10 Tips for Beginning Medical School
10 Tips for Beginning Medical School
As many M1s across the country recently got their white coats and I've been having a lot of conversations/requests about advice for starting med school, I decided to put together a little post of my top 10 pieces of advice for surviving the first year! Here is a little throwback photo of my first day as an M1, and now for the mediocre string of ramblings you didn’t ask for:
#10: Pay attention to the people cheering for you regardless of whether you have ‘made it.’ People whose support for you is contingent upon your performance don’t actually care about you, they care about their own expectations.
#9: Some people are here trying to feel big. The truly magical part of medicine is experiencing, together, how we are so small.
#8: Choose carefully what advice you act upon. A lot of advice is presented as universal and may sort of sound good at surface level, but is actually not what you need to hear (including this advice). Do not be afraid to depart the well-worn path.
#7: Time, distance, and hardship are three contexts that show you your true people. This is a blessing and a curse. Pay attention to who keeps showing up - these people are your family, and you must be there for them.
#6: When a group of people intentionally marginalized by a system are sharing and speaking about that, one of your sacred obligations is to listen. Do not be part of the incredibly harmful process of dismissing this.
#5: You must find your people - peers, residents, faculty mentors, coaches, etc., with whom you have mutual respect, whose approach to life and medicine resonates with you. Create a local environment that supports you, as this will be fulfilling/empowering on the good days, and absolutely essential on the bad days. I promise there are wonderful people around you, many of whom you perhaps haven’t found yet. Invest in finding those people.
#4: Being ‘apolitical’ isn’t the flex some think it is. It's an idea that emerges from a vacuum of critical thinking and only benefits people who get to choose when they want to think about policies or things that challenge them. No one serves patients by plugging their ears.
#3: I’m borrowing this one but I think it’s so true: no one cares how much you know until they know how much you care.
#2: The only person you should be competing with is yourself. Push yourself in ways that come from you yourself believing what you are capable of, and do it with compassion. Divorce yourself from the flawed thinking that is the desire to be 'better' than others as your final goal. Center on the beautiful aspects of this journey including what you get to learn about the human body, the infinite privilege of taking care of patients, and compete with yourself to hit your own goals and your benchmarks, understanding that although yes some goals will involve jumping through hoops that involve rankings, your ultimate goals themselves should not be about ranking. Do not lose yourself in this.
#1: Your life is worth infinitely more than what this field demands of you. Please know that even if you can’t imagine it right then, there are multitudes of beautiful ways you could spend your life that are completely outside of medicine. We all recognize medicine has a lot of harm in it to trainees/practitioners right now. You have to recognize that if this field is destroying your mental health and wellbeing, the problem is not you. I ask you to make a promise/plan about staying safe if things get too bad. The significance of your life is not conditional nor is it related to anything you fail at or achieve in med school, and you are loved.
If you’re still with me, thanks for reading and I hope this is helpful! M1s I am so proud of you, cheering you all on, and so excited to start getting to know you in the near future!
