Here we go again (again)

Just started up again with classes this morning: 3 hours of pharm...which wasn't all that bad considering that have a Bachelor's in Chemistry. Hopefully it will continue to be mildly interesting for the rest of the semester so I can pull myself out of the academic P=MD quagmire I put myself in.

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On a different note, responding to a comment that I received on an earlier post ranting about medical education philosophy asking for suggestions on how to address my rants:
I honestly don't know if there is a viable way of addressing my concerns of being left to my own devices to learn the super-detailed basic sciences that will have little, if no relevance to my future career. At my institution, we're basically thrown 200 pages of outline, reading assignments and small group assignments at the begining of a semester along with a copy of Robbins. For each subject section, we're given a cursory overview of the relevant topics, a few shallow ventures into interactive learning/problem solving and an all-but comprehensive review of what we'd expect to see on microscopic/gross inspection. And then we are examined to a very detailed level that I somehow manage to never quite prepare adequately for. There is no remedy for this problem because the vast amount of exquisitely detailed knowledge we're expected to amass over a short period of time is determined by the NBME and the content of the USMLE.

I guess my personal problem is that I get bogged down in all of the details and checking off all of the learning objectives after reading them twice and don't have an accurate way of ensuring that I have adequately prepared to answer questions about the material. Unfortunately, our learning objectives are somewhat vague in comparison to the depth we're expected to prepare. I suppose that having something more than a vague list of clues as to the depth of prep needed would be helpful, as would a self assessment tool to guage where I am at. We are provided a bank of old exams, but they are in no logical order for me to organize my studying. I suppose that if there was a better resource for me to ensure that I had prepared to the proper extent for the exams that I am expected to take, I might be better able to achieve the learning goals.

For what it's worth, I think that the current system of medical education needs to be severely overhauled to incorporate an integrated knowledge of basic science and clinical information and that the Steps of the USMLE need to be done away with. But for the time being, we just have to deal