-proclaimed slightly-higher-than-average-intelligence person, it comes as a realization that I am actually-below-average-intelligence, as almost all of my current education could have been covered with the cost of a $10 library card and a suggested reading guide. For those that have difficulties picking up a book, there is no adequate substitute for a good lecturer, but videotaped lectures do a pretty decent job for a fraction of the price. We are born into social structures that have existed for hundreds of years, and continue to build onto a solid foundations, but at a heavy cost of time and debt. A young person may gladly trade his time for money, and an older person may gladly trade money for more time, and any professional needs to trade both.

I applaud the trend of universities and institutions offering their course lectures for low/no cost (well-known among them are TED, Khan Academy, MIT/Yale/Berkeley, but I have no doubt that hundreds of others exist), as well as the rarer institutions that teach and additionally certify these students. I also have a hope that one day we will see institutions that build from the ground up to utilize these low-cost alternatives, instead of sticking them on like a post-it note. Hopefully, I'll even play a role in them one day.

PS: I was originally going to write about how I haven't gotten off my couch since my exam on Friday (and yes, it is currently Sunday), how I finally got out of this couch-induced rut, my search for a new apartment, revelations in my last semester of lectures, and my study plan for the coming exam. Apparently, I also shouldn't keep my bananas and tomatoes in the refrigerator.