Advice from Phase 2 Students

A LOT is going to be thrown at you over the upcoming year, that’s for sure. The biggest piece of advice I have is to keep an open mind, be flexible, and relax. You might not find your ideal study strategy from the get-go, you might not get the score you wanted on the first exam, you might not get an answer from that doctor you wanted to do research with, and that’s all completely OK. Use M1 as a way to better understand what YOU want, both from yourself and from your career, and don’t focus so much on getting every question right on the exam or memorizing every factoid in First Aid. Also, time is going to fly even faster with a 1.5-year preclinical phase, so really spend time with your friends, travel if you can, go out and have fun! You’ll have less time for that once you start clerkships until you’re done with residency interviews, and that’s quite a long time!

Before medical school, I used to scoff at all the different cliches people used to describe medical school — “it’s like drinking from a fire hydrant”, “med school is a marathon, not a sprint”, “lifelong learner”, etc. After completing the preclinical phase of the Gateway Curriculum, I admittedly still scoff at most cliches, but there’s wisdom hidden behind them. There’s so much stuff in medical school. Not just content, but also friendships, research projects, family, student organizations, Netflix shows, rooftop parties, volunteering, etc. With so many opportunities squeezed into a few years, it can be difficult to find any semblance of balance. I’ve found it helpful to stay attuned to myself and trust my body to tell me what it needs. Feeling tired? Take a nap. Isolated? Go get bubble tea with friends. Bored? Explore a new specialty. Stressed? Rearrange the to-do list. It’s been so much more sustainable to work with how I’m feeling instead of against it.

Navigating through medical school can also be challenging because there is a lot of learning, forgetting, relearning, forgetting, relearning again, etc. It’s humbling to search up the name of the right-sided heart valve for the fifth time (it’s the tricuspid) or miss an entire portion of the history during an SP encounter (don’t forget the social history!). Don’t let those blips make you think you don’t deserve to be in medical school or that you won’t be a great doctor; it just shows that medicine is hard and takes time. Thankfully, there’s a long way between now and practicing medicine; hopefully, by then I’ll remember to take a full history.