What Is A “Gunner” In Medical School?

This question was originally posted on Quora.com and was answered by Rick VonderBrink, M.D. Medicine, University of Cincinnati College of Medicine (1995)



A gunner is a student who is putting out maximal effort all the time, living in the the library (and usually telling everyone how much time they spend in the library), and asking frequent questions in class. This is usually with the stated or unstated objective of finishing at the top of the class in order to secure the best residency in a prestige specialty. It became a verb too, as in “I’m really gunning for an Honors in pharmacology”.

There is another component as well. At the beginning of medical school, students are grouped solely with a bunch of other high achievers, possibly for the first time. Probably half of the class were valedictorians or salutatorians in high school and nobody had under a 3.75 GPA in college. For some people, either a sense of need to prove yourself or show that you are as smart as everyone else leads them to try to display that they are smart too, like a peacock displaying tail feathers.

My class was like this, especially in the first week or two. Lectures were interrupted regularly by students (usually the same 5 people) trying to ask REALLY INSIGHTFUL questions to show that they were REALLY INTO the material. One of our first series of biochemistry lectures was on protein synthesis. At the time, biochem tried to pair each topic with a disease state so that it seemed more medically relevant. For protein synthesis it was sickle cell anemia, and as part of the discussion, we talked about malaria (which sickle cell protects against). The professor was discussing the life cycle of the malaria parasite, which goes from infected human to mosquito to uninfected human, who then gets the disease. Repeat. There were hands going up repeatedly through the lecture. When the professor got to the point where the mosquito bit the infected human, a hand went up. The prof looked straight at the guy with the hand up and said, “I don’t know what effect this has on the mosquito, and I don’t really care.”

The hand went back down.

That was the end of the REALLY INSIGHTFUL questions, for the most part.

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