How Do You Motivate Yourself To Keep Studying In Medical School?

How do you motivate yourself to keep studying in medical school?
Medical school overloads you with content and you often have insufficient time to cover the materials required but you must keep going on, day after day, being on the ball always. Medical students might be the selected people who can take all the stress, etc but how do you keep yourself motivated always?

This question was originally posted on Quora.com, and below are some of the best answers:

Answer 1 by Peter Wei, Monkey with a pen

Let’s do a quick back of the envelope calculation. Assume that you’ll be practicing for 30 years – although many physicians practice well into their 70s and beyond. And let’s give you a leisurely clinic schedule of 10 patients a day. This means that you’ll have 75,000 patient visits over the course of your career. Many of them will be sniffles and scrapes – common problems that anyone with some training can manage. But some of them will be more challenging, testing the limits of your skills of diagnosis and management. And this is where the depth of your knowledge will make a difference.

Maybe one in 50 patients – 2% of them – have an unusual presentation or require unconventional treatment. They’re the rare “zebras,” the ones where you have to go above and beyond cookbook medicine. Over the course of your career, the number of such patients you will encounter is 1,500. Throughout medical school, residency, and the lifelong learning beyond, how well you learn your craft will have a massive impact on 1,500 lives.

Medical students already been selected by a process that rewards diligence and perseverance. And medical school uses the normal array of academic carrots and sticks - grades, evaluations, and standardized test scores. Most of the time, this is enough reinforcement to study obscure biochemical pathways and the intricacies of human anatomy. But at the end of the day the realization that this is not just an academic game - that how effectively one learns the important stuff will have far-reaching future consequences - can be a powerful motivator.

Answer 2 by Drew Young, works at Boston Children's Hospital

The most successful students share something in common. There’s no technical way I can say this other than:

There’s a fire in their belly.

In my first year of medical school, I signed up to be a "big brother" to a 6-year old boy with congenital deafness and chronic renal insufficiency (I am reasonable in ASL so it was a natural fit). I was able to sit with him during his clinic visits and renal ultrasounds. We read together during his 3-hour dialysis sessions trading comic books. I sat with him as the anesthesiologist was prepping him for his much needed kidney transplant. I remember trying wildly to distract him with bad jokes during his IV placement. I saw him buckle on the ventilator while nurses hastily tried to sedate him. I learned of not one, but several medical errors during his hospitalization. I saw how happy his family celebrated his home-coming followed by their desperate struggle to administer the numerous immune-modulating medications. He refused. His family felt overwhelmed and unprepared. When we learned his body was rejecting his new kidney, I couldn’t believe how much I would be affected.

Having this experience as a student lit a fire in my belly. In class, when we were taught about the clinical manifestations of renal failure, the role of hemodialysis, and the peri-operative management of transplant medicine: I was goal-directed in my learning. I was desperate to learn more about mechanical ventilation and how to make patients more comfortable while recovering from surgery. When we encountered child psychology, the content wasn’t elusive – it was familiar and revealing. When we disussed quality and safety in healthcare, I viewed each lessons through the eyes of my paired family and my little brother. I challenged my instructors and I remember believing we, as a medical community, can and must do better.

Take a stroll through the halls of a medical ward, observe a surgical operation, or regularly chat with a would-be mentor. And if the opportunity exists, connect with a patient who sits in the middle of everything we do as a medical community.

The most motivating influences are to find ways that brings focus into your journey, the very fires that lit your passage to medical school.

Answer 3 by Jae Won Joh, sleepy medical dork

The reality is that much of the time, you just suck it up and do it.

This is a tongue-in-cheek sketch of what a U.S. med student would feel:


MS1: "OMG! I'M GOING TO BE A DOCTOR!!! WHOOO STUDY EVERYTHING!!!!"

Naturally, this approach gets tiring after a while, and towards the end of the year, everyone's worn out. A brief summer break lets everyone recharge.

MS2: "ALL RIGHT LET'S DO THIS! ONLY ONE MORE YEAR UNTIL CLINICS!"

Still, classes can get tiring/boring, and motivation starts dying out a little more quickly. Motivation picks up pretty quickly toward the end, however, because everyone goes bonkers studying for Step 1.

MS3: "YEAH I PASSED STEP 1, I AM AWESOME! GOODBYE BOOKS, HELLO CLINICAL ROTATIONS!"

Hooray, now you're taking care of real patients. Everyone starts with pretty high motivation, but even with the most enjoyable work, fatigue sets in; physical, emotional, ethical duress all occur. Once someone figures out what they want to specialize in, it tends to get a bit worse, because everything else just feels like jumping through hoops.

MS4: "I FINALLY KNOW WHAT I'M DOING WITH MY LIFE! I'M GOING TO BE THE BEST APPLICANT IN [INSERT SPECIALTY HERE] EVARRR!"

This is the beginning of the end. People do their sub-internships in their desired fields, get their applications ready, and then send them off to their desired programs. Once residency interviews and Step 2 are done, it's pretty much over for most people, and motivation basically drops to nil. Fortunately, there aren't many requirements during 4th year, and most people are done with clinical rotations after the first semester.

It's been a tough ride. Most people enjoy the time to lose some of the weight they gained, get back into shape, take a vacation, read some books for pleasure (although given how popular choices like House of God are, we apparently can't stray too far), spend time with family, etc.

~~~~~~~

Here's the thing about motivation in med school: unless you happen to be one of the blessed few who appear to validate the notion of an endorphin-secreting tumor, you tend to be motivated when you're doing something you're interested in, and/or you're given incentives that validate your work, and/or you have a particularly inspiring set of residents/attendings on your assigned team. Given that the latter two are probably not as common as you'd like, the only thing you can attempt to control is the first.

Strategy #1: Try to link everything you see to subjects of interest.

If you're going into radiology but you're in the ICU, study the films and scans on your patients and make that the highlight of your day. If you're going into pediatrics but you're on a gyn onc service, learn about preventative measures such as the HPV vaccine. If you're going into internal medicine but you're on surgery, learn pre-op and post-op care, because you're going to need that in the future. And so on and so forth.

I'll be blunt: even with this, you will likely have moments that drain you. Maybe it's the 6th month of waking up at 5AM and you're out of caffeine pills. Maybe it's a family tragedy that hits you when you least expect it and you end up having to take a few days off to take care of it and when you're back the rest of the team starts making insensitive jokes about your "vacation". Maybe it's the constant reminders that you're at the bottom of the totem pole. I once asked while on a rotation for some basic feedback and expanded responsibility. The exact response I got was this: "Well, what's your status right now?" [awkward, confused silence] "Correct, you have none. You have no status. Remember that. That's why we have residents." And that was the end of it. Ouch. That stung for a few days. When this sort of thing happens...

Strategy #2: Remember the patients.

In general, patients do not give a flying rat's arse about what year of training you're in. When they look at you, they don't see someone who's "just a med student", they see a healthcare provider. Sure, you may be in training, but that doesn't mean you can't do other things that they find invaluable: get them a glass of water, talk to them about their condition, explain what X test means, etc. Find ways to make this work, because you almost always can. The validation you receive from being the one to think of the little things can be incredibly motivating.

Strategy #3: When all else fails, find ways to stay sane and endure.

Work out. Read. Paint. Cook. Find your release, and stay serene. This too, shall pass.

~~~~~~~

Hope that helps. Best of luck.

Source