This question was posted originally on Quora: Answer 1: Liang-Hai Sie, Retired general internist, former intensive care physician. This question has been asked many times on Quora, I even answered it a few times, unfortunately am unable to retrieve my own answers at present….. These for me, a 70 yo retired erstwhile hospital based medical specialist doc, were some important points: are you sure you want to study medicine, and know why you want to? Look again at your motivation, don’t do it for money or prestige, or pure idealism, it has been shown that people doing it either for the money or out or idealism are more likely to fail than those doing it for both. In many places studying something else e.g. engineering is a far shorter traject before being able to make some real money, so e.g. in the US having to accumulate less student debt (according to Medscape the first year medical resident doc has a mean student debt of US$ 155,000). despite your profession (and before that your studies) taking up so much of your time you need to make time for yourself, to relax, to “have a life”, cultivate hobbies, keep in touch with your friends, albeit be very selective whom you chose to invest the little spare time you have to be with. You need this to have a good balance between work and private life. Know that in The Netherlands and the US also 30% of first years residents (junior docs just starting out in their professional life as a doc) already have a burn out. Maybe depending on your cultural background cultivate yoga, mindfulness and/or other mentally strengthening strategies to prevent this from happening to you. Joining intervision sessions with your peers having the same problems most who did so found so helpful and supportive. When I was working, between 55 to 90 hour weeks, around twice a year I felt to be on the brink of being overworked, this because my zeal for perfection, having problems delegating because I knew that by doing it myself it was done faster and right the first time, good for the patients but very bad for me as a person. My wife soon learned to anticipate this and planned many short leaves from work and thus helped me prevent having an emotional crash. cultivate people’s skills, all your life you’ll be working with other people, respect them all, from the lowest cleaner to the highest medical director, smile at them, be polite, friendly, be interested in the people you work with. I used to know quite a lot about the nurses (and some lab techs) I worked with, especially those on “my” team of Intensive Care Unit nurses. It served me well, they appreciated me being interested in them as a person, often having a cup of coffee with them, knowing whom you work with is so important professionally speaking, being on good terms with them practically assured you of their whole hearted support when the chips were down. being a doctor isn’t “just a job” like any other, to my father and me it became a very important part of our life, a vocation even, so will impinge on your whole life, in some fields of work it means you sacrificing parts of your private life for your profession. Fortunately after retirement I could “instantly” let go of it, no “black hole” like many feared I would fall into. this means you need to look for a suitable spouse, you just don’t have time to cater to some “high maintenance” person who e.g. will call you during busy clinics for nothing because (s)he for the umpteenth time needed to hear from you that you love them, or “just needed to hear your voice” and such BS, (s)he needs to be able to accept that your profession entails that you can’t make all the family holidays (somebody has to work holidays too), be at all family functions, even at most happenings at your children’s school, and often can be late if a patient suddenly got worse. Since probably you’ll be at work a lot (s)he needs to be self confident, self reliant, my wife of 40 years during my working years in fact ran our family, including myself, as our general manager, while leaving what we agreed upon I should do e.g. finances to me; we couldn’t have functioned as a family without her doing that (and very well too!). Communications is essential at home too. should you ever have children, plan time to be with your children, not just leave them to your spouse, or they could ask :” who is that man who cuts the roast on Sunday”. In my case I planned and started morning clinics 15 minutes later so could in the morning after getting them breakfast, bring them to school after which I went to my hospital and started my day, often coming home after they’d gone to bed. Week-ends were mostly reserved for the family, but that’s a choice we made. Our now thirty something old children when asked now say they never felt neglected by me, so it did work. Be aware that the daily life of a doc isn’t like that portrayed in books, television series etc., no heroics, we treat lots of people, but seldom achieve a cure, most is about care, treating chronic conditions like diabetes, high blood pressure, heart failure so patients won’t have bothersome symptoms, and our treatment will prevent future calamities from taking place e.g. treating hypertension to prevent strokes, heart and kidney failure, heart attacks, even blindness later on in life. Our work for the most part is routine, lots of drudgery, we need to be sufficiently alert so not to miss those cases outside the routine, one of the perks of our job, which is good for our morale, even on the Intensive Care Unit (the most satisfying part of my 40 year long medical career) we don’t save lives every day…. Maybe not what you were looking for, but if you need more answers, ask, if needed you can PM me. Answer 2: Patrick James Boland, medical student + health/wellness blogger + world traveller Keep a routine. If you don't have a routine, make one. If you don't like having a routine, LEARN TO LIKE A ROUTINE. You won't have any time to do anything. As a friend of mine told me before med school: sleep, family, friends, school, exercise - choose any three. It's true - you won't have