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- Mar 29, 2011
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Hello. I am currently an MS2 at a US allopathic school. I graduated from college in May 2014 and matriculated in August 2014. I've been on SDN since my freshman year of college, and I don't think I would've gotten in to medical school without the guidance I received from this forum. I was just thinking about all the **** I have come to realize about medical school/medicine/life and how little I knew about what I was getting myself into. Luckily, I love it all and it worked out for the best. I am writing this to help those of you thinking about a career as a doctor, and for myself. I created this as a separate thread because, well, it's my letter and I wanted to.
As an undergraduate, I think I was more attracted to the idea of being a doctor than anything else. I had watched medical TV shows growing up, and of course it all seemed so exciting. It's designed to seem exciting. So, based on this idea of me wanting to be a doctor, I focused on the immediate next step: getting into medical school. I spent a lot of time and energy focusing on bolstering my application by doing research, volunteering; etc. I got kind of wrapped up in all of it, especially because I was reading SDN. I lost sight of the point, which was to find out whether or not I really wanted to be a doctor and not to put another bullet point on my resume. Over and over, medical school will test how determined you are to actually be a physician and not how determined you are to just have the title or prestige based on whatever impression you have of medicine.
I want to really explain this, because it's something that I heard over and over while I was applying. I thought I had fully appreciated how hard medical school would be, but I was wrong. And it's not that the level of difficulty of learning the information is more or less than I thought it would be (I would say that the average person who can score a 28 on the MCAT probably has the mental capacity to memorize and understand what you need to as a doctor.) For me, the most difficult part was the shift in the ratio of time I spend studying alone vs. fun stuff. Also, unlike a regular job, you’re always “on.” There’s always more work to do, more lectures you can watch, another resource to read.
I'll try to illustrate this as someone who is currently preparing for Step 1 boards. If you haven't heard of the test and/or want to have a fun little thought experiment, peruse a copy of "First Aid for Step 1" (please don't buy it as a pre-med, because that would hurt my soul). It is a 500-600 page textbook of tables and charts full of information about human physiology/pathophysiology and a little bit of social science and statistics thrown in there. Imagine memorizing this book.
Now, I bring up this book knowing that the magnitude of just how much information it encompasses cannot be fully dawned upon someone until they go through medical school themselves. In order to have an idea of what the process of learning all this information is like, imagine that you have to eat 10 pancakes per day, every day, for two years. If you miss any pancakes in a given day, they roll over to the next day in addition to the 10. And so on. You may think, “gee, I like pancakes! I can do that!” Well, we all like pancakes. And the degree to which you enjoy pancakes will make medical school that much more or less difficult. But eventually, everyone at some point in their two preclinical years begins to resent pancakes. Because it never stops, and if you try to take a break in order to re-sensitize your palette, you’re ****ed. So, how do you keep eating pancakes in the face of this seemingly never-ending stream of them? I think that’s a personal journey for everyone going through this process. Or maybe not, maybe the pancakes never get old for some people. I probably shouldn’t assume.
For me, it’s the realization that I actually do like medicine. I do enjoy learning about diseases, identifying them in patients and then working with them to understand, treat, and manage their disease and their overall health. I want to learn more and know everything, because in medicine, if you don’t know about a disease or disease process, then you won’t consider it on your differential. If it’s not on your differential, which is essentially a physician’s working list of possible diagnoses for a given set of signs/symptoms/labs, then there’s a chance you miss something important and then somebody gets hurt. There's something both fulfilling and slightly terrifying about that responsibility that makes me glad I chose this as a profession.
This is just one of many reasons for which someone can want to be a doctor, and it just so happens to be mine at the moment. It’s definitely not the same one I came into medical school with, and I’m sure it will constantly evolve throughout my career. That’s why I urge pre-med students to really take a good hard look at yourself as a person and why you want to become a doctor throughout this entire process. Because when you’re looking down the barrel of a gun halfway through med school and realize you don’t want this, it’s a lot messier than figuring that all out right now.
As an undergraduate, I think I was more attracted to the idea of being a doctor than anything else. I had watched medical TV shows growing up, and of course it all seemed so exciting. It's designed to seem exciting. So, based on this idea of me wanting to be a doctor, I focused on the immediate next step: getting into medical school. I spent a lot of time and energy focusing on bolstering my application by doing research, volunteering; etc. I got kind of wrapped up in all of it, especially because I was reading SDN. I lost sight of the point, which was to find out whether or not I really wanted to be a doctor and not to put another bullet point on my resume. Over and over, medical school will test how determined you are to actually be a physician and not how determined you are to just have the title or prestige based on whatever impression you have of medicine.
I want to really explain this, because it's something that I heard over and over while I was applying. I thought I had fully appreciated how hard medical school would be, but I was wrong. And it's not that the level of difficulty of learning the information is more or less than I thought it would be (I would say that the average person who can score a 28 on the MCAT probably has the mental capacity to memorize and understand what you need to as a doctor.) For me, the most difficult part was the shift in the ratio of time I spend studying alone vs. fun stuff. Also, unlike a regular job, you’re always “on.” There’s always more work to do, more lectures you can watch, another resource to read.
I'll try to illustrate this as someone who is currently preparing for Step 1 boards. If you haven't heard of the test and/or want to have a fun little thought experiment, peruse a copy of "First Aid for Step 1" (please don't buy it as a pre-med, because that would hurt my soul). It is a 500-600 page textbook of tables and charts full of information about human physiology/pathophysiology and a little bit of social science and statistics thrown in there. Imagine memorizing this book.
Now, I bring up this book knowing that the magnitude of just how much information it encompasses cannot be fully dawned upon someone until they go through medical school themselves. In order to have an idea of what the process of learning all this information is like, imagine that you have to eat 10 pancakes per day, every day, for two years. If you miss any pancakes in a given day, they roll over to the next day in addition to the 10. And so on. You may think, “gee, I like pancakes! I can do that!” Well, we all like pancakes. And the degree to which you enjoy pancakes will make medical school that much more or less difficult. But eventually, everyone at some point in their two preclinical years begins to resent pancakes. Because it never stops, and if you try to take a break in order to re-sensitize your palette, you’re ****ed. So, how do you keep eating pancakes in the face of this seemingly never-ending stream of them? I think that’s a personal journey for everyone going through this process. Or maybe not, maybe the pancakes never get old for some people. I probably shouldn’t assume.
For me, it’s the realization that I actually do like medicine. I do enjoy learning about diseases, identifying them in patients and then working with them to understand, treat, and manage their disease and their overall health. I want to learn more and know everything, because in medicine, if you don’t know about a disease or disease process, then you won’t consider it on your differential. If it’s not on your differential, which is essentially a physician’s working list of possible diagnoses for a given set of signs/symptoms/labs, then there’s a chance you miss something important and then somebody gets hurt. There's something both fulfilling and slightly terrifying about that responsibility that makes me glad I chose this as a profession.
This is just one of many reasons for which someone can want to be a doctor, and it just so happens to be mine at the moment. It’s definitely not the same one I came into medical school with, and I’m sure it will constantly evolve throughout my career. That’s why I urge pre-med students to really take a good hard look at yourself as a person and why you want to become a doctor throughout this entire process. Because when you’re looking down the barrel of a gun halfway through med school and realize you don’t want this, it’s a lot messier than figuring that all out right now.
