Doctor Fishypants

At various points in your medical education, you reach a point where you have to ask yourself whether or not all your effort has been or will be worth it. Most of the time, you tell yourself that everything you’ve done up until this point has been a step in the right direction that will ultimately get you to your career in medicine.  Sometimes, it becomes difficult to keep your head above water and reassure yourself of what you know to be true.

You’re away from family and friends, and you spend any time you have outside of the classroom inside of a library. There will be some exams where, regardless of how hard you study or how much you think you know, you’ll do poorly. It’s discouraging, because you begin to feel like nothing you do to prepare has any effect on the outcome. You begin to resent the professors for writing ridiculous questions, your classmates for somehow outperforming you, or your friends outside of medical school who are busy starting their own families instead of wasting four more years and another $150,000-$200,000 after college.

I have plenty of things to look forward to at the end of my second year. I’m getting married in May, and I start clinical rotations in June. I’ll actually be getting hands-on experience with real patients instead of pretending to treat actors with fake medical problems. I’ll be leaving Pennsylvania and moving in with my wife to a brand new house.

But when you’re stuck inside every weekend preparing for a 2-3 hour exam every Monday morning, it’s difficult to think that far ahead. You start getting run down, tired of treading water and going through the motions. I know that it will be worth it in a few years when I’m starting a family and doing what I’ve wanted to do for as long as I can remember. It’s just that right now, all I can remember is that I should be studying instead of typing this.

NursingSchools.net has put together a list of the 100 blog posts you should read before going to medical school. The posts are divided into 8 categories, including: Getting In, Getting Started, Financing School, Advice from Med Students, Getting through School, Residency, Your Education, Testing, Life After Med School. The list covers a huge variety of topics like how to write an admission essay, money saving tips, how to maintain a social life, and (my personal favorite) a guide to not being a pre-med douchebag.

I’m honored to be included on the list at number 48 for a post I wrote over the summer reflecting on my first year of school. I’m happy enough that anyone just reads this site, let alone sees fit to include it on a list like this one. I wish I had a resource like this when I first applied to medical schools. Information from college advisors is useful, but it really helps to hear things from the students’ perspectives.

My first year of medical school is over, and my second year is fast approaching. I’m sitting comfortably during my summer off, relaxing and playing video games without feeling guilty that I should be studying instead. As with most life changing experiences, it wasn’t exactly what I expected. The curriculum wasn’t as difficult as it was time consuming; the difficult part about memorizing tons of bacterial or viral diseases is the extremely limited time frame with which you have to commit everything to memory. The atmosphere was also very different than what I was accustomed to. During college, students clawed all over each other to get to the top. When nearly every course is graded on a curve, the best way for you to do well is for other students to do poorly. It’s a terrible system that fosters animosity and cutthroat attitudes. In medical school, the competitive atmosphere is much less prevalent. Students are more willing to help each other because, ultimately, better studying means better physicians.

Regardless of how much studying or how many degrees you earn, I don’t know if you can ever be ready for an experience like medical school. It’s often said that trying to soak up as much knowledge as you can during your medical education is like trying to drink water from a fire hydrant. Again, it isn’t really the subject matter that makes studying difficult, but rather the time with which you have to do it. As interested as I am in learning as much as I can to prepare me for a career in medicine, it’s difficult to get motivated to study piles and piles of flashcards. At least during this first year, success seemed to hinge on rote memorization skills.

As far as the curriculum goes, an undergraduate and/or graduate education in the basic biological sciences is certainly helpful in preparation for medical school. Still, it seems ridiculous to me that a course like organic chemistry is a universal prerequisite to admittance when a student really only needs to know the most basic principles. Courses like anatomy and physiology, which are not required at many undergraduate institutions, would be infinitely more useful. Waking up at 4:00AM just to drag myself to the anatomy lab before class was certainly one of my least favorite parts of last year.

I imagine my second year will be fairly similar. Go to class, come home to study, sleep, repeat. We’ll see how it goes. Exciting stuff.