As a third and fourth year medical student, you are exposed to a wide variety of professionals. Stressed-out and overworked nurses. Attendings with particular medical styles and “read my mind” types of questions. And residents* that have spent several years taking crap from other people and are now ready to dish it out to lower entities in the hierarchy of medicine.

Okay, that isn’t always true of residents. Most of the residents I had the pleasure of working with and learning from were incredibly patient, brilliantly educated, and full of tips and tricks to help make our lives easier as students. I liked a lot of the residents that I encountered and worked hard to help them look good to our attending. In turn, I feel like I learned a lot and made a few friends along the way.

But there are always a few rotten apples in the barrel.

During my fourth year, I heard whisperings about a certain resident that was on service at our hospital. She was mean. She was spiteful. She would say one thing to a student’s face and another thing to the attending. She yelled. She insulted. She was not a very nice person and from what I could see, it didn’t even seem like she was a very good doctor.

But I learned a few very important lessons from her:

1) No matter how tired you are, take the time to look presentable.
Early on when Creighton was only a few weeks old and I was bleary-eyed at 3am, I realized I could relate to being exhausted. And looking exhausted. And feeling like even my toenails were exhausted. But geez. Please let me never be the resident with unwashed hair, scrubs that look slept in (and then thrown on the floor and then slept in again), and a white coat crisscrossed with pen stains and wrinkles.

2) Be consistent. Be professional. Ditch the gossip.
Being consistent refers to your actions, but also includes the things you say to other people. Because, you know, those other people might talk and learn that you’re saying one thing to them while another thing to somebody else. And if one of those things happens to be derogatory? It’s helpful to realize hospitals are not as big as they may seem.

3) Learn medical students names. And use them.
One of the most frustrating times in my medical student career occurred on service with a resident that didn’t bother to learn our names or read our nametags. And it was SO ANNOYING to hear her say “oh, the medical student did that” when something SHE DID went wrong.

4) Make friends.
Dude. Friends help friends. And as exhausted residents, you need all the friends you can get. What on earth is to be gained by talking behind everyone’s back and trying to make your colleagues look bad??

And so, I would like to thank that scary-looking and mean-sounding resident for the lessons she taught me even though I was never on her team. There were a couple of times I saw her come through the ER for an admit and I would literally cringe as the wake of frowns and annoyance spread behind her.

Don’t be that resident.

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*For those of you still catching up with the medical hierarchy lingo, a “resident” is a new doctor that is completing training in their specialty of choice. There are residents running around the hospital in every specialty from Family Medicine to Surgery to Urology to Pediatrics to Radiology. Based on the number of hours they spend in the hospital, most residents are underpaid and overworked. And that is often the main reasons hospitals offer to teach them: residents are cheap labor.