Clinical Skillz, auscultation skillz, diagnostic skillz....

The cardiology course I'm currently taking introduces med students to Clinical Skills for the first time, which I have found very exciting. These are the things doctors do at the bedside during a physical exam. So specifically to cardiology this includes observing for the jugular venous pressure (something I had never heard of before this class), taking blood pressure, taking pulses, and what I find particularly fun: listening with the stethoscope. I think my musical skillz directly help my stethoscope skillz. When listening to a murmur its important to grade the intensity of the sound, the pitch, where on the chest its loudest, where it radiates to, where in the cardiac cycle the sound starts and where it ends, whether its regular, regularly irregular, irregularly irregular, etc. The hundreds of hours I've spent listening to piano solos over and over again has enabled me to hear a sound and be able to basically take a "picture" of it in my mind.

These clinical skills classes are fun because they show you how the "book-learnin" I'm doing actually helps in the real world -- as opposed to helping for nothing other than test scores.