Medical School

Getting into medical school was only the first hurdle. Learn more about how to be successful in medical school.

Chronicles of a Med Student: One’s Not Such a Lonely Number

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Chronicles of a Med Student

Medical school is becoming routine to me now—which is great. I’ve finally found my rhythm after a few months and feel comfortable with my learning style and studying methods. And it keeps me busy enough during the workweek. I try to accomplish most of my studying during the week so that I have the weekends to not study and actually have a life. But here’s the thing: my study habits don’t necessarily line up with those of my peers, which can leave me with some long weekends. Instead of wondering if am covering all of my bases (or if I’m forgetting to do this reading or that reading), I take a break. I can’t possibly study all the time, so I’m forced to have confidence in myself to do well. I understand that I sound quite crazy complaining about having free time, because who–especially a medical student–has ever done that?

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Chronicles of a Med Student: Time for a Reality Check

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Chronicles of a Med Student

I was about to burst with excitement the minute I started medical school. I’m pretty sure I was actually giddy: like so many other pre-meds, I had dreamt of the day when I would finally put my pretty white coat on and actually start learning about things I cared about (that’s not to say everything I’d learned previously was useless—it absolutely wasn’t, but it wasn’t what I wanted). It felt like the longest road just to get to this point and I couldn’t even begin to fathom what was to come. It really was like the journey had ended…instead of just begun.

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3 Ways to Prepare for the USMLE Step 1 Exam

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The USMLE Step 1 exam is arguably one of the most important tests in a medical student’s career. While a student’s score on Step 1 is taken into consideration amongst many other factors, the score still plays a major role in determining a student’s competitiveness for residency in certain specialties. After all, once a student has applied to a specialty, his or her Step 1 score will partially determine which types of institutions he or she will have the opportunity to interview at. Below are three general strategies to help you prepare for the USMLE Step 1 exam:

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Chronicles of a Med Student: We’re All In This Together

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Chronicles of a Med Student

Walking into my first day of medical school was a little like walking into my first day of kindergarten (if my memory does not fail me). Everything was brand new: I was being exposed to a new way of learning in a new environment, where people had new expectations of me, and where I was going to start from square one and build up a new circle of friends. I had carried the same set of friends in grade school and though I thought initially that college would’ve felt like this on my first day, it didn’t. I had a lot of friends from high school go to the same college as me, so it just felt like we were hanging out in a new place. And again college is very different from medical school in more ways than I can put into a coherent list. Starting medical school was unlike any other start in my life (besides kindergarten, of course). What if I had forgotten how to make new friends from scratch?!

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Five Ways to Make Your Audition Rotation in Anesthesia (or Other Specialty!) a Success

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It is that time of year again. Medical school students across the country are preparing applications for residency and pursuing audition rotations at residencies they are hoping to woo into an interview and hopefully to match into their program.
Any audition rotation is a challenge. This is especially true for the anesthesia audition rotation. For medical school students who look great on paper, the audition rotation can either confirm they are a great candidate or confirm the program should not interview/rank them. For medical school students who do not have a stellar record, the audition rotation can open up doors.

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Chronicles of a Med Student: Drinking from a Fire Hydrant

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Chronicles of a Med Student

For the past several years, I felt like all I heard was everyone in medical school telling me how hard it is. I was a little worried, especially since I took a year off of school. How would I have the capacity to study anymore? Heck, I was used to spending my weekends and evenings lazing around, watching TV, and overall doing as I pleased. And now all of a sudden, I was expected to sit with my feet bolted to the floor staring at a computer screen with words like infundibular recess screaming at me for 9 hours a day. There was no way. All kinds of thoughts crossed my mind: I would lose all of my friends, gain weight from sitting around all day, and generally go insane.

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What I Learned During My First Semester of Medical School

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Students will feel a variety of emotions during the weeks and days leading up to the start of medical school, ranging from excitement to anxiety. Below are five key things I learned during my first semester in medical school, some of which I wish I had known before I began:
1. Every student is unique, so do what works best for you
Many people equate the preclinical years of medical school to standing before a water hose and attempting to drink all of the water that pours from it. The vast amount of information that you will be exposed to may seem overwhelming at times, but it is important to remember that generations of physicians have successfully completed their medical training. There is a way to manage this wealth of information.

