I recently read a twitter update from a friend of mine. It read:
After tonight, i don’t understand how anyone in their right mind used school as an excuse not to come to Oshkosh.
First of all I should probably explain the tweet. My friend is at Oshkosh for an International Pathfinder Camporee. (My friend is there as one of the staff members.) Pathfinders is sort of like co-ed Boy/Girl Scouts. This year there is a camporee in Wisconsin where clubs from all over the world gather for a few days, sing songs, play games, and learn different things.
As usual there are young people who choose not to go and claim that it is because they don’t want to miss out on school.
But my friend doesn’t understand why someone would use school as an excuse for something that is so much fun.
I would venture to guess that the person willing to use school as an excuse would do so for a couple reasons:
- They are lying and school really isn’t the reason. They just figure it sounds like a “good” excuse — that the excuse is a respectable-sounding one.
- They are telling the truth because school is important to them.
I would venture to say that medical students, in general, are most likely to be willing to sacrifice fun for school — not necessarily because we like school (although many do thoroughly enjoy school and learning), but because we are pursuing a goal that will only be realized in the long-term.
And so we sacrifice while others around us wonder why we would do such a thing. We sacrifice as a pre-med student trying to push as hard as we can to get into school. We sacrifice as a medical student to get into the best residency we can get into. We sacrifice as a resident to get into the best fellowship we can get into.
It’s just the nature of our “business.” We have to prioritize. We have to pick and choose which of our interests we will indulge in (Yeah, I know I ended that sentence in a preposition. Sorry.). And that is just something many people will never understand.
