The last few months have been BUSY, but we just finished up and I am officially a second-year medical student! I’ve recently had several people ask me what it’s like in med school – how do we spend our time and whatnot.
Sometimes it’s hard for me to imagine [remember] what life was like before school started. I know I had most weekends off, that even though I worked a lot, I still had time for writing and reading and cooking meals for myself. I know that these last few months, I studied most weekends, had no time for writing, struggled to finish one book and I hardly ever cooked for myself. When we started our block on the heart, lungs, and kidneys I got into a rhythm. I set the speed to high and settled into cruise control.
To give some perspective on what medical school is like I decided to keep track of everything I did for the last three weeks of class. Are you ready for it?
My day usually starts with my alarm going off at 5:30 am, but I have a healthy relationship with the snooze button so I don’t typically get out of bed until closer to 6:15-6:30. I am a huge fan of slow mornings and my favorite ones are when I have time to make scrambled eggs with coffee.
I’m a lecture go-er and that runs from 8-noon, [Monday-Friday]. We have 10-minute breaks between lectures and often we use this time to grab a cup of coffee, go for a walk, or stand in the sunshine right outside the auditorium door. Not everyone in my class attends and as one of our professors calls it, these students are part of “Panopto Nation”. There’s nothing wrong with choosing to watch the lecture online, people are still engaging with and learning the material, it’s just a different way of approaching school.
Some days we have small groups instead of lecture. These are required sessions that we get questions and clinical cases for beforehand. The expectation is that we read through and come prepared for class. It’s more of a hands-on method that allows you an opportunity to see and struggle with the material in a clinical scenario.
Once a week, I go see my preceptor. She is a family medicine doc and she graciously teaches me the skills I’ll need to succeed as a real doctor. We are learning to interview, to perform a physical exam, to presenting, documenting and come up with an assessment and plan. While I’m there I usually go into the room first and talk with the patient. Then I present my findings to my preceptor and we go back into the room together. It’s awkward, I often feel unqualified and I definitely don’t know the answers. But, I’m learning and as the year has progressed it feels more natural for me to be asking the questions. I even knew some answers one day as we conveniently learned about acute mountain sickness a few hours earlier!
A bulk of the rest of my “free” time is spent studying – reading for lecture, flipping through flashcards, answering practice questions, making graphs, tables and drawing pictures in an effort to understand and learn the human body and diseases that we experience. *Spoiler alert – there’s A LOT*
However, I also try to find time for other things that make me happy like –
- Exercise: I go to my Crossfit gym and I recently trained for a half-marathon so I was attempting to run several days a week.
- Friends and Family: The good news is that I study with friends and then I usually eat dinner with my family. The friends that don’t live in Denver I talk on the phone with or we use this app called Marco Polo. You can record and send videos and the person can play them back whenever they want and as many times as they want. It has certainly made long-distance friendships easier!
- Fun: In this particular week, we hopped on our bikes on Sunday and rode to some new Denver breweries, I went to a birthday party, met some friends at a restaurant and toured my sister’s new home.
My day typically ends around 10:30-11 PM and I’m out before I get finished with one page in my book.
Med school is a strange combination of exhaustion and fun. Our limits are tested, but I don’t even presume to imagine that it won’t be more challenging [and time-consuming] when we get to residency. It’s possible to do things outside of school, but I’ve definitely had to make some tough choices. For instance, when I had an exam coming up that I wasn’t prepared for and I ended up canceling on skiing to study.
Finding the harmony between when to say “yes”, and when to say “no” is never easy, but it’s a battle worth fighting in order to preserve the bits of yourself that aren’t a doctor or student.
Glimpse of Grace 