When you look back on it, did you really know what you were getting yourself in

[45408]

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Anyone who answers "yes" is kidding himself.

Why? I didn't know the specific details, but I knew it was going to be hard, time-consuming and occasionally pretty demoralizing.

Guess what? It lived up to its billing. Anyone who says "No, I had no idea" wasn't listening to med students or residents, and was like a lamb being led to the slaughter.

See? I can make sweeping generalizations too.

 

[45408]

Everyone always says 'you think you'll never be that way'. Was I the only one who came in that way?

Definitely not. I'd already picked up plenty of those habits just from a part-time job in medicine.

-I knew I would be 30 when I finished med school and residency but the ramifications of that never really hit me until I watched all my friends get married, buy houses and have kids.

Now, I will be the first to admit that male residents/attendings sacrifice less in the children department, but none of what you said is mutually exclusive with being a med student or resident. I was married for all of med school, a parent for the last year of med school, and I bought a house a few weeks before residency started. Life is happening now. Live it.


One example for me was when I really got into video games as a senior in college. Everyone was saying "OH MAN, you're not going to have time to play video games once you get into med school!" I played hundreds of hours on COD2 as an M1/M2. Then everyone said "Oh, you're not going to have time to play video games as an M3!" Wrong. No one said I wouldn't have time as an M4 😀. However, I don't really have time to play them as a PGY-1.

 

[Ragman]

One example for me was when I really got into video games as a senior in college. Everyone was saying "OH MAN, you're not going to have time to play video games once you get into med school!" I played hundreds of hours on COD2 as an M1/M2. Then everyone said "Oh, you're not going to have time to play video games as an M3!" Wrong. No one said I wouldn't have time as an M4 😀. However, I don't really have time to play them as a PGY-1.

This gives me a lot of hope for having at least some time to continue studying MA while I progress in school. I currently attend a lot of classes for Jiujitsu and JKD kickboxing, and to a lesser extent Filipino weapons fighting and Indonesian martial arts. The university I want to transfer to has an academy with a great Muay Thai kickboxing program just four miles away from campus--and that is something I've been greatly looking forward to.

 

[AlexMorph]

This gives me a lot of hope for having at least some time to continue studying MA while I progress in school. I currently attend a lot of classes for Jiujitsu and JKD kickboxing, and to a lesser extent Filipino weapons fighting and Indonesian martial arts. The university I want to transfer to has an academy with a great Muay Thai kickboxing program just four miles away from campus--and that is something I've been greatly looking forward to.

A loner who is really into martial arts...what could possibly go wrong?

To each his own, enjoy your life.

 

[Ragman]

I have to admit, you're the first person I've ever came across who has expressed doubts about a hobby that teaches self-discipline and good health overall.

Most of the people I went to high school with now spend their free time sitting in dank apartments and popping pills. I decided to get out of that and opt for something different.

 

[Everglide]

It is a lot better than I thought it would be. I'm doing well in all of my classes and still finding time to take 2-5 days off per week depending on if exams are coming up or not. Granted it's only first year, I'll take what I can get.... I can tell second year is going to be terrible.

 

[alwaysaangel]

Now, I will be the first to admit that male residents/attendings sacrifice less in the children department, but none of what you said is mutually exclusive with being a med student or resident. I was married for all of med school, a parent for the last year of med school, and I bought a house a few weeks before residency started. Life is happening now. Live it.

Oh I do live my life. But I think it is more difficult for women and its also more difficult if you're not already married going in.

Its hard to start and maintain a new relationship in medical school. Its hard to decide when to have kids as a woman.

And I watch my single female medical school friends - they have a very hard time because most want a man who makes more money than them...and many don't really want someone in medicine. Severely limits their options and they don't have a whole lot of time to go out and find someone.

 

[girlofgrace7]

Med school has been a mixed bag for me so far, but overall, I don't think it's as bad as people make it out to be.

Yeah, we study a lot (which I knew we would but had no idea how sick of the studying I'd get). Yeah, you sacrifice a lot. Yeah, sometimes the material just seems like it doesn't matter.