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How to ace your first patient encounter

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As a medical student, you spend four years of college and the first two years of medical school studying non-stop for what feels like thousands of hours, cramming your brain with knowledge. But when the time comes to conduct your first face-to-face patient encounter, your confidence is rocked by the challenge of having to establish rapport, extract all the relevant medical history, and complete a physical exam, all while showing compassion, answering patient questions, and developing a differential diagnosis list and treatment plan in 30 minutes or less. Clinic is even worse with a meager 12 minutes scheduled for each patient encounter. 

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Chronicles of a Med Student: And So It Begins!

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Chronicles of a Med Student

The minute the tasseled hat flew off of my head after “Pomp and Circumstance”, I knew I was no longer a kid. What a startling realization–one I’m sure many of you have experienced–for someone who has led a fairly sheltered life! Let me confess one little thing: I was scared. Not just an ordinary level of scared. The kind of scared that catches you by surprise to the point where you start bawling on your graduation day with your bedazzled cap and a brand new bachelor’s degree in your hand. I was taking a gap year and had no idea which direction my life was going to go next. I knew what I had been working for my entire life: medical school. But this was not the feeling I had anticipated when I completed my undergraduate career. I had practically planned my life out since I was in middle school: I was going to go straight from high school to college to medical school to a career. But things had changed; I had grown a little tired of the academic life and wanted to experience something new. I wanted to live a little! But figuring out what to do next and how to do it was intimidating.

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5 Mistakes I Made in Med School (So You Don’t Have To)

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It has been nearly a year now since I walked across the stage at Carnegie Hall to accept my diploma. Now approaching the end of internship – let’s say that again, one more time, with appropriate emphasis: the end of internship – I can look back with a little more objectivity on my four years of medical training. As with everything else, hindsight is mostly 20/20 and, while there are a lot of things I did right in medical school, I now realize I made some mistakes, or, if they weren’t outright blunders, at least things I would do differently if I had to do it again. Let that these not be your mistakes:

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Opinion Column: A fundamental flaw in the USMLE exams

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There exists a fundamental flaw in the USMLE exams – applicants who pass the exam cannot retake the exam. This means that applicants who score poorly in the exams are prevented from applying to competitive specialties and in some cases even from practicing as a doctor in the US. Why does the USMLE not allow candidates to rewrite exams to improve scores? To understand this, we have to delve into the purpose of USMLE.
The United States Medical Licensing Examination or USMLE as it is popularly known, is a critical set of exams that medical students and graduates must pass before they can practice medicine in the US. The USMLE is a multi-part exhaustive evaluation of a physician’s ability to apply knowledge, concepts, and principles, and to determine fundamental patient-centered skills that are important in health and disease and that constitute the basis of safe and effective patient care. It is highly regarded not just in the US, but also in various other countries around the world. So much so that one can use the USMLE in lieu of that country’s exams.

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Marriage in Medical School: A Memoir (So Far)

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During my senior year of college, I asked my girlfriend to marry me. We had been together for almost three years and planned to get married the following summer, since we were both graduating in the spring. The timing seemed perfect to start our new life together. There was just one minor problem: in the fall, I was planning to begin medical school.
While engaged, we dealt with a mixture of apprehension and excitement about marriage. The typical questions asked by engaged couples–questions like, “Where will we live? What will our source of income be? How will we make time to see family? How will our relationship change?”–were the same questions we asked, except with the additional uncertainty of medical school. We had learned how to juggle our relationship with the demands of college, but we were unsure about how it would change while I dealt with the great challenge of medical school. (Neither of us were oblivious to the “horror stories” surrounding medical school and its required time commitment).

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Doing Small Things Great: A practical guide to contributing to your team as an MS3

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“Go forth and do great things.”
– Anonymous
No one gets into medical school without a considerable dose of ambition. We want to be involved, to make a difference, to save lives. In short, we want to do great things. We spend years waiting in the wings, our enthusiasm funneled into pre-med activities, o chem exams, and countless hours of studying in the first two years of medical school. Like a horse that has been held tightly in the starting gate that suddenly swings up at the sound of the starter’s bell, we spring forward with unbridled enthusiasm into third year, dirt flying. Having spent nearly a decade in prep (if you start counting in undergrad), we are eager to actually do something and start making a difference. And yet, so much of third year can be sitting around, waiting for the action, and, when the action happens, standing in the back of the room.

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