The hardest thing about medical school isn’t learning medicine. It isn’t the hours. It isn’t the tests. It’s that you sign away control over years of your adult life.
When I started my clerkship year in January, I felt like I was stepping onto a conveyor belt and would not be allowed off for twelve long months. For the entirety of 2018, my days are planned for me, my hours are …
To change the culture, start with clinical education
Having a mentor leads to a more successful and satisfying career for doctors. So how does one go about finding a mentor mid-training or after training? Many medical schools and residency programs have mentorship requirements for trainees. But those mentorship needs may change if a student or resident (like myself!) changes their mind about what they want to be when they grow up. I have been …
Why all physicians need mentors
Want to hear a crazy story?
Typical medical school students can relate tales of a college experience that includes summer research or hours spent reviewing for the MCAT. I didn’t even take the MCAT. Read on for the oddest medical school acceptance story you’ve ever heard.
I was driven in high school. I’d heard for years about smart kids going off to the Ivy League, and I wanted that experience — to …
I was accidentally accepted to an Ivy League medical school at 17
I believe there’s no such thing as work-life balance. I think this every morning when I leave for work, watching my two-year-old son press his face against the front window and wave at me as I back down the driveway. It comes up again at work, as I guiltily feel relieved when a patient cancels and I have an unexpected half hour to work on a behavioral science presentation for …
There’s no such thing as work-life balance
One of the best bits of wisdom I’ve ever received is that you can tell a lot about someone by looking at how they spend their time. In medical school, time is our scarcest resource. We’re at this strange and exciting point in our lives, during which we’re responsible for learning an enormous amount of information in hopes that someday we’ll be able to quite literally save lives.
Many of my …
A medical student’s reflection on time, the scarcest resource
For the over 6,500 candidates who applied to Canadian medical schools this cycle, the term “admissions” has taken on a whole new meaning. For some, the word has become a kind of divine judgment — a determinative force defining the individual’s value or worth. For others, a long road of struggle has led them to acceptance of the next step in their career. To most, however, the word has morphed …
Trust the process of medical school admissions
Hello, premeds!
There’s so much advice out there from so many sources. Your aunt, cousin, and grandpa think they know what to do to be successful in your pursuit of medicine. All of your friends are experts — and why aren’t you a doctor already?
I know, I know … This time in life is hard. You are comparing yourself, and you are hearing so many messages.
So, I’ll make it simple.
Here are …
Premed? Here are 3 things to consider.
A few days ago I learned about a different manifestation of imposter syndrome. The “usual” one, of course, shows up as, “I shouldn’t be here because I’m not qualified or smart enough to be here.”
The one that was confessed to me a few days ago, however, went like this: “I shouldn’t be here because I don’t know what I’m doing here.”
They explained how it seems that everyone is filing away into …
Facing the pressure to choose a specialty
Being a medical student is a piece of cake. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
If someone says medical school is too demanding, then they shouldn’t be here in the first place. I can tell that you’re different. I can see that twinkle in your eye. You’re gonna make a great doctor someday. You need to cut these negative people out of your life; they’re only going to drag you down. …
Like most medical trainees my age, I step into the hospital with the entire knowledge base of the world in my pocket. I have apps on my phone to look up disease symptoms and diagnoses, reference drug doses and side effects, estimate the 10-year risk of having a heart attack, determine the correct timing and type of vaccine administration and screening tests, and even display the risks, benefits, and statistics …
Bridging the gap: medical training in the digital age
An excerpt from 
I know what you’re thinking, I thought this book was about how to raise a doctor, and now this guy is telling me not to raise a doctor! That’s exactly right. I’m telling you to not …
Since graduations will soon be upon us, this is a graduation speech that I’d like to give one day:
Hello everyone, and welcome. To the practicing doctors in the audience, I hope you can look back on your own graduations. To the med students, I hope you can look ahead. And, hopefully, everyone can look forward to what are some heartfelt insights.
To the graduating class: As you’re sitting here ruminating about …
Advice for graduating medical students
After a semester of studying and taking written exams, we had our first OSCE in medical school. An OSCE — or an objective structured clinical examination — is the real deal. Instead of filling out multiple choice boxes, we instead work with a real human being, which for me is a welcome change.
The actor is given a script with their unique condition and story — it’s a simulation of what …
My first objective structured clinical examination
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Learned helplessness. It’s a psychological concept marked by a perceived loss of power, and it’s prevalent in medicine. We are taught early on how little we are in this colossal world. We are told what to do, when to do it, and what we will get for it. Our objections go unheard or—worse—ignored.
Let me quote a paragraph from The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz:
They were conducting a series of experiments on basic …
Physicians and medical students: Unlearn helplessness
Working in a clinic as a medical student is the best of all worlds. We have the opportunity to expand our knowledge and skills by working with some incredible patients, all while knowing that we have the support and backup of our fully trained, expert attending physicians every step of the way. This apprenticeship type of system is absolutely essential to medical training, allowing us to get our feet underneath …
Taking off the training wheels and becoming a real doctor
Now that the children have shouldered their muskets and taken aim — figuratively speaking, of course — against the gun lobby, maybe we can interest them in another partisan conflict that’s even more sweepingly about their survival: climate change. Not to minimize the horrific consequences of school shootings, but there are many more lives at stake from climate calamities. Threats from sea level rise, flooding, wildfires, and storms are multiplying …
A case for climate activism: but where are the medical students?
Her: “So what do you do?”
Him: “Well, I’m applying to medical school. If I make it, I’ll spend the vast majority of my time studying for the next four years. You and I will be able to go on cheap dates occasionally, but even then I’ll feel guilty about not studying. I won’t have any money, so you’ll have to support me on your income. Otherwise, I’ll have to take …
First date with a medical student
It’s a question that reverberates in the minds of premeds around the country.
If you have a choice between multiple medical schools, should you go to the cheapest medical school available, or should you go to the more prestigious, more expensive medical school?
MD vs. DO vs. Caribbean
I think it is worth the investment to go to a U.S. allopathic (MD) school if at all possible.
It’s an unfair bias, because every medical …
Public vs. private medical school: Which should you choose?
Two recent posts highlight the problems facing many medical students today.
The first was by an anonymous rising fourth-year student who has come to the conclusion that going to medical school was “a terrible, terrible decision.” It ended with a comment that medical school “is not fun. It’s jarring, scary, disappointing and absolutely depressing.”
The second was by another anonymous student who described how miserable he (or she) has been …
If you go to medical school, you will be stressed: bigly
In recent years, there has been a push across medical schools to change the grading scale towards that of a pass-fail system. The appeals of a pass-fail system to me were obvious. Instead of worrying about my grades as I had in college to maintain an adequate enough GPA to get into medical school, I believed that merely passing would lessen much of the pressures I faced as an undergrad.
Those …
The unintended meaning behind medical schools’ pass-fail system
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