I know a lot of people dislike feeling stupid, but I think it's a fairly useful emotion- feeling stupid about something almost certainly means you just learnt something, in a way you're not likely to forget.
It's hard to get used to. Many of us are used to being high/over-achievers... When I first got to med school I had to get my head round the shift from being one of the top students in a fairly crappy comprehensive, to being decidedly average in comparison to my peers. (Unluckily for me, I also get compared with my super-smart brother being one of the top people in his year in medical school... Thanks for making me look bad!)
Feeling stupid means you've realised there's something you didn't know. Often that's the spur for me to open my books... you just have to sit through one lecture/clinic session, not understanding half of the terminology used, and the urge to do your reading rises dramatically!
Of course, reading around the subject before you go in is valuable and should be commended. But if you're not being challenged, if you don't see anything you didn't know about, if you didn't ask any questions or get asked something you couldn't answer straight away, what did you gain from it?
Similiarly, making a gut-wrenchingly embarassing mistake I think is a sure-fire way of ensuring you don't do the same thing again! I find this especially important for clinical skills- you can read about them all you like, but it's the first time you struggle to ask a patient to undress that you realise what you *really* need to practise.
(History taking too- during a GUM history I accidentally on autopilot asked an MSM if the sex was "oral, vaginal or anal"... I won't be doing that again!)
We all cope with it in different ways; be it laughing it off, silently wishing for the ground to swallow you up, or ranting about the circumstances that led to it happening, as long as you find a way to accept what happened!
It's a good thing to get used to though- everyone will make mistakes (hopefully not too many) in the course of their career, and it's a truly valuable skill to be able to admit that you've made an error, apologise and deal with the consequences.
So I say embrace feeling stupid. No-one's going to make it through life without the feeling, so you may as well take what you can from it!
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Or as Donald Rumsfeld would say "we have unknown unknowns and known unknows"
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