time for anything. The way to have time in medical school is EFFICIENCY - efficiency in every single thing you do. If you can create a routine where you're dressed, showered, clean-pressed, and well-fed in the morning in just 35 minutes, you are ready to be a medical student. Sweatpants are for college. Appearance matters. A lot of medical students will dress casually for lecture. They'll throw on a T-shirt, a pair of sweatpants, and lounge in front of their iMacs with glazed eyes. BE BETTER THAN THEM. The professors of your classes might later have you in clinic. They might even be the ones who write you a recommendation. Medicine is a small world - people talk. I once had the head of the general surgery department tell me, "You're always clean and well-dressed. I like that." And like most surgeons he walked away and never spoke to me again for the rest of the rotation. He later offered to write me a recommendation, without my asking. Appearances MATTER. Sleep when you can, but it's overrated. I'll sleep when I'm buried in a coffin six feet under. I do sleep in, but it's a luxury. There's a reason humanity invented the depth charge, or whatever they call it at your local coffee shop - a mix of espresso and drip coffee. Caffeine is amazing. Coffee also has health benefits. Get sleep. Love sleep. Relish sleep. But don't sleep. It's for later. Learn what matters and cut out the rest. Be ruthless. Do grades really matter? Does your Step 1 score really matter? Does doing research matter? Do your hobbies matter? When thinking about priorities, DON'T think about a particular school or a particular residency in the future. Instead, imagine: in fifteen years, what do you want your life to look like? What kind of person do you want to be? What kind of relationship do you want to have or not have? What kind of house or apartment do you want to live in - urban, suburban, rural? Now, to have that dream life, think: what do you NEED to do now? When you've identified that, take everything else and cut it out. Perhaps you decide that you'll just pass most of your medical school classes with a few rare honors, but to balance it you'll get a 265 on Boards because that's what you NEED. In med school, don't try to do and be everything. You'll fail, you'll look worse than the people who focused, and you WON'T be the doctor you always dreamed of being. One of my best friends, a brilliant pediatric ENT surgeon who trained in the Ivy League schools for years, once told me he realized part of the way through residency that he HATED doing research. So he didn't do it anymore. Now he's happy, successful, and doing the things he always loved to do. BE RUTHLESS with what you love. Ask for help. This is the single hardest thing for medical students to do, but one of the most important. In medical school, you will struggle with at LEAST one thing. I say 'at least one' because I know what you're thinking, you, like every other doctor, are completely infallible. Just like we all say when we're 40 and a doctor that we were born a surgeon or an internist, and were NEVER a med student (or so the attending will tell you - it's kind of a classic joke). The point is we are human. We are vulnerable. There will be a class that is hard, or a rotation where the attending does not like you, or a day you did not sleep enough. It is completely ok to admit the truth. It's ok to say you just ended things with your boyfriend or girlfriend and thus, you might sound a bit incoherent in your case presentation (this happened to me - and it ended up one of my best days in clinic). Be real. Tell the truth. Ask for help when you struggle. When all is said and done, no one will put in your recommendation that your grandma passed away, but you forgot to take a social history and had to go back to the room and ask again. Just be real, and you'll be a fantastic, incredible medical student. Eat well and PLAN. I cook most of my meals Sunday night. I also have a morning smoothie with Greek yogurt + hemp seeds (for protein), almonds + chia seeds (for healthy fats), fresh berries + banana (for healthy carbs + antioxidants), and spinach or kale (for the fiber and green goodness), every single day. This is not me bragging (yeah, that smoothie sounds super pretentious...). There is no substitute for giving your brain the energy it needs to learn. There is no substitute for the time saved by planning your meals ahead of time. Do it. Learn it. Even study it - we know you're good at that. Study hard, but remember the end game. There is no substitute for studying hard and studying a lot. You need to know this material. Patients and your attendings depend on it. Just know that you WILL learn it. Medical school wasn't designed to fail you - it was designed to teach you. All I will say as a counterpoint is that you will eventually work with patients at the end of their life regularly during third and fourth year. And when you do... you'll see a lot, a lot of regret. A lot of people realizing they'd never travelled, they'd never written that book, they'd never challenged a system of routine and comfort and truly LIVED. Don't be that person. If you leave the library everyday drained and unhappy in undergrad, consider the fact that you'll feel that way everyday in medical school. There's always the chance, as unfortunately happened to a recent brilliant neurosurgery resident, that you'll die of a rare cancer in the midst of your residency (ps, read his book, it's incredible and poignant for all of us). That could very well happen to me. It could very well happen for you. So yes, there's ultimately no substitute for studying. But there's also no substitute for your life if you don't live it now. I backpacked Europe alone for a month-and-a-half between first and second year. Recently, I went to Mexico for vacation for a week and hiked to a hidden beach along the coast. I don't regret a thing. In fact, when I come back, I study all the harder for it. And guess what - when the patient walks in that door, the first thing they see is me smiling. Smile. You'll do just fine. Source
