Complete apathy?

[ciestar]

I need advice. I am a second year approaching Step and my cumulative final. However, my grades are rather lackluster. Well, extremely. I’m barely passing every single one of my courses. At least point I am getting worried for my cumulative and i take Step 1 June 11th. Now, this isn’t negotiable as I MUST take it but the 18th (and pass..) to keep my third year rotation spot at my desired location. (This is insanely important and I have to go into random locations I am screwed as Drexel does a lottery and probably all that is left are spots in the worst locations like York and whatnot far from Philly...spouse works in center city).

However, my apathy towards my school work is astounding. I imagine it is due to a great deal of depression due to a multitude of things and the fact that I’ve struggled with depression since I was 13 or so. Before I receive a response to “seek help”, I’ve tried that. I was turned away before her patient load was full. I thought about counseling elsewhere but that gets expensive fast and where is the time right now?!

Im probably two weeks behind on this block and I don’t know what to do to catch up and do well on this final set of exams. I don’t know how to fix this apathetic mindset of mine. It is simply awful and i feel there is no way I can pass this final and if i pass step, get a decent score. (Final includes micro, pathology, pathophys, and pharm...must pass every section to pass the entire course).

So oh wise SDNers who aren’t on the verge of failing out or giving out, help?

I realize this ended up as a vent.
TL;DR -basically i suck and can’t get my act together to complete second year.

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[ciestar]

Another question...
As far as catching up, can you get by not watching lectures? It would take much less time obviously to read through lectures instead.

 

[libertyyne]

I need advice. I am a second year approaching Step and my cumulative final. However, my grades are rather lackluster. Well, extremely. I’m barely passing every single one of my courses. At least point I am getting worried for my cumulative and i take Step 1 June 11th. Now, this isn’t negotiable as I MUST take it but the 18th (and pass..) to keep my third year rotation spot at my desired location. (This is insanely important and I have to go into random locations I am screwed as Drexel does a lottery and probably all that is left are spots in the worst locations like York and whatnot far from Philly...spouse works in center city).

However, my apathy towards my school work is astounding. I imagine it is due to a great deal of depression due to a multitude of things and the fact that I’ve struggled with depression since I was 13 or so. Before I receive a response to “seek help”, I’ve tried that. I was turned away before her patient load was full. I thought about counseling elsewhere but that gets expensive fast and where is the time right now?!

Im probably two weeks behind on this block and I don’t know what to do to catch up and do well on this final set of exams. I don’t know how to fix this apathetic mindset of mine. It is simply awful and i feel there is no way I can pass this final and if i pass step, get a decent score. (Final includes micro, pathology, pathophys, and pharm...must pass every section to pass the entire course).

So oh wise SDNers who aren’t on the verge of failing out or giving out, help?

I realize this ended up as a vent.
TL;DR -basically i suck and can’t get my act together to complete second year.

But in all seriousness, you should pay to get counseling.

You should also consider it a good way to spend time . Rough analogy , currently you are running at 25% efficiency. In four hours you complete 1 Unit of work. If you spent time counseling you may end up running at 50% efficency completing 1.5 units in 3 hours and 1 hour spent recieving the appropriate care. Even after taking into account the time "wasted" you are coming out ahead.

 

[KU Brendan]

You certainly aren't alone. Medical school takes a lot of overachievers who are used to getting awesome grades and redistributes them on a curve. It is easy to start feeling defeated if you're used to being at the top, especially if you're a perfectionist. Having actual clinical depression certainly doesn't help any of those feelings. And it also doesn't help that most med students will never admit they are struggling and try to act like everything is going perfectly.

Obviously, whatever you're doing right now to study isn't working for you. So change things up. Make learning more fun for you. If you've been sitting on your own watching lectures, try getting a couple people together and teaching each other the material. Or make flash cards if that's how you learn best. Maybe try giving yourself little rewards for getting through a certain number of pages, or for studying a certain amount of time. Sometimes even a checklist of things to do that you check off can be satisfying. I don't know what your school is like in terms of needing to watch vs. read the lectures, but I certainly never watched them when I was in school. I would read the transcriptions (we had a service where everyone would take turns transcribing/summarizing the lectures), make notes off of those, and study them. But that's just what worked for me.

 

[curbsideconsult]

Sorry you're going through this ciestar.

As for the lectures vs reading, it totally depends on the prof where I'm at. Some profs have literally just images or a few words on their slides so I have no idea what's going on and I have to listen to lectures and other profs have beautiful powerpoints/outlines that have so much good information it brings a tear to my eye.

You could also do what a lot of my classmates and other med students I've talked to IRL do who don't use school material at all. At this point, they're just using the tried and true standards like Pathoma, FA, Sketchy, UWorld, Bros Anki deck, etc.

