My question is to you: Looking back, do you wish you had gone to medical school directly after college? Why or why not? How has your time "off" been an advantage or disadvantage?
Well, one of the more important things that living life has taught me is that there is really no room for regret. There are simply the choices we make and the results we get from them; we keep moving along and making more choices along the way. As one of my friends occasionally reminds me, if we could have made a different choice at the time, we would have, meaning we made the choices that made sense to us at the time we made them.
I wasn't ready for medical school back then. I had the intelligence, but not the maturity, and ultimately, not the right kind of motivation. I needed time to grow into the person that I was when I finally made the leap to apply to medical school. The time just didn't feel ripe for it. There were still things I needed to sort out in my life and I trusted my instinct to guide me to the right things to do. Plenty of people kept trying to push me toward medicine along the way, but my heart wasn't into it. It was nearly 10 years before I decided that medicine was the right path for me and I'm glad that it took me that long. The 10 years between college and medical school were extremely rich and rewarding. If I were to sit here and describe all that I did and experienced, you'd be hearing me go on for some time. Let's just say that I really lived my life to the fullest and got to know myself a lot better. Then one day, I woke up and found that my life had led me back, full spiral (same place, different me), to the same choice point I had years ago; this time, it was the right time and my heart jumped at the opportunity.
Once I made my decision, I went back to school and retook many of my premed science classes and the MCAT. I got in on my first try and the rest is history. It seemed as if my entire life was leading me to that point. It was as if all the seemingly randomness of my choices now made sense.
Those 10 years away from school were absolutely a blessing. I feel a lot wiser and stronger than I was, right out of college. I've been through a lot of things, some good and some bad, that my younger colleagues have only heard of. I have become much more efficient in many areas of my life and more refined in choices. I think I am more able to sort through the BS much better than my younger self. Through all of the jobs I've held in the past 10 years, I learned a lot about people, how to talk to them, how to understand them, and how to listen better. These things usually translate as something intangible to the people I interact with, but it makes it easier to establish a connection with them. I actually had one standardized patient ask me if I had been in health care prior to medical school (I hadn't), because it seemed to him that I felt completely comfortable with the interview process and a bit ahead of my colleagues. I couldn't help but attribute this to my many years of experience in different fields.
Now, I gave some thought to your question of where I think waiting 10 years might not have served me. At the beginning, it was a bit more difficult to pull those all-nighters and to keep up such a rapid pace of learning and doing. I'm sure everyone has a hard time with these things, but for some reason, I felt that it was just a tad bit harder for me, having been out of school for so long. Sometimes, I felt as slow as a rock compared to my younger colleagues, who seemed to have a lot more energy and were just so incredibly sharp. I had to push myself through some things and sweating from the effort, I'd find my younger colleagues at the finish line having not even broken a sweat. Yet, after some time, I eventually adjusted and it wasn't a problem.
Another thing is that I sometimes feel a bit alone, that I am not as understood by my younger colleagues. What I mean is that I am sometimes more keenly aware of the gap between my younger colleagues and I. I grew up in a slightly different time and had slightly different experiences. When I was finishing high school, many of my colleagues were in kindergarten/first grade. I grew up before computers were household appliances, when they still filled entire rooms. The first president I remember was Jimmy Carter and I had a Bee Gee's lunch box when I was kid. I recall having dinner and hearing that John Lennon had been shot and killed on our huge tube TV set. So yeah, there is a bit of gap. But beyond all that, I'm pretty much done with all the partying, silly sophomoric stuff I used to do when I was in my twenties, etc., etc. Many of my younger colleagues are still into all that, and they should be, but I often don't feel like spending my time like that, so I'm not hanging out with them and it can be a bit isolating. Yet, the experience of medical school is so strong that it does create a unifying bond even despite all that. I also end up connecting with my younger colleagues in other ways and am well liked. I am an excellent listener and have obviously been around the block a few times, so people end up sharing a lot of stuff with me that they want to get off their chest or want opinions on.
Anyway, that's the long and short of it. Two years of medical school done and I am the age that I am. I have no regrets.
If I did that, I'd be so mired in regret that I'd just sit there and do nothing for the rest of my life. I think I developed a bit of "Rocky-esque" type of approach over the years with regard to those gut-wrenching body blows, which basically amounts to (from the most recent Rocky movie):
Not that I would recommend it but it brought down my stress level.
