This has to be one of the best posts I've ever read on SDN.
But QofQ -- that you considered quitting at a minimum of once a month absolutely blows my mind. What factors brought this about and how did you deal with it? On some level, did you know these factors might have been a problem before starting medical school -- but downplayed them anyway?
I say it blows my mind because for whatever reason I consider you the **ideal** premed/med student -- at least from your SDN profile anyway (non trad with life experience, MCAT off the charts, etc etc).
The factors that brought it about differed depending on where I was in the process. First year, I felt very frustrated about how intellectually stifling med school was compared to grad school. It's a lot more memorization, and you have to do a lot of things without really understanding why you're doing them. Every time someone told me, "just do it, and you'll understand why later," I wanted to throttle them on the spot. Also, it was hard at the beginning to go from being competent and knowledgeable about chemistry to being an idiot freshman who didn't know anything. I don't think I realized ahead of time how difficult the loss of my former identity would be. For a while, I would say that I used to be a chemist, until one day someone pointed out that I still *was* a chemist, and it's not like my previous experience went away once I started medical school. That helped me see it differently, and eventually being in medical school felt less alien than it did at first.
Second year is very stressful for most people because the curriculum pace picks up quite a bit from first year, and also because you have Step 1 looming over you. In my case, I was working on an outside project that took up a lot of my free time. It was supposed to be done in November, and I finally finished it at the beginning of May, six months behind schedule. I then began studying for Step 1, which meant going from one high-pressure situation to another. Also, I was taking classes for my MS. So all in all, it was a very challenging year.
Third year was the hardest year for me, with the biggest highs and lows. I liked seeing patients, and I liked learning about their diseases, but I didn't like any of the specialties I was rotating through enough to want to do them for 30 or 40 years as a career. There were some specialties like surgery that I wound up liking more than I expected to, but I realized I couldn't physically do surgery because I have back problems, and it hurts to stand for hours in one place like that. I came into med school wanting to do anesthesiology, but realized that although I could see myself being an anesthesia resident, I didn't think the job of an academic attending was what I was looking for. As the year went on, I started feeling more discouraged about finding a specialty that I wanted to do. My last rotation was OB/gyn, and it was the worst one of all. Not a positive note to end the year on.
My fourth year was a lot smoother, although doing away rotations and then going through the residency app process was still stressful. It's not too dissimilar to going through the med school app process, except you don't have to do secondaries, and you don't get multiple acceptances. (Instead, you go through the match, which if you're interested, you can learn about by googling "residency match".) But what helped was that I had finally found a subspecialty that I really wanted to do. Once I figured that out, I felt a lot better about my decision to go to medical school. Though I still anguished quite a bit about where I wanted to do my residency--I *think* I chose the right program.
I'm not sure how much of this I could have known ahead of time. To paraphrase one of my profs, it's easy to see what you should have done differently when you use the retrospectroscope. But while you're in the middle of the process trying to muddle your way through, it isn't always very easy to know which way to go. I don't think you can totally know ahead of time if med school is right for you until you go to med school and experience it. The shadowing you do before med school is still useful, because it makes you think about these things, and some people realize even at that point that medicine is probably not for them. But the leap of faith required can be scary, and it's normal to doubt your decision sometimes. If anyone tells you they never had a second of doubt, I call BS. They may not ever talk about their doubts, but they still have them.
n3xa said:
Wait, so you started *over* again? Re-taking grad courses and all?
No, fortunately I didn't have to retake the courses. But I did have to start over completely from scratch with my research, because I wasn't even at the same school any more. The good thing though is that I was already well-trained in the techniques. So I guess it's most accurate to say that I began from around the point of passing quals. (They did make me retake my quals, which I did right after I got there.)
. Maybe I'm just gonna really miss being the master of my domain 
