TL;DR: Make sure you research your choices for the future very carefully and figure out a multitude of ways in which you can get there. Don’t be afraid of not taking the traditional path and stop giving a shit about what other people think of the way you achieve your goal. No one but you knows how hard you work and don’t let any obstacle slow you down.

Hello everyone!

I know I haven’t been very consistent with the 100dop challenge but I’ll be back on it soon! I’ll also try to continue the 30dbts challenge although we’re so far into it now that I’m not sure if there’s any point. Oh well!

I wanted to share with you why I was gone as I’ve recently received some lovely messages from some lovely people saying my blog keeps them motivated, which means a lot, especially when sometimes you feel like your posts go unseen.

The reason I took a step back from Tumblr for a while was that I thought I needed to keep up the good image of an amazing straight-A student or something, even though I promised myself at the beginning I will be 100% honest with how I actually am doing. But here’s the thing - I’m not that. I’m nowhere near perfect when it comes to my studies and I’m not even remotely close to figuring out how I work best and I want to be honest about that because I know that the reason I turned to Tumblr was that I thought this would help me figure out by learning how others do it. Maybe that’s why some of the people that follow me do! However, what I did learn from the majority of the people in this wonderful community is that resilience is powerful. 

Over the last 2 weeks-ish, things haven’t been going so well in terms of my future plans but I’ve managed to find ways out and around it which I thought will keep you motivated to keep going. As some of you may know, to apply to Medicine in the UK you have to sit BMAT and UKCAT tests which test different abilities, mostly not related to your ability to learn or anything like that - they’re like IQ tests but way harder. I’m applying to all BMAT universities, so I only took the BMAT and my score for it wasn’t that good. It wasn’t even close to the normal entry score of a Cambridge applicant and it’s just below UCL and Imperial cut off scores (which I may be able to work around). 

For a while, I thought that was it. I thought I should just stop applying to Medicine. What was the point if I’m not even going to get in? I might as well apply to something I could get in. But nothing else seemed appealing. I actually never wanted to do anything as much as I wanted to do Medicine. I remember in the past I was going to do Law or Journalism because I was too scared of the Maths A-Level, but I had the guts to do it and I’m doing well and I sure as hell wasn’t going to back down now.

I felt like a failure. I felt really stupid. I didn’t feel good enough. 

But if you really want to do something, you’ll get there in the end, even if it’s not in the way you expected/planned. 

I’m now applying to 3 Medicine courses and 2 Biomedical Science courses that do not require the BMAT. If I end up doing Biomed, I’ll continue from there with Graduate Entry Medicine. Nothing and no one is going to stop me from getting where I want to get and that’s the lesson I wanted to teach you all today.

Never, EVER, no matter what, give up on your dreams and your plans. Research what you want to do. Find out as many possible ways to get to where you want to be. Don’t be afraid if it’s not the norm or traditional way of getting there. Don’t worry about what people will think if you get there in some other way that, to them, makes you look like a failure. No one other than you knows how hard you work, how much effort you put into what you want and the fact that you are going for it regardless of the ways you get there shows your true passion and shows you have the strength and grit to keep going and that’s the only fucking thing that matters.