oh wow. i feel so honored talking to you. i wonder now what others on here have achieved bc of how competetive it is. I'm 28 so i am getting pretty old and feel already left behind but i still dont feel discouraged in focusing on premed courses whether its now or later. the msw will take me 2-3 years plus another to get licensed. so if i want to be realistic then i will probably be in med school with completed courses in my 30s. i know i will have to obviously work super hard but i've seen people (not that smart) BECOME DOCTORS AND LAWYERS LOL....it shouldnt be that hard if THEY also did. everyones journey is different tho so not everyone will get to the same destination in the same way 🙂
No worries, I'm just a guy on the internet just like you, hoping my experiences and reflections can help someone out there.
I agree with you, everyone's journey is different, and that's why it's so perilous to compare your outcomes with the people around you.
Consider that the average medical student is upper-middle class, with at least one physician parent, and generally has not experienced socioeconomic challenges of any kind. The "winners" of the system are those who have the passive benefit of being well-connected and resourced; people whose academic careers were thoughtfully arranged by one or more parents who understand what a liberal education is and why it is important.
Think about what that does to a person. You're doing all this work to plan out the next decade of your life. Where would you have been had your parents planned your path to medical school from preschool? Maybe you would have the mental latitude to stress less, to take it easy, to know that your effort is strongly positively correlated to your success. You've got less to prove to others. You can take more risks because you know you can't fail
that hard. You allow yourself to learn earnestly and make mistakes because nobody has ever faulted you for them, nor have you ever experienced serious life consequences for making them.
In other words, the people who have the most resources and have benefitted from them the most are also going to be the people who insist that it's really not that hard; that you just have to take the classes and sit for the exams and pull yourself up by your bootstraps and you will be successful. And that might have been true for them... but setting that injustice aside, what is also true is that resenting your own choices (or lack thereof) by comparison doesn't help you.
I have found working with patients that 99.999% of people are actually pretty insightful and have made logical decisions for themselves given their circumstances. I extend that grace to you, too. I imagine you are where you are because it made the most sense considering where you were, and that will probably be true into the future.
So, sure, maybe you'll be a medical student in your 30s and 40s. But it's going to be a life you chose and worked hard to manifest. The time will pass anyway. It's the life that makes
you happy, so go for it! In the meantime, I'm confident you'll develop all kinds of important skills in social work.
This one is all projection, but I'll part with saying that you should never feel ashamed to lean on community. Whether you've made friends in tutoring, your extracurriculars, or just online in spaces like this—be open and vulnerable. Many of us are going through it alongside you, and genuinely want to see you succeed.
