#thethingsilearn

[raincoaster]

Kite skiing is a Thing? Man, #thethingsilearn #IRL. I wonder what it costs to try when you don't have skis, boots, or a kite. #Ottawasnow #ottawaphoto #Ottawa #Ontario #travel #canada #winter #Outdoors #Winterlude #britannia #sports #fitness #fun #kitesurfing #kite #kiteboarding #kiteski (at Britannia Beach) https://www.instagram.com/p/B8o7CoZhEhR/?igshid=1c0o3snqa49a2

[thefuturedrfame]

This. This is literally everything I went through but more eloquently-written than I could ever possibly write.

[taztammy]

I admit, I #bingewatch way too much but, #thethingsilearn. Like the show #growinguphiphop is far more #mature than any Real Housewives could ever hope for..... #keepanooenmind #hulu #realitytv #realitytvshows

[slc2599]

So apparently super heroes live on the roof of Barbie's Dreamhouse. #thethingsilearn #gmoney #sweetbabyrae

[danngoff]

Who knew that the sun comes up over the mountains like that?? #sunrise #wakingupwaytooearly #fireballinthesky #howlonghasitbeendoingthis #thethingsilearn (at Dann's Office)

[dreambarbies]

Apparently sequins and beads on vs tshirts bras and panties can set off the security system at airports

[minnieandnoir]

I learned that these tiny holes in pews are cup holders for communion. #thethingsilearn #church #interesting #communion

[wrths-blog]

in australia, scallions are called spring onions.

[thefuturedrfame]

My school recently had a female physician panel and some of the things of this article reflected most of the sentiments and themes of the panel.

[thefuturedrfame]

Whirlwind of Emotions

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.

P.S. I’m really sorry if this was such a depressing post. I’ll try to get happier soon.

[thefuturedrfame]

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.

Honestly, after reading it, I was surprised at how not rigorous it was. I was expecting to have to do so much more! Ergo, this article really made me feel more confident in my ability to be able to go towards the EM specialty, and not as a “reach” residency, but as a viable one.

[thefuturedrfame]

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

This would have been great to know before I started school but hopefully might help someone else out there who’s about to start!

[thefuturedrfame]

First Class...Done!

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.

I wish I had known this earlier, as I didn’t really use my First Aid book until Week 2 of 3. At that point, I was already slightly behind schedule, but I made it work. In the end, the happiness and relief I felt after finishing the 135-min, 90-question final told me that my hard work and countless times making myself a hermit and sacrificing myself to the studying gods totally paid off. A giant weight lifted off my chest, knowing that I PASSED!!

[thefuturedrfame]

Another great article for pre-meds. Goro, the author of this post, is a well-known advisor on these forums. I think (s)he is also in an adcom committee.

[thefuturedrfame]

Great article to read for any pre-meds (in my opinion). It contains a lot of advice that I ignorantly would have done.

[thefuturedrfame]

The Personal Statement

It’s finally May, and it’s crazy to think that another application cycle has already started. It has been a year since I applied and it has definitely gone by too fast. 

I’ve talked about the processes that had stressed me out during the cycle, including letters of recommendation and interviewing; but the thing that stressed me out the most during applications was the personal statement. As a medical school applicant, this was probably the one thing that could make me stand out since my application stats were mediocre and unimpressive. That mentality only added to the stress for me because I felt the pressure to be extremely unique and not cliche. This became even more stressful when paired with my self-critical and perfectionist ways.

I consulted a myriad of websites, which I will list at the bottom of this post in case other applicants ever want to know. All of the sites told me how to write a personal statement, what it should include, and samples of accepted students’ previous statements. However, none of them prepared me for all the emotions and other external factors that surround writing the personal statement.

Here are a few things I learned from writing my own statement:

It will take more than 1 draft. 

For me, it took almost 20 and halfway through, I completely scrapped the whole thing and restarted. And even then, I wasn’t fully satisfied with my final draft as I felt I could improve more and be less cliche. But at that point, I was so over it and I was just glad I fit it all into the maximum word count.

Don’t be too scared of cliches.

Everyone advises to avoid cliches, but sometimes they are inevitable. Think about it! Of all the medical applicants that have ever existed, I’m pretty sure someone has thought of the words I’ve been thinking about. And I’m pretty sure half of those applying have been interested in medicine since childhood or have had an ill and dying grandparent. This scared me off. Every time I got stuck during the writing process was because I felt like what I had written was too cliche. Later, I just made the cliche work for me by personalizing it with a unique experience. For example, I’m sure a lot of people have had experiences being the patient, being the family of a patient, and being on the medical staff side of medicine. However, I made it work for me by inserting personal stories for each of those experiences and making that cliche become the structure of my statement to allow for a certain flow. 

Which brings me to my next point...

It needs to have coherence.

A unifying theme makes it easier to ensure that the statement flows. Writing more than 20 drafts starts to make all the statements look the same. Especially after editing everything more than 100 times, I never noticed when my statement started to slowly become a bunch of separate experiences that had no flow. After editing my statement every few times, I learned that I needed to reread the statement in its entirety to make sure it didn’t sound block-y and that it was still uniform in theme and as a whole. 

Start writing anything down, then make minor changes each day. 

For me, the hardest part was getting something down or having an outline of a “story” that I was satisfied with. I would constantly think of a plan in my head but change it and eventually nothing got written down. I started with one story, then I thought to change one part, then it sounded too cliche and not personal enough, then I thought that it didn’t answer the “Why medicine?” question well enough. Things evolved along in my head so far that I became too afraid to actually start with something. And, especially since nothing was written down, it was just easier to hold off on writing. Once I finally sat down to do it, things started coming out. I even got to the point where I wrote too much so I had to make edits to fit the maximum word count requirement.

It’s all about balance.

The personal statement itself is a balance between what the university wants to hear and what I actually experienced and can eloquently talk about. It’s a balance between telling the stories of both my medical and extracurricular experiences, showing that I have interests outside of medicine. It’s a balance between rambling on (too many words) and not talking enough about something (too few words). It’s a balance between too many words and too few words.

Editors can be brutal. Do not let them deter you.

My last advice has to do with online stranger-editors. There were sections on Reddit and a yearly thread on StudentDoctor.net that offer personal statement reading by strangers. I used it on Reddit and the person who read my absolutely eviscerated my statement, which made it even worse for me since I was already mentally-blocked on my personal statement ideas. It made my perfectionism flare up and I got even more afraid to add a single word to my statement. This was truly the point I learned to take the things I read online with a grain of salt. True, there were valid points he had about my statement, but because he was a stranger, he held nothing back and was really a lot ruder than he needed to be. In the end, it moved forward by completely ignoring the guy and continuing to write and edit my statement and thennnnn I went back and applied what he said when I felt like I had a better statement to work with.

  Websites Consulted for my Personal Statement:

AACOMAS: Application’s Personal Statement Requirements

Purdue OWL Lab: How to Write the Personal Statement

Keck Science Dept: Everything Personal Statement

Carnegie Mellon: Sample Essays

Accepted.com: Sample Essays and Critiques

Studential.com: Sample Essays and Critiques from outside the US

StudentDoctor.net #1: Myths

StudentDoctor.net #2: Tips from a Doctor

StudentDoctor.net #3: General Guide to Writing Personal Statement