#thethingsilearn

So, it’s been exactly 2 weeks since the last post and it feels like I’ve lived a year. There have been happy times where I feel like it can’t get any better and then there’s days like today where I just cry to myself as I study something I just don’t really have the energy for. Welcome to medical school, right?

Well, we can start with the good because that was the start of the past two weeks. It was my birthday and I felt so loved by the outpouring of well-wishes from family and even the friends who i’ve only just met within the past two months. It was interesting to notice that I felt more love and happiness on this birthday than I did for my past birthdays where I got more presents. I guess it’s really is enough to just feel the love and caring over material things (though those things don’t hurt either, haha). 

Moving on to the week following my birthday, I spent an enormous amount of time studying for anatomy. This is my first time ever taking anatomy. I was genuinely interested in it and actually enjoyed studying. That leads me to the past week-ish. I was productive, everything went smooth, and everything seemed like it was as great as it could be. Studying wasn’t even bad. I felt like I was doing what I was meant to be doing. Everytime I get this feeling, it’s just like the best high ever - the high you feel when you’re being super efficient (though I can’t really speak for the other “highs” you feel since I’ve never experienced them). But everything was great. I was working towards a goal.

Then it came to this week, and it all came crashing down. I took my test and got my first failure in medical school. As I was going through the material, I kinda had a feeling I wouldn’t do very well. It just got to be too much material and I just didn’t seem to have the time to study for everything. This has legitimately made me scared for my future. Anatomy is one of the more important classes and I’m not standing afloat yet. It’s debilitating. I keep having to tell myself that I just have to keep on pushing. I just need to work hard and ace the final (which is worth more than this midterm) and I could still make it up. But really, I can’t shake this sadness I feel when I think about it every once in a while. 

And to make matters worse, I interviewed for an ambassador position at my school and didn’t get it. I’ve always known I wasn’t the best interviewer but I figured I was ok enough to get through a few medical school interviews coming out on top. But this just made me freak out even more. What about when I need to do residency interviews?! How am I gonna get that great job that I want if another candidate can out-interview me? I know that it’s just practice, practice, practice but it’s just so nerve-wracking and my true personality never comes out in interviews. I just don’t know how to put my best self forward and that has costed me. My other half is so great at them and it’s just even more frustrating that things like this can come so easily to other people. What is it? Is it the lack of socialization from my younger years that makes me unable to communicate well in interviews? How do you just force yourself to change how you are to become better for those 15-30 mins? I just don’t know...

All of this happened within the last day and it’s all just hitting me really hard today. I guess the realization has just really sunk in my head. Or maybe it’s the mix of ingesting an excess amount of caffeine today. Either way, I’m not sure how I’m doing. People are asking and I say I’m fine, but I’m not. I’m having my first bad day of medical school and as of now, I’m not quite sure how and when I’ll get over it.

As someone who has considered Emergency Medicine as a possible future specialty (though really, I’m not sure what I want to do yet), I found this article to be a great timeline of what is expected of a medical student wanting an EM residency.

This was an interesting read from an evidence-based scholarly article. Normally articles are about medical concepts rather than the learning of them.

Biochemistry was brutal.

I learned a lot. [That’s the understatement of the year...three weeks to learn what I learned in 10 weeks in undergrad.] But I’m not just talking in terms of actual biochem concepts, but also on how to study effectively for that class, which methods worked for me, and what resources to use. 

Now, the thing about medical school is this: it’s hard. I know it is! It’s not supposed to be easy. There’s supposed to be too much material to learn (everyone says that studying in medical school is like “trying to drink out of a firehose”). And biochemistry definitely didn’t let me down in that aspect. With a range of two to four lectures per day, five days a week, my brain was overloaded with information that I started to feel like I couldn’t keep it all in. 

It was detailed yet at the same time, not as detailed as some concepts in undergrad -- more like, selectively detailed. I tried to read my textbook. People and the internet told me it wasn’t realistic but I thought that I would be the exception. I was proven wrong after the first day. I saw that I couldn’t possibly handle reading 100+ pages in addition to going through the 100+ lecture slides for that day, only to consolidate it down to what was important to rewrite in a notebook. The process itself was theoretically awesome but not realistic in terms of time. I wouldn’t end till 5pm and that process would take 6+ hours. That would be nonstop studying for more than 12 hours a day, which would make any person insane. 

I learned to regroup and retry a new method that I later on found was working. I relied on the teacher’s thankfully-instructive lecture slides and only used the textbook for clarification of concepts. Then, I sprinkled in the high-yield concepts (meaning, the concepts that would most likely show up on the board exams I would take at the end of second year). This made me refer to the Holy Bible of med school - First Aid for the USMLE. This book was a lifesaver and I would definitely recommend it to any medical student EVER! It is a staple...ask anyone who’s ever taken the USMLE. It includes mnemonics and pictures and, though it’s not exactly a page-turner, it fulfills its purpose.