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Hey guys,
I used to be an extremely faithful member of this site as a premed, and I'm now a fourth year at a great med school. I made up an anonymous name because it's application time and I'd like the fewest number of people possible to associate me with my old SN (since many who know that SN also know me in person).
I'm writing this post because for a long time I have wanted to write an almost blog post-like list of things I used to believe were true about med school that were either completely incorrect or at least incomplete. I hope that some of this hard-fought knowledge will help at least one of you be a little more ready for the journey you're about to embark on (even though it's true what they say- you really don't know until you get here).
1) Early patient contact is important
I remember reviewing med school curricula with a fine-tooth comb and looking through the websites for that magical phrase, like "clinical experience starting your first day of first year" or "patient contact from matriculation!". I get it guys, you want to move ahead with your lives, past the abstract world of physics and orgo and into clinical medicine. A part of you figures you'll be the med student who changes lives the first week, who gets to do CPR on the dying patient, who comforts families and impresses everyone with your innate clinical skills. However, let me tell you what early clinical experiences are. They basically involve you standing there awkwardly behind an attending and wondering what your role is. You try to memorize where the attending puts the stethoscope, where he palpates the abdomen, the phrases he uses to calm the patient down. But you don't really know what's going on, what to listen for, what to palpate for, or why those phrases work. No matter how much shadowing you've done, you just don't know what medicine is. And I'm here to tell you that IT'S OK. No one knows. That's why you're there! To learn! Just because a while ago you decided you were premed, it doesn't mean you were imbued with medical knowledge. I'm not saying hanging out with patients and MD's and getting to look forward to what you're going to do ad nauseam soon enough isn't cool, but it's time-consuming. And what you'll need/want most of all from the beginning is time- to study, to adjust, to party, whatever- and I swear you will soon resent those 3 hours in the afternoon that you have to spend staring awkwardly at the attending, nodding your head and wondering when you can go home and review anatomy.
2) Your performance in college will equal your performance in med school/ Your MCAT performance will equal your performance on Step 1/ Step 2.
Sorry guys. You're smart, or else you wouldn't even be considering this crazy path. You're hardworking, or you wouldn't be in med school. Chances are your classmates are just about as smart as you are and just as hard-working. Don't put enormous amounts of pressure on yourself on day 1 because you've always been the best before and you're terrified of falling behind. It's a marathon, not a sprint. Try to find a work/life balance from the beginning or you'll burn out by October of your first year. On the other hand, don't slack off thinking you'll catch up- you won't. Some of the more successful med students I know simply treated school like a job- basically they worked 8-6pm (our lectures generally finished at noon). Try to be consistent and steady. Figure out what works and stick with it. Don't stress so much in the beginning about scores and numbers and grades- you'll soon realize it's ultimately irrelevant as long as you're somewhere in the middle of the pack in your first 2 years. The people I know who struggled the most were either those who after 4 years of doing nothing but studying figured "ok I'm done, now I can finally relax and enjoy this med school thing" and on day one of biochem said "oh I know all this, I'm good, it's just review, my biochem class in college was really hard" then got their asses kicked, or those who came in guns blazing having always had great grades and expecting the same results, and started to have nervous breakdowns on every exam. Don't be those people, and you'll be ok.
3) You will be an integral member of the healthcare team
This is more about third year, but see 1) for how you feel most of third year as well. So you're a third year- you're super excited, you're on the wards, hanging out with residents in the workrooms, can finally talk the medical talk and understand most of it, and you're seeing patients. Sweet, this is what you've been waiting for. Well, as a second year, you're basically the senior in the med school (3rd and 4th years are always off somewhere) and underclassmen come to you for advice. As a third year, you are the BOTTOM of the totem pole again, because you're in the hospital now. The focus in the hospital is not your education AT. ALL. It's patient care. There are at least 4-6 people taking care of a patient at any one time in the hospital- they can do this pretty well without you. No one really cares that you saw the patient this morning, or that you wrote this super awesome note, or that you know the pathophys of their disease really well. The team is focused on practicalities- you know none of these at this point. Again, IT'S OK! THAT'S WHY YOU'RE THERE! Don't get stressed if you feel completely useless- you ARE useless. Do your work, be helpful when you can (this mostly involves asking a patient questions the resident forgot to ask earlier, or calling consults for recs, or getting outside medical records- hardly glamorous), ask questions when you're curious, and try to stay out of the way otherwise. Don't get offended if no one pays attention to you. You're not priority number 1, and you're not supposed to be.