That being said, I've been pleasantly surprised at how good some of my professors are, how responsive the school is to student requests, and how amazing it is to go through things with my classmates. My school is very interested in the students' mental and physical health, and our class and teacher evaluations actually matter. The students were the ones who got the school to switch to a straight pass-fail system, which I think really prevented much competition and "gunner-behavior" from developing (people whine about the amount we study, but it's more commiserating than bragging). Students are always willing to help each other and constantly send out charts and web-sites that they made/found useful/etc. We're only required to be present for labs and small group sessions (one small group session every two weeks or so), and all of our lectures are recorded. They also set up blocks so we only have one to three classes at a time (a clinical skills class runs throughout the first two years, but other than that, anatomy/embryo was the only class for the first 10 weeks).

I don't think I realized that 2-3 days in med school would be like a semester's worth of undergrad material, but it's doable. There is something to be said for having to plan your life around med school though. Nearly every med school girl I know who was not married prior to med school has struggled with trying to figure out when would be a decent time to get married and/or have kids. Also, your dating pool is majorly limited. Generally, as soon as a man who is not in the medical field finds out you're in the process of becoming a doctor, he will more-or-less run the other way (either because the guy is intimidated or because he realizes that the girl will have little free time and will never be the type to have dinner on the table at 6 o'clock every night).

 

[ButImLETired]

Nearly every med school girl I know who was not married prior to med school has struggled with trying to figure out when would be a decent time to get married and/or have kids. Also, your dating pool is majorly limited. Generally, as soon as a man who is not in the medical field finds out you're in the process of becoming a doctor, he will more-or-less run the other way (either because the guy is intimidated or because he realizes that the girl will have little free time and will never be the type to have dinner on the table at 6 o'clock every night).

Maybe it's just me, but I think this is sort of a perk. I've always hated dating because I think it's a waste of time and money for everyone involved, and you almost always find out why you're going to break up on the first date. It'll be a mismatch in goals, a mismatch in opinions...etc. Something that you know will come up again, but you try to get past it to make the relationship work. For every date that's actually successful, you end up going to like 30 that are anything from boring to painful. So for me, the med school thing is actually a really convenient way to weed out people. If I tell a guy I'm in med school and he makes a really idiotic comment ("you're too pretty to be a doctor, you should be a nurse", I got that one once), he's out. If he doesn't really know what that means, he's out. If he's intimidated or uncomfortable with the idea that I might make more money than he will or freaked out by the time commitment, he's welcome to leave. I could have found out on the 4th date that he wants to be married to Suzie Homemaker, it would have broken us up anyway, and by then everyone would have wasted a ton of time and money.
I'm all for being upfront about it, honestly. Much, much easier.

 

[SharkyMD]

After thinking about it, the only thing medical school really changed was the value of my time. Now I walk twice as fast everywhere, multitask everything, and avoid anything unimportant. Now it's pretty hard for me to waste time, but I still seem to find ways.

 

[dozitgetchahi]

I'll just say this...I'm surprised at how many people end up in medical school without being overly "into" science and/or medicine. One thing I've noticed among my friends at both MD/DO schools is that the students who are truly curious and interested in the basic and clinical sciences are just having the time of their lives. On the other hand, those who are less interested in the material and are just "tolerating" it to get onto the clinical years and/or residency have generally turned into bitter, angry, antisocial people.

 

[da8s0859q]

I'll just say this...I'm surprised at how many people end up in medical school without being overly "into" science and/or medicine. One thing I've noticed among my friends at both MD/DO schools is that the students who are truly curious and interested in the basic and clinical sciences are just having the time of their lives. On the other hand, those who are less interested in the material and are just "tolerating" it to get onto the clinical years and/or residency have generally turned into bitter, angry, antisocial people.

Yeah, I can see that. I was one of them (most of us were?) in first year, but at least M2 is a little more interesting in terms of material.

The ones I really feel bad for are the ones who were fairly clearly forced into this by overbearing parents.

