Friday, September 21, 2007

Me: Average Joe

So I FINALLY got the results of my anesthesia practice boards exam that I have to take every July. It's the same exam given to become board certified, but we are given the test as residents to gauge how we are doing each year. Unfortunately, our department has big aspirations and requires the residents to score in the national 50th percentile. If you don't, you are not allowed to "moonlight" (ie...make LOTS of extra money by working on the weekends as a general practitioner- usually in a rural ER, botox clinic, or quick-care clinic). And if you do REALLY bad you are placed on departmental probation and could get terminanted if you score poorly a second time. Anyway, we got our scores today in our 6:30am conference. I managed to barely scrape by. Any other year, I would look like a total superstar by scoring in the 53rd percentile (which is good, right? It means I did better than 53% of the first year anesthesia residents in the entire country!), but not in my class. The year I applied to residency programs, anesthesia was competitive, so I'm in a class full of smarty-pants overacheivers. How I got mixed in with these brainiacs is beyond me. Almost everyone did better than I. One person did worse and I tied with another person.

Ah well. At least I'm not lamenting that I came in last. I think I'll keep quiet at work-don't want to hurt anyone's feelings.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I took my National Certification Exam a couple weekends ago and I have to wait until the end of Oct. for results. I don't care if mine comes back "average Joe," I just want it to say PASS.