Jul 24 2005
Torture Your Freshman, Coz That’s the Way They Used to Treat You
Dr Phien: Teh, the chickens are already set in the dining room.
Dr Lie (looks aside): Thank you, Phien.
Teh, in Sundanese dialect, is a kinda calling for an older woman.
Me: Doc, are the freshmen commanded to buy all of you dinner each night?
Dr Lie: Yes, they are.
Dr Lie is a resident in my hospital, she’s been in the second year of her program for specialization. And Dr Phien is a new resident, she hasn’t been already three months for the program. Coz Dr Phien is still a freshman, then the first tasks for her is serving her seniors, including provide the dinners for those residents who doing the night-shifts at the hospital.
Meanwhile, I haven’t been a doctor yet already, right now I’m still an intern who works at the hospital for experience.
Me: Why, can’t you buy your own dinner and should the freshmen do it for you?
Dr Lie: No, Vic, that’s the way the habituation works.
What kinda habituation? It’s not appropriate to make someone buy your dinner every night. They’re not your slaves.
But then Dr Lie says: When I was a freshman, I bought my seniors dinner, too.
So that’s the culture works. A freshman’s task is buy the dinner for their seniors. Not just that. Sometimes they should come for work earlier to clean up the desks, write a few reports for their seniors, and they’re allowed to leave the office after the seniors do. Later, the freshman’s phase is over, and they become new seniors, coz the new freshmen will come. Then the freshmen will do the same jobs, for the ex-freshmen who become seniors now.
It’s a torture, though it doesn’t really look like a torture superficially. But that’s been happened for years, even decades. In medicine, though it’s not mentioned in the written procedure, the feodalism is legalled, almost like in military. And nobody can’t stop it, coz nobody knows how to stop.
Like then Dr Lie says to me: Vic, I know it’s not appropriate for the freshmen, and also it’s not a good command of me. But I’m not the only one who do this, coz the others do. And I can’t stop it on my own, as long the others don’t stop either…
