Everyone has had those days. When you are so voraciously hungry you
are confident you will be able to put away 4 boxes of Wendy’s chicken nuggets,
a chicken sandwich, a side of fries and a large frosty. Then you get your food and by the time
you’re on the 5th nugget you’re barely nibbling. Cue the “your eyes must have been
bigger than your stomach” which never made sense to me because that’s
anatomically ridiculous but the gist of the story is you bit off more than you
can chew, literally.
So now the title makes a little
more sense, right? I think that
medical school’s eyes are far too large for my academic stomach. Let me explain a little bit further. The biggest shocker to me was not the
difficulty of the subject matter in medical school but rather the sheer
volume. Never in my life have I
had to study so many things at once.
Its like the academic wizards over in the college of medicine walked
through a buffet line of classes and decided to just pile on heaping loads of
biochemistry, histology, anatomy, physiology (which should be its own freaking
restaurant) and all the other classes until it started to get so high they
couldn’t see over the plate and then continued piling it on.
The biggest mistake I made was underestimating
when people described the volume of material, I figured I could handle it. I did handle it, everyone does, but it
is an epic shock to your system.
Here I have to warn that everyone has a very different experience and I
can only speak form my own. I have
never been the type of student that holes up in the library right after class
to review notes from that day or to pre-read chapters, I barely get to reading
the chapters in the first place.
Medical school changed all of that.
Study guides, those are my
favorite. I’m a study guide
maker. I’ll type up all my little
notes from all my powerpoints with doodles and scribbles and bullet points and
amass all of that information into a neatly stapled packet from which I can
review. And when I say review I
mean just read over and over and over until I know what is going on, that’s the
only way I know how to study. Here
is a little comparison, in undergrad I thought 6 page study guides were
intense. Any more than 8 pages had
to be some kind of epic final exam study guide for a class that gave a
cumulative final. The first time I
put one of these little guys together in med school it was like 34 pages
long. That’s not even a joke. Its really difficult to explain that it
isn’t really overwhelming, you know its what you have to do and so your mental
mindset evolves and adjusts to your present circumstance. At first you may feel a little at sea
but then its fine and you just go with the flow.
Being the kind of person that you
are, utilizing the study skills that you have been have brought you as far as
it has so whatever methods you have employed has obviously worked for you.
Being in medical school is a shocker to the system, no doubt about it. You will study harder than you ever
have in your life, you will spend more hours sitting at a desk reviewing notes
than you ever thought possible, your body will hate you for not sleeping enough
because you got distracted by whatshouldwecallmedschool’s tumblr page instead
of reviewing for shelf exams, but that is what its all about. At the end of the day, you figure it
out.
Honestly, in retrospect, I can now
say that it wasn’t all that bad.
In the throes of it, I was miserable, but I made it through and so did
everyone else. People tend to overdramatize and act like being a medical
student means you have no friends, no social life, no nothing, I strongly disagree. It is what you make of it so the
biggest thing you can take with you to medical school is a positive attitude,
as cheesy as it sounds, its so easy to get sucked into the vortex of complaints
and frustration but don’t let yourself do it. There are too many negative nancies in medical school just looking for something to leech on to and complain and whine about, FIGHT IT! You’ll be so much happier for it in the end.