 

[medstudent87]

Maybe it's just me, but I think this is sort of a perk. I've always hated dating because I think it's a waste of time and money for everyone involved, and you almost always find out why you're going to break up on the first date. It'll be a mismatch in goals, a mismatch in opinions...etc. Something that you know will come up again, but you try to get past it to make the relationship work. For every date that's actually successful, you end up going to like 30 that are anything from boring to painful. So for me, the med school thing is actually a really convenient way to weed out people. If I tell a guy I'm in med school and he makes a really idiotic comment ("you're too pretty to be a doctor, you should be a nurse", I got that one once), he's out. If he doesn't really know what that means, he's out. If he's intimidated or uncomfortable with the idea that I might make more money than he will or freaked out by the time commitment, he's welcome to leave. I could have found out on the 4th date that he wants to be married to Suzie Homemaker, it would have broken us up anyway, and by then everyone would have wasted a ton of time and money.
I'm all for being upfront about it, honestly. Much, much easier.

Hmm...this makes me wonder what my boyfriend thinks about how i'll probably end up making more than him. I never really thought about it. I guess its different though cause we're both dudes haha

 

[yakiea]

Second that wholeheartedly. You said it!

 

[yakiea]

This is very true, and I guess it's one of the things I didn't realize before I started.

Like many of you, I think I understood in theory what would be expected of me, I just didn't realize how much of myself I'd lose in the process. Especially as a second year, my chronic level of stress is insane (I'm always behind), I'm constantly overwhelmed and it's taken a toll on my relationships. Last year, I was so miserable studying crap I had zero interest in that my whole family was apparently worried about me. This year I just have no time to talk to them. On a basic level, the things I figured I'd like, I did like; and the things I figured I'd hate, I did hate. I just didn't expect how much that hate would eat at me, and how frustrated I'd get. Nowadays, if I go to lecture and the lecturer is bad, I get incredibly angry at having wasted a full hour of my day on something useless. I used to be able to go to lecture and accept what was going on. If a friend surprises me and tells me he's coming to visit, I get annoyed at having to reschedule stuff, while I used to be happy to see people. Any change in my routine, anything that takes up time, anything required that isn't immediately relevant for my next exam- it makes me crazy.

You couldn't have said that better. My friends (outside of med school of course) told me that I totally changed. While it seemed like most people in my class were invincible or at least okay trying to hide the effect it had on them. I don't know if I can deal with losing myself like that...

All I can say is that I feel alone for the most part in med school because everyone else has this front on where nothing hits or hurts them. Or else they say things will be better in the future but really, what guarantee do we have of that?

Thank goodness for one friend of mine because without her, I don't know where or what I'd do...

 

[Perrotfish]

After thinking about it, the only thing medical school really changed was the value of my time. Now I walk twice as fast everywhere, multitask everything, and avoid anything unimportant. Now it's pretty hard for me to waste time, but I still seem to find ways.

Like posting time saving tips on SDN?

 

[MilkmanAl]

Why? I didn't know the specific details, but I knew it was going to be hard, time-consuming and occasionally pretty demoralizing.

Guess what? It lived up to its billing. Anyone who says "No, I had no idea" wasn't listening to med students or residents, and was like a lamb being led to the slaughter.

See? I can make sweeping generalizations too.

No need to be pissy about it. The devil, as they say, is in the details, so while you might expect med school to be hard in a variety of ways, there's no way you can appreciate the gravity of the difficulty and impact it will have until you're immersed in it.

 

[swamprat]

I think I posted on this maybe a month ago but I wanted to add more reasons why medical school sucks:

1) social aspects - i like to always be around people and woman, its kind of hard to do when you need to study all the time or when you don't but every other neurotic friend of yours in class thinks they do so you don't do anything.

2) gunners - turns out my roommate is a huge gunner - notorious actually. people in the class comment to me all the time about how bad he is and it bugs me a bit as well. literally 24/7 studying its crazy. me myself am an understudy-er. I am currently doing slightly above class average on every exam with the exception of a few tests i really did well on. my motivations towards medicine have def changed. i still want to be a doctor obviously but the thought of doing a long 5 year surgery residency or something of that nature (which as a premed thought would be great and prestigious) has diminished.

as far as the material goes in first year, it is pretty dull.

 

[coldweatherblue]

first two years were easier academically than I expected.. but they were still pretty bad. i just expected it to be a lot worse.

third-year is amazing.. love medicine, best profession and I'm still really grateful to have this opportunity. There are rough spots ahead (intern year) but uhh.. well I kind of like people in general, and even when they're acting bat-**** crazy I still just wanna help them out.. so medicine is awesome.

then again maybe i'm just in a good mood today cause SoCal has had a run of really fun surf this week..