4) You will be learning something useful every day.
False. A nice thought, but false. A lot of what you learn in the first two years is mostly foundational- you need to understand basic biochem and genetics to understand physiology and pathology to then figure out management. Will you ever use it again? No. Will you forget it 2 days after the test? Probably. The concepts are in your head, and the details you can reviw before the boards. Not everything you learn is useful, guys, but you do still have to learn it. This is one of those "suck it up, you're in med school" type things. You're often going to wonder why you're memorizing stuff that you know you can (and will) google as a physician or that you'll never ever see again depending on what you go into. It is what it is.
5) You know you want to be a doctor. You also think you know what kind of doctor you want to be.
Honestly, you don't. Some med schools (i think mine as well) do this exercise apparently where toward the end of your fourth year they send you a copy of your personal statement from when you were applying to med school. Most people come to the conclusion that they really had no idea what they were getting themselves into. AGAIN, THIS IS OK. I don't mean that in a bad way, and I know it probably sounds super patronizing. There literally is NO way to know what kind of doctor you'll be or what that word will mean to you until you're there. I have been interested in my specialty for a long time now, but do I KNOW this is the best one for me? No. Of course not. I'm not a doctor in that specialty yet. I don't know what I'll be like, how happy I'll be, or how happy I would have been doing anything else. Naivete is not a bad thing, and passion for what you think you want to be is what drives most of us, so embrace it. Just know in the back of your mind that you may be surprised by what's coming and how much you'll love/hate it. There are at least 3 people in my class who are now going into something other than clinical medicine- they all wrote a personal statement about how much they couldn't wait to be around patients and healing the sick, etc. They had no idea they'd go into consulting or administration or research. Keep an open mind.
6) You will hate your life and work like never before every single day. Everyone will be out to get you.
This is a popular sentiment on this forum, and let me tell you, when i started med school after a year or so of being on here all the time, I was PETRIFIED. I basically told my family I loved them and prepared for death.
Look, I went out a lot as a first year. Not as much as I would have had I not been in med school, but I had a life. Second year, a little less. Third year, almost not at all (but I liked my life a little better, which helped). Now I have plenty of time. There are bad weeks and not so bad weeks. If you're smart, you get into a good routine that makes the bad weeks a little more manageable and less filled with last-minute cramming. You will likely study more than you ever have sometimes, and other times it won't be as bad as that one godawful class you took in college. You can do book-learnin' at this point, it's not a great mystery. Some things are inherently trickier in med school (anatomy comes to mind), but otherwise for the most part it'll be a lot of sitting around reading as long as you can stomach it, then living your life.
Third year is different in that it is a giant time-suck, but even as a third year you'll have easier rotations and tougher rotations, easier days and worse days. You'll have a day off per week. It'll become your life, and you'll deal with it as long as you semi-like what you're doing (or it'll feel like drudgery).
That being said, I wanted to quit at least 50 times since I got here. I even met with my Dean a few times to discuss my plan B- and when I realized I still wanted to be a physician- or at least try- I'd skulk back to the library. There are days when you feel like you can't look at another book, and you can't stand your classmates and seeing them every single bloody day, and you hate your residents and no one cares or notices how hard you're working. There are times you work your butt off and don't do well anyway, and the guy sitting next to you who you swear is definitely dumber than you are does way better. Some days you get yelled at for no reason, and some days you realize that you really are the bottom of the totem pole even after 7 years of post-high school education while some members of the staff who went through 2 years of community college get to bitch at you for not doing everything perfectly. You miss pimp questions you swear you knew a week ago, you get the crappy rotation assignment while your classmate gets out 5 hours earlier than you every day and does better on the final cause he had more time to study, you realize a resident is wrong in what he teaches you and you look like an idiot when you repeat it to an attending. ALL OF THIS HAS HAPPENED TO ME MULTIPLE TIMES. IT SUCKS SOMETIMES. It's ok to be frustrated, to want to quit, to cry, to complain, to hate your life. It's ok to feel like you threw your 20s away. Just keep chugging. It gets better, then worse, then better again, etc. I've had some really good days here, too. I've had really great conversations with people and I've learned a ton and I've made some cool diagnoses. I've gotten some great evaluations and I got some attendings to be in my camp and I had some personal victories with subjects I found difficult. There are good and bad days, I promise you.
Ok, this is what I can think of right now (I'm sleepy, so I hope it makes sense...). Keep working hard, guys. Don't obsess too much and try to ride out some of the stress. Try to keep a balance. And let me know if you have any questions.
