#7: Anatomy lab

Anatomy lab is done differently at different schools, but is always done in the first year of medical school. If you are lucky, your school will do all of anatomy in about two months, and then you will be done with it forever. If you are unlucky, your school will buy into the "systems-based integrative-knowledge" garbage and you will have anatomy labs throughout the year. Fortunately for this second group, having anatomy throughout the year is a good way to There is absolutely no benefit to having anatomy through the whole year, at all, ever. Only bad things will come of having to prolong the end of this experience because no one learns anything from it and it only ends up pissing people off.

Professors like to call anatomy a "rite of passage," which is an accurate description because anatomy lab is basically a legalized form of hazing. The major difference between the two is that there is less free alcohol in anatomy lab. Major things you will notice about the anatomy labs when you first get there are that they are always very cold, and they always smell like death. Ostensibly, the professors need to keep the temperature of the anatomy labs so low for the sake of preserving the cadavers, although they also get the added bonus of doing even one more thing to make medical students as uncomfortable as possible.

Each lab session consists of approximately three hours of pretending that you are finding whatever body parts are on the list. Pretending is important because even though it is a well known fact that nothing in a [dead] body can really be distinguished from anything else, professors like to see that you are hard at work. For this reason, when you are in anatomy lab, it is best to try to leave as early as possible. Set a deadline for giving up, and then try to beat it. Making a game of this helps keep it fun, even after thirty or more lab sessions.

Sometimes, you will find yourself stuck with a lab partner who wants to find every single last thing in the miniscule chance that they will commit something to memory. Partners like these can make sticking to your deadline difficult, but it is best not to lose your cool in this situation. Simply ignore them and make a habit of leaving lab at a specific time every session; they will adapt to your behavior.

Also, do not worry about how these behaviors will affect your score on the final lab practical. Professors love holding review sessions, which are many times more useful than anatomy lab ever is.