Medical School is Killing My Personality

Abstract

This piece is a conversation and reflection of my ongoing relationship with toxic professionalism in medical school. Students are often at the whim of their evaluators to give them outstanding feedback in the name of having a strong residency application, but a great deal of the criteria we are evaluated on is subjective. One piece of feedback I’ve gotten more than once that I take issue with is the idea that being extroverted, enthusiastic, and cheery in medicine is seen as “unprofessional” and that I need to change myself. I am pushing back on this idea and advocating for medical students to feel more comfortable being themselves during patient encounters and asking those in evaluative positions of power to consider how feedback such as this contributing to phenomena like physician burn out.