5. iPhones

With its rounded corners, colourful display, and difficult-to-swallow design, the iPhone better resembles a child’s toy than a sophisticated multimedia device. However its easily identifiable design and high cost (roughly $2,000 per year) make the iPhone a necessity in the medical student’s inventory. For the pre-clinical student, the iPhone serves a myriad of functions, such as disrupting lecture with its xylophone-themed ringtones and text alerts, being left out in the open to be stolen, and running out of batteries in between dropped calls. In addition, clerkship students can use the iPhone to look up arcane facts while pretending to take a shit in order to humiliate their classmates in front of an attending.

The next time a fourth year Anaesthesiology hopeful frantically insists that she “loves children” and has “always wanted to do Pediatrics” but couldn’t due to a crushing student loan burden, suggest that she get an iPhone (which she almost certainly already has). With dazzling 4G speed, she can calculate what portion of her $350,000 per annum salary she must set aside to repay her loans. There’s an app for that.

4. Working Out

Perhaps the most direct way to validate one’s narcissism, working out is one of the most cherished activities of the typical medical student. There are few better ways for a med student to inflate his self worth than to stand in a public area surrounded by mirrors, flexing his grotesquely blown up muscles while reading a thick medical textbook. Improving one’s output at the benchpress also gives the medical student a quantifiable and standardised measure with which to diminish fellow med and non-med students alike.

Working out is not limited to men, as female med students often take this opportunity to burn off the 50 Calories they consumed for supper. The perfect svelte figure is a must-have for female med students who wear heavy makeup and designer dresses to lecture on a regular basis.

3. Dating Other Medical Students

Intra-class dating, known colloquially as ‘incest’ is rampant in medical school. Reasons for dating within one’s own ranks are diverse, including time constraints, difficulty reaching outside of established social circles, and wanting to share common points of interest with significant others. However, we would be remiss to ignore a huge driving force behind our attraction to fellow med students, which is our own narcissism; dating a med student is as close to fucking your own reflection as you can ever hope to get.

The zenith of med school incest is of course marrying a doctor, a dream perhaps as old our desire to become doctors at all. Male doctors who lack the foresight and wherewithal to marry a female doctor will often settle for a nurse, but only if she acknowledges that she is inferior to you in every measurable way. Female doctors die barren and alone before wedding so far below their station.

2. Resenting Students from Other Professions

Medical students represent a homogenous sliver of our society. Not only do we come from relatively similar financial, ethnic, and political backgrounds, but we also share a common taste for money and respect. While being surrounded by such insipid people grows quickly tiresome, we can’t speak out against our colleagues without throwing light on our own hypocrisy.

Thus in the ultimate display of self denial, we lash out at students in other lucrative professions for being greedy and ‘selling out’. We organise elaborate inter-school mixers to corner law students and complain about how short their training is and how much more money they will make than we will. We then jokingly lament how much easier it is to get into Harvard Law School than Harvard Med. How we even know this is a mystery to everyone.

1. Wearing Scrubs in Public

The last thing you want to see is student on his Infectious Disease clerkship wearing scrubs after having treated a half dozen herpes patients and collecting Simian Immunodeficiency Virus samples for a side research project--standing next to you in the buffet line. Yet there he is in all his scrubbed glory. The first thing a normal person would do after a 20 hour shift would be to get out of his work clothes and take a shower—especially if said garments were ugly and soiled—but med students don’t seem to think in this way.  They take this opportunity to go to the mall, go cycling in the park, or play a round of golf. Wearing scrubs in public not only gives med students a way to declare their profession to people outside the hospital, but also reminds us that their time is so valuable and limited they don’t have five minutes to change into a t-shirt and jeans.

Imagine if a fireman showed up to his son’s birthday party with his helmet and boots and the charred embers of an old lady’s housecat still rubbed into his overcoat. Or if a police officer attended a backyard barbeque in full dress uniform wielding a Glock 22.

How fucking weird would that be?