I used to be an extremely faithful member of this site as a premed, and I'm now a fourth year at a great med school. I made up an anonymous name because it's application time and I'd like the fewest number of people possible to associate me with my old SN (since many who know that SN also know me in person).
I'm writing this post because for a long time I have wanted to write an almost blog post-like list of things I used to believe were true about med school that were either completely incorrect or at least incomplete. I hope that some of this hard-fought knowledge will help at least one of you be a little more ready for the journey you're about to embark on (even though it's true what they say- you really don't know until you get here).
1) Early patient contact is important
I remember reviewing med school curricula with a fine-tooth comb and looking through the websites for that magical phrase, like "clinical experience starting your first day of first year" or "patient contact from matriculation!". I get it guys, you want to move ahead with your lives, past the abstract world of physics and orgo and into clinical medicine. A part of you figures you'll be the med student who changes lives the first week, who gets to do CPR on the dying patient, who comforts families and impresses everyone with your innate clinical skills. However, let me tell you what early clinical experiences are. They basically involve you standing there awkwardly behind an attending and wondering what your role is. You try to memorize where the attending puts the stethoscope, where he palpates the abdomen, the phrases he uses to calm the patient down. But you don't really know what's going on, what to listen for, what to palpate for, or why those phrases work. No matter how much shadowing you've done, you just don't know what medicine is. And I'm here to tell you that IT'S OK. No one knows. That's why you're there! To learn! Just because a while ago you decided you were premed, it doesn't mean you were imbued with medical knowledge. I'm not saying hanging out with patients and MD's and getting to look forward to what you're going to do ad nauseam soon enough isn't cool, but it's time-consuming. And what you'll need/want most of all from the beginning is time- to study, to adjust, to party, whatever- and I swear you will soon resent those 3 hours in the afternoon that you have to spend staring awkwardly at the attending, nodding your head and wondering when you can go home and review anatomy.
2) Your performance in college will equal your performance in med school/ Your MCAT performance will equal your performance on Step 1/ Step 2.
Sorry guys. You're smart, or else you wouldn't even be considering this crazy path. You're hardworking, or you wouldn't be in med school. Chances are your classmates are just about as smart as you are and just as hard-working. Don't put enormous amounts of pressure on yourself on day 1 because you've always been the best before and you're terrified of falling behind. It's a marathon, not a sprint. Try to find a work/life balance from the beginning or you'll burn out by October of your first year. On the other hand, don't slack off thinking you'll catch up- you won't. Some of the more successful med students I know simply treated school like a job- basically they worked 8-6pm (our lectures generally finished at noon). Try to be consistent and steady. Figure out what works and stick with it. Don't stress so much in the beginning about scores and numbers and grades- you'll soon realize it's ultimately irrelevant as long as you're somewhere in the middle of the pack in your first 2 years. The people I know who struggled the most were either those who after 4 years of doing nothing but studying figured "ok I'm done, now I can finally relax and enjoy this med school thing" and on day one of biochem said "oh I know all this, I'm good, it's just review, my biochem class in college was really hard" then got their asses kicked, or those who came in guns blazing having always had great grades and expecting the same results, and started to have nervous breakdowns on every exam. Don't be those people, and you'll be ok.
3) You will be an integral member of the healthcare team
This is more about third year, but see 1) for how you feel most of third year as well. So you're a third year- you're super excited, you're on the wards, hanging out with residents in the workrooms, can finally talk the medical talk and understand most of it, and you're seeing patients. Sweet, this is what you've been waiting for. Well, as a second year, you're basically the senior in the med school (3rd and 4th years are always off somewhere) and underclassmen come to you for advice. As a third year, you are the BOTTOM of the totem pole again, because you're in the hospital now. The focus in the hospital is not your education AT. ALL. It's patient care. There are at least 4-6 people taking care of a patient at any one time in the hospital- they can do this pretty well without you. No one really cares that you saw the patient this morning, or that you wrote this super awesome note, or that you know the pathophys of their disease really well. The team is focused on practicalities- you know none of these at this point. Again, IT'S OK! THAT'S WHY YOU'RE THERE! Don't get stressed if you feel completely useless- you ARE useless. Do your work, be helpful when you can (this mostly involves asking a patient questions the resident forgot to ask earlier, or calling consults for recs, or getting outside medical records- hardly glamorous), ask questions when you're curious, and try to stay out of the way otherwise. Don't get offended if no one pays attention to you. You're not priority number 1, and you're not supposed to be.
4) You will be learning something useful every day.