 

[ciestar]

Sorry you're going through this ciestar.

As for the lectures vs reading, it totally depends on the prof where I'm at. Some profs have literally just images or a few words on their slides so I have no idea what's going on and I have to listen to lectures and other profs have beautiful powerpoints/outlines that have so much good information it brings a tear to my eye.

You could also do what a lot of my classmates and other med students I've talked to IRL do who don't use school material at all. At this point, they're just using the tried and true standards like Pathoma, FA, Sketchy, UWorld, Bros Anki deck, etc.

Thank you. Yeah, it depends for me too. Sometimes I get through an entire lecture and think at the end what a waste of time it was.

Unfortunately, at least two of my course directors intentionally get way more detail oriented on purpose so you can’t just use Pathoma and Sketchy to prepare. (It kicked my butt back in September for pathology.. ugh)

 

[19pieces19]

Wow, I can feel you. For this past block, I've done nothing because I just really don't feel like doing work anymore. I don't really give a **** about learning this stuff and would rather just sit around and surf the web. I'm getting destroyed right now.

 

[el_duderino]

Before I receive a response to “seek help”, I’ve tried that. I was turned away before her patient load was full. I thought about counseling elsewhere but that gets expensive fast and where is the time right now?!

Im probably two weeks behind on this block and I don’t know what to do to catch up and do well on this final set of exams. I don’t know how to fix this apathetic mindset of mine. It is simply awful and i feel there is no way I can pass this final and if i pass step, get a decent score. (Final includes micro, pathology, pathophys, and pharm...must pass every section to pass the entire course).

So oh wise SDNers who aren’t on the verge of failing out or giving out, help?

I realize this ended up as a vent.
TL;DR -basically i suck and can’t get my act together to complete second year.

Seek help. Seek it harder. I don't know who "she" is, but you need professional help. Your office of student services or equivalent should be able to hook you up with an appropriate professional.

Your problem isn't that you're on the verge of failing out, it's that your mental health is poor and you're about to be facing serious consequences for it. Get yourself together and see someone.

 

[Lannister]

I take step a few days before you, and I totally get the apathy you're feeling. My mindset is that at this point, if I do poorly on a random in-house repro exam, who really cares? What matters now is step. So I've been focusing much less on lectures and instead doing FA, pathoma, sketchy, and practice problems when necessary. Maybe you should see if that works for you, you obviously wouldn't do quite as well on exams as you would memorizing the lectures, but I've found that it's usually good enough to pass comfortably.

 

[sammiesings]

I feel for you, op. I hope things start to feel better soon.

When I'm behind on lectures I'm always tempted to skip listening to lectures completely but I've found what works better than that, is just pulling out your lecture slides/coursepack whatever and just reading along as best as you can while plowing through lectures at 2.5x speed.

It's not going to get you as good a score as you would have had you not been behind, but this method tends to work really well for a catch up style first pass for my school's exams which are PhD written and detail dense.

Proceed as usual when done with the lectures once through via this method.

Good luck! You got this!

 

[Goro]

I need advice. I am a second year approaching Step and my cumulative final. However, my grades are rather lackluster. Well, extremely. I’m barely passing every single one of my courses. At least point I am getting worried for my cumulative and i take Step 1 June 11th. Now, this isn’t negotiable as I MUST take it but the 18th (and pass..) to keep my third year rotation spot at my desired location. (This is insanely important and I have to go into random locations I am screwed as Drexel does a lottery and probably all that is left are spots in the worst locations like York and whatnot far from Philly...spouse works in center city).

However, my apathy towards my school work is astounding. I imagine it is due to a great deal of depression due to a multitude of things and the fact that I’ve struggled with depression since I was 13 or so. Before I receive a response to “seek help”, I’ve tried that. I was turned away before her patient load was full. I thought about counseling elsewhere but that gets expensive fast and where is the time right now?!

Im probably two weeks behind on this block and I don’t know what to do to catch up and do well on this final set of exams. I don’t know how to fix this apathetic mindset of mine. It is simply awful and i feel there is no way I can pass this final and if i pass step, get a decent score. (Final includes micro, pathology, pathophys, and pharm...must pass every section to pass the entire course).

So oh wise SDNers who aren’t on the verge of failing out or giving out, help?

I realize this ended up as a vent.
TL;DR -basically i suck and can’t get my act together to complete second year.

Very sorry to hear of your woes Ciestar.

Whatever it takes, even if it means taking a LOA to go and heal, get help now if you value your career in Medicine.

If you were peeing blood, would you ignore that?

You're going to have plenty of noncompliant patients in your career; don't be one yourself.