Hello friends!
I write to you no longer as a first year medical student… but as a rising second year! With all my final exams passed, I’m officially on to the next stage of the journey. It’s surreal and it’s taken a few weeks to really soak in, but I’m beyond thankful to be here and I’ve been thoroughly enjoying this summer break
I wanted to write today about some of my reflections and biggest lessons learned from this past year. So with that, let’s dive in!
Self-Care Matters
If there’s one lesson I can’t emphasize enough from this first year, it’s that self-care is key in medical school. Self-care can mean many things to many people, but to me its about:
Getting 7-8 hours of sleep
Remembering to eat
Taking breaks from the screens
Exercising
Connecting with my loved ones (especially Nathan and Maya!).
We hear it over and over again: Medical school is like a marathon. For me, my “marathon-training” in this past year required a lot of self-maintenance and sleep.
Some weeks were harder than others (everything kind of goes haywire during finals week tbh), but I want to believe that creating these healthy habits now in medical school will build a strong foundation to prevent burnout and disillusionment. You gotta take care of yourself in order to care for others!
Don’t Do It Alone
It takes a village. That village might be the one you were born into. It might be one you move to. In any case, the importance of going through medical school with friends, family, and classmates who support you cannot be understated.
To me, there’s something special about going through the trenches together. Med school is a unique time where you’ll be tested in more ways than just on the final exam. Having at least one or two friends who you can really talk to when things get rough is so important. Being able to study with others, share resources, and ask each other questions in a pinch also makes the journey so much more fun!
Beyond friends in school, I’ve also really appreciated my family and friends from home and outside of med school. Having friends outside of school pulled me back into the real world and helped me maintain perspective. Having an exam this Friday is hard, but it’s not quite the same as caring for a loved one with a chronic illness or handling true responsibility in a 9-5 job. It’s also just nice to catch up with family and friends who you know are always rooting for you.
Which leads me to my next point…
Married Med School Life… It Works!
First and foremost, Nathan, my husband, was my rock this year. He saw it all.
Perhaps my favorite Nathan line from this past year came when I was when my social anxiety kicked in and I started stressing about making friends in med school. In the midst of this worry, he simply stated, “I think it would be really hard to go through med school without making a single friend.”
His grounded perspective makes me smile, and his support has been invaluable this year.
When we first got engaged, one of my post-baccalaureate professors warned me that 50% of relationships (including marriages) fail during medical school. I don’t know where this statistic came from, but it gets thrown around a lot. But in any case, I had some apprehensions about how our relationship might change while in med school.
Well, I’m happy to report…. we’re still married! And we still like each other. There’s a lot more I could say about being married in med school (maybe in another blog post!), but what it comes down to is that we make time for each other and we support one another. I am inordinately blessed to go through med school with my best friend.
Being a Student Has Its Perks
Ok so hear me out. Being a student has its perks. And I’m not talking about student discounts (though those can be nice too). I’m talking about schedule flexibility.
Don’t get me wrong. The schedule can be packed, and we do have some mandatory classes. But in general, most of our lectures are recorded, and we have a lot of freedom in how we structure our days.
Some students stay up til 3am for uninterrupted study time and wake up at 11am. Others are morning people or like to hit up coffee shops. For me, I mostly study from home and I build my day around my husband’s work schedule. It gives my day structure, lunch and dinner breaks are built in, and I get to spend blocks of quality time with Nathan at meals (or I get to pop into his office and bother him during the day when I get tired of studying. Always fun!).
Having worked a 9 to 5 job for a number of years before coming to med school, this flexibility feels like such a privilege. I can schedule a doctor’s appointment when I need it and I see Nathan way more now than when I was commuting 3 hours per day.
Also, having winter break, spring break, and (at least for this year), a summer break is pretty sweet!
Life Will Happen
As I’ve shared before on this blog, we went through our share of struggles this past year. Adjusting to medical school and maintaining the pace is a special challenge. But what about when life hits?
We went through a miscarriage this year. About a month ago, the baby’s due date came and went without much fanfare. It’s difficult to imagine how life would have looked so different at this moment if things had turned out differently. But life and the Lord has shown us something different, and we are choosing to embrace this extended season of being a young couple with no kids.
This year, I’ve seen classmates go through a lot. Deaths in the family, relationships tested and ended, loneliness, intense anxiety, and impostor syndrome. Life will happen.
There isn’t always a good answer to how to deal with life in med school. Sometimes you need to pause everything and deal with the problem at hand. In other moments, you may need to put your head down and just get through finals week. Personally, I did a little bit of both this year.
At the end of the day though, it’s important to know what your limits are and where you can find help. Having a supportive school faculty, counseling resources, and a strong social circle can help. If you’re going through something, all I can say is reach out early and give yourself some grace.
Your Skills and Confidence Will Grow
At the beginning of this year, I walked into every test praying I would pass. And I passed… but sometimes it was by the skin of my teeth.
By the end of the year, I walked into most tests feeling confident that I had done everything I possible could do to prepare. I walked into tests feeling confident that I would pass.
Building confidence in med school takes time. The first semester felt brutal at times. But I turned a corner heading into my second semester, and it was just… better. This past year to me has been an ongoing lesson that I have the capacity to improve. And though it’s a simple thing, it’s so important.
We aren’t born experts. We have to put in the work, and for me that meant constantly re-evaluating my study strategies and studying studying studying even when all I wanted to do was crawl onto the couch and watch Netflix. Throughout the year, improved study skills lead to better exam results which led to increased confidence. My steady improvement is what I’m most proud of this year. So if you’re reading this and worried about how well you’ll do in med school, just know, you can do this.
Leave Room for Wonder
The grind of med school is real. It’s easy to get weighed down by looming exams, impostor syndrome, and even academic bureaucracy. When the list of to-do’s feels like it’s stretching out the door, it’s easy to grow bitter and hyper-focused on the tasks at hand.
Sometimes this tunnel-vision is necessary, but staying in non-stop survival mode is incredibly draining. There has to be room for more.
In the anatomy lab, I constantly felt this push and pull of bitterness and wonder. Especially in the first semester, anatomy lab was a struggle for me. There were days where I wanted to throw up my hands and say, “Forget this! I can’t dig out this tiny structure my manual is telling me to find.” Even to the last dissection in lab, I stressed about cutting through a nerve or artery.
But in my first year, it was in the anatomy lab that I felt some of the deepest moments of awe.
I felt like a star-struck fifth grader again when removing the brain from the skull, feeling the weight of it in my hands, and later seeing its almost textbook-perfect structures when hemi-sected. Dissecting out the uterus, ovaries, even seeing the tiny fimbriae coming off the fallopian tubes made me wonder at how a full-term fetus could grow inside such a tiny structure.
The level of detail every organ in our body holds in its structure, physiology, and function is something I don’t think I’ll ever get over. And this is something I often return to when I feel like I’m getting lost in the details.
Hold onto your wonder in medical school. It’s a place few are privileged to enter.
This year has been a whirlwind with every possible emotion. I’m beyond grateful to have made it this far, to be in this season of life, and to be pursuing my lifelong dream. By God’s grace, Year 1 is done. I’m one quarter of a way there!