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PaperclipPerfector  18hr ago (text post)   464 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for December 12, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Gentlemen, and the odd lady: I passed my MRCPsych Paper A. And not just passed, but passed well.

This is one of those moments where I should probably reflect on the nature of medical education, the arbitrary gatekeeping functions of credentialing exams, or maybe the peculiar psychology of test anxiety. Instead I'm just going to say: thank God that's over.

Walking out of the exam hall, I felt that distinctive mix of mental exhaustion and fatalistic acceptance you get after three hours of multiple choice questions. You know the feeling. Your brain is simultaneously convinced you failed catastrophically and that dwelling on it serves no purpose whatsoever. I spent an hour debriefing with fellow trainees (mostly commiserating) and ChatGPT (mostly useful), and gradually my mood upgraded from "exhausted fatalism" to "cautious optimism about probably passing."

Turns out my intuition was underselling it. The Royal College doesn't release exact percentile scores (because of course they don't), but reading between the lines of their deliberately vague feedback system, I'm guessing somewhere around 90th percentile. Which means I almost certainly overprepared.

But here's the thing about pass/fail exams: you can't really overprepare. Or rather, you can, but the expected value calculation still makes sense. The cost of overstudying is maybe fifty extra hours of your life. The cost of failing is retaking the entire exam, paying the fees again, and explaining to your training program why you need another attempt. Better safe than sorry is one way to put it; another might be "pathological risk aversion masquerading as conscientiousness."

I got the results today while sitting on a beach, drinking beer, under what I can only describe as an unreasonably hot sun. As far as settings for receiving important news go, this ranks pretty high. It occurs to me that this might also be one of the better settings for receiving bad news, actually. Hard to catastrophize properly when you're slightly tipsy and the ocean is right there.

The bad news (there's always bad news): the reward for winning a pie-eating contest is more pie. I now have to start preparing for Paper B.

Paper B is generally considered harder, though "harder" here mostly means "has more statistics and critical appraisal of scientific papers," which are exactly the things most doctors struggle with. I'm cautiously optimistic about continuing to be above average in this specific domain. We'll see.

Thanks again to everyone who wished me well. I am now 1/3 of the way (measured in major exams, not counting the years of supervised practice or any of the other requirements) to being a fully qualified psychiatrist. Only [checks notes] several more years of training to go.

Onward.

Congratulations!

What am I, the protagonist from Evangelion haha?

(Thank you!)

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