u/BeyondCorona

Hi everyone.

MD4 in a bit of a conundrum here, feel very unmotivated to do clinical medicine. Just had a mock OSCE and came back with a borderline pass mark of 51 - feedback was that I was indecisive and needed prompting throughout some of the stations. This aligns with some of my recent case assessment marks on placement where i get a pass and the assessor gives me a "you can do better than this" kind of speel. Have reached out to Med School for performance improvement, am seeing a GP, and have a therapist.

Background, started off med school performing very well in OSCES (90+% first OSCE then 84% in MD1, then 55% at end of preclin, then below average 55% in MD3, and now borderline 50% pass in MD4 on mock OSCE . In the background of this, I've had a lot of trauma indirectly tied to being a medical student (In MD2 Mum lost her job and then took a pay cut and I didnt work to support the household earnings drop (at her request because she felt guilty about it), in MD3 mom was assaulted by her employer and made redundant, so had a year where i was kind of economically grounded and couldnt do anything (I wrote papers though and they were unpaid), and now in MD4 shes retired and our house is totally paid off and my life is really good now outside of placement so I kind of dont have any extrinsic factors motivating me to pursue medicine anymore now either (really hard problem to relate to i know).

I am of the view I have probably just been avoidant of becoming more clinically independent and need to lock-in, be open with my friends about my shit performance and attempt to upskill reasonably fast as there are likely significant margins for improvement berfore MD4 final exams.

Problem List:

1. Is this trajectory of statistical OSCE performance decline something that can be overcome in 3-5 months? Give me tips.

2. I am interested in competitive surg subspecs and feel like this longitudinal evidence of subpar performance may reflect poor character traits - so should I reconsider my clinical choices?