False. A nice thought, but false. A lot of what you learn in the first two years is mostly foundational- you need to understand basic biochem and genetics to understand physiology and pathology to then figure out management. Will you ever use it again? No. Will you forget it 2 days after the test? Probably. The concepts are in your head, and the details you can reviw before the boards. Not everything you learn is useful, guys, but you do still have to learn it. This is one of those "suck it up, you're in med school" type things. You're often going to wonder why you're memorizing stuff that you know you can (and will) google as a physician or that you'll never ever see again depending on what you go into. It is what it is.
5) You know you want to be a doctor. You also think you know what kind of doctor you want to be.
Honestly, you don't. Some med schools (i think mine as well) do this exercise apparently where toward the end of your fourth year they send you a copy of your personal statement from when you were applying to med school. Most people come to the conclusion that they really had no idea what they were getting themselves into. AGAIN, THIS IS OK. I don't mean that in a bad way, and I know it probably sounds super patronizing. There literally is NO way to know what kind of doctor you'll be or what that word will mean to you until you're there. I have been interested in my specialty for a long time now, but do I KNOW this is the best one for me? No. Of course not. I'm not a doctor in that specialty yet. I don't know what I'll be like, how happy I'll be, or how happy I would have been doing anything else. Naivete is not a bad thing, and passion for what you think you want to be is what drives most of us, so embrace it. Just know in the back of your mind that you may be surprised by what's coming and how much you'll love/hate it. There are at least 3 people in my class who are now going into something other than clinical medicine- they all wrote a personal statement about how much they couldn't wait to be around patients and healing the sick, etc. They had no idea they'd go into consulting or administration or research. Keep an open mind.
6) You will hate your life and work like never before every single day. Everyone will be out to get you.
This is a popular sentiment on this forum, and let me tell you, when i started med school after a year or so of being on here all the time, I was PETRIFIED. I basically told my family I loved them and prepared for death.
Look, I went out a lot as a first year. Not as much as I would have had I not been in med school, but I had a life. Second year, a little less. Third year, almost not at all (but I liked my life a little better, which helped). Now I have plenty of time. There are bad weeks and not so bad weeks. If you're smart, you get into a good routine that makes the bad weeks a little more manageable and less filled with last-minute cramming. You will likely study more than you ever have sometimes, and other times it won't be as bad as that one godawful class you took in college. You can do book-learnin' at this point, it's not a great mystery. Some things are inherently trickier in med school (anatomy comes to mind), but otherwise for the most part it'll be a lot of sitting around reading as long as you can stomach it, then living your life.
Third year is different in that it is a giant time-suck, but even as a third year you'll have easier rotations and tougher rotations, easier days and worse days. You'll have a day off per week. It'll become your life, and you'll deal with it as long as you semi-like what you're doing (or it'll feel like drudgery).
That being said, I wanted to quit at least 50 times since I got here. I even met with my Dean a few times to discuss my plan B- and when I realized I still wanted to be a physician- or at least try- I'd skulk back to the library. There are days when you feel like you can't look at another book, and you can't stand your classmates and seeing them every single bloody day, and you hate your residents and no one cares or notices how hard you're working. There are times you work your butt off and don't do well anyway, and the guy sitting next to you who you swear is definitely dumber than you are does way better. Some days you get yelled at for no reason, and some days you realize that you really are the bottom of the totem pole even after 7 years of post-high school education while some members of the staff who went through 2 years of community college get to bitch at you for not doing everything perfectly. You miss pimp questions you swear you knew a week ago, you get the crappy rotation assignment while your classmate gets out 5 hours earlier than you every day and does better on the final cause he had more time to study, you realize a resident is wrong in what he teaches you and you look like an idiot when you repeat it to an attending. ALL OF THIS HAS HAPPENED TO ME MULTIPLE TIMES. IT SUCKS SOMETIMES. It's ok to be frustrated, to want to quit, to cry, to complain, to hate your life. It's ok to feel like you threw your 20s away. Just keep chugging. It gets better, then worse, then better again, etc. I've had some really good days here, too. I've had really great conversations with people and I've learned a ton and I've made some cool diagnoses. I've gotten some great evaluations and I got some attendings to be in my camp and I had some personal victories with subjects I found difficult. There are good and bad days, I promise you.
Ok, this is what I can think of right now (I'm sleepy, so I hope it makes sense...). Keep working hard, guys. Don't obsess too much and try to ride out some of the stress. Try to keep a balance. And let me know if you have any questions.
Amazing post, thank you!
