10 Things Medical Students Want You To Know

Sometimes I feel like everyone has this vague idea of what medical school is like–in general, everyone knows it’s a lot of hard work and long hours, but what are the 10 things medical students want you to know? This is a kindasorta “behind-the-scenes” post inspired by a couple conversations I had with friends in med school!

10 Things Medical Students Want You To Know

Medical school can be extremely alienating.

It takes sacrifice. For me, that was mostly just sleepless nights, shutting out the rest of the world to go into hibernation to study, and not seeing my family/friends for months (or at present, over a year). If you have a spouse, significant other, and/or kids…it can be pretty rough, although if they’re very understanding, they can be an amazing support system.

We have no threshold for “acceptable dinner conversation topics.”

I think this was best exemplified when my friends and I went to Pittsburgh and were talking about life back in first year, when we were in the anatomy lab. Our server came by to hear us talking about cadavers whilst finishing off our sushi and promptly backed away, unsure that we’d still want dessert after such a topic.

(We did in fact still want dessert, and lots of it.)

We always feel like we should be studying.

Have the weekend off? Yay! Time to catch up on reading/studying and all other aspects of life (e.g. cleaning the apartment, doing laundry, returning phone calls + messages, sleeping)!

Please don’t be offended if we pass up spending time with you in favor of studying. Please know that it (usually) is not personal. :[

We’ve wondered at least once why we decided to do this to ourselves (or perhaps that the admissions committee made a mistake and let us slip through the cracks).

Medical students can be frighteningly self-critical. In a way, we’re pretty much trained to nitpick our each and every flaw as part of our training–partly so we’ll always be working on self-improvement, but also because in the future, one mistake can mean the difference between whether or not a patient lives.

Although I think of myself as above average in intelligence, I haven’t actually considered myself to be smart in over a decade.

Feedback makes our worlds go round.

To expand on that last one, feedback helps us to know what’s expected of us, areas where we can improve, what we’re already doing correctly, and what we need to do more of. <3 …and it never hurts to hear a preceptor tell you that he thinks you’re hardworking, brilliant, and will go far in life!

Doing something right/answering a preceptor correctly can exponentially improve our days.

Especially if it’s a preceptor that:

• You really respect and want to impress
• Works in the field you want to go into
• Always pimps you and makes you feel like a brainless speck of a human being

We do not get paid.

No one ever pays medical students (exception = you’re under work study in your first two years), unless you’re lucky enough to score a scholarship of some kind (yay!). We are paying to learn on those 8-16-hour shifts. In my school’s case, that’s $50k/year for tuition alone. I no longer open my “Quarterly Loan” emails, because they just make me [really, really] sad. Medical school is not cheap.

Seeing all our friends/family having fun, living their lives, having actual jobs, and getting married makes us really happy for them…

But it can also be somewhat depressing when we stop to think about our piling student loans and/or lack of job, a love life, nearby family… I’ve more or less accepted the fact that I’m gonna be a spinster. (At least I’ve gotten the cat lady part down pat!)

For instance, my family is currently on a cruise that’ll be going to Dubai, India, Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, and Indonesia right now. I’ve never been to any of these places. Not bitter. Not at all. ;_;

Sometimes, we just really want to hear that everything’s gonna be okay.

Some days can be really rough–breaking terrible news to a patient and his family, getting verbally slaughtered by an attending, seeing a patient pass away, wondering if there’s anything else you could have done to help. Sometimes, I just really want to know that I’m going to have a future that I can look forward to.

We’re basically juggling multiple lives at once, so I apologize on behalf of all of us if we always seem stressed and/or high-strung.

It’s because we are. :[ Our rotations are pretty much a full time “job,” and when we get home from that, we still have to study a full-time [medical] student’s course load’s worth of material, which has often been compared to “trying to drink water from a fire hydrant.” Cleaning my apartment just really doesn’t fall very high on my list of priorities when I’m barely in it other than to sleep!