It’s the holiday season, and medical school doesn’t exist for the next few weeks! While you recuperate from a string of horrifying finals, hectic call schedules, unpleasant shelf exams and seasonal-affective disorder patients, remember to enjoy your holiday! As students, it can sometime seem like we’re always racing toward a deadline. The end of fall semester signifies a halfway point, and we forget to stop, relax, enjoy our families (self medicating with eggnog and cookies) and take a breather from medicine or pre-medicine. In the midst of the holiday season, it’s important to remember some ground rules to maintain your sanity. Retain your composure when your uncle asks you to “just take a quick look at this mole,” and your grandmother asks when you’re going to “meet a nice girl and settle down” by following these medical student (or pre-med) guidelines: DO take a break. Shut your books, ignore the fact that the next semester is coming (at least for a few days) and unplug your computer. Get away from the grind that we’re so used to and really unwind. Read a book for pleasure. Talk with your relatives you don’t see that often. Tell them about school, your plans for your career, your ideas for residency. Get feedback from the people who know you best. If you’re torn between two specialties, use your support system to help you decide. They know you in a different way than you know yourself. Don’t worry about your next module, rotation, test, or exam. Just unplug and get back to your own roots. DON’T play doctor. Don’t offer medical advice. Don’t psychoanalyze. Don’t recommend drugs. It can be hard for us to turn that part of our minds off, but around the holidays and at this point in our careers, we need to be especially mindful of this. While you realize the limitations in your medical knowledge, your family is starting to see you as a medical license-wielding, advice-slinging doctor. Eventually you’ll be able to have a firm base to stand on to give advice, but be careful at this point in your careers. DO re-evaluate your goals. After your week long hiatus from looking at clinical material, right before you’re due to start back in January, reassess where you are in your career. If you’re a third year med student, you’re likely about to have to declare your specialty. Have you made the right choice? If you’re undecided, what more do you need to make the final decision? If you’re an M2, do you have a plan for Step 1? If you’re an M1, what are your plans for the summer? If you’re still in college, what can you do next semester to guide you towards medical school? What hurdles stand in your way? What can you plan now to make your life easier in the near future? Spending some time ruminating on these questions can make a huge difference with how you tackle the next few months. Before you know it, you’ll be back in the thick of it, and some careful planning beforehand can keep you grounded. DON’T lose sight of why you got into medicine in the first place. This goes along with the above, but this time of year, when the days are short and the only sun you might see in the hospital is when you happen to catch a glimpse from a patient’s window, you can get real down on medicine. It happens. You hate the hours; you’re not into the rotation; whatever it is, use your break as a time to reflect on why you applied to medical school, where your gut tells you your career should go, and the goals you have for the future. A little self-reflection and gratitude towards the ability to be a part of one of the noblest and greatest career fields in the world is something we don’t do often enough as medical students. Source
