Believe - An account of my rise and fall as a first year med student
I know I haven’t written in forever, but I think sometimes getting it down in words is needed.
I started my first year of medical school excited to learn everything, and confident I would succeed. While I started my first year concept mapping and creating practice questions, I finished out my year cramming in useless facts to make sure I passed and would not have to repeat. In both cases, I maintained by high GPA and high class rank, but I’m writing to tell you that the person behind those numbers changed from the beginning of the year to the end, and not for the better.
At the end of the year, I left school and shortly there after left the U.S for Europe. Traveling was the prescription I needed to sort things out and get away from the madness I had created. I came back well rested and ready to mentally work through what was going on, and why my attitude had changed. Honestly, I couldn’t figure it out and just figured that it was due to the harder material and faster pace. Then I started reading a book on how to take standardized tests, you know, in prep for boards. The book literally opened my eyes to all that I had done right, and then chronicled my downfall with all that I had done wrong as the year went on.
This is not a book review, but here is what I learned about myself, and what I think EVERYONE needs to know, no matter what type of situation you are in.
1. You must believe in yourself. This is the hardest easy thing to do, I will come back to this. Essentially there is believing, and then really believing. As I said, we will revisit this.
2. Attitude and Motivation, especially for learning. There are students that learn to get grades, to have high class ranks, to compare themselves to others. There are other students who learn to avoid failing, to avoid bad grades, or embarrassment of failure. Lastly, there are students who learn because they love to learn, they want as much knowledge as they can soak up, for no reason other than their own curiosity. They want to make connections from pockets of knowledge all over their brain and weave them into one working web.
I’m sure without writing more you can see that the last type of learner is the goal. It’s exactly that, A GOAL, and ideal but in my mind not an absolute. There are always additional motivating factors, but my goal is to remain the last type of student. I was there when I started medical school last year, and that is when I started to think, if I was there, and I am no-longer, then what changed?
I think the answer is belief. I stopped believing I could do it, rather even worse, I started to doubt myself. They say doubt kills, I would agree. It creeps in to the back of your head and reminds you that your exam is worth 50% of your grade. It whispers the night before an exam that if you do poorly, you may not make it to the next year. It even interrupts during an exam question to remind you that you did not study this particular item well enough.
In my opinion, loads of people call this test anxiety. They accept it and say it’s normal for them. I call B.S. and I think this applies to more than just test taking and school.
I don’t deny anxiety is a real thing, but I believe this form of anxiety is doubt and lack of belief masquerading around as anxiety. What’s better, I really believe it can be overcome.
Before I go further, I am not claiming to solve the worlds anxiety issues, nor do I think I have a solution for everyone, but the thought process I have gone through this summer has helped me immensely and I figure I will share it to try and help some of you.
The first step for me was to acknowledge what had happened. To realize that I had let myself become motivated by fear, lost my love for learning the material, and worst of all, begun to doubt my ability to learn and retain. I understood my errors and could now begin trying to repair them. For me, that was setting goals and refreshing my mindset. Setting goals is relatively easy, just google it theres tons of info on making real hard goals... you need realistic goals in real timeframes with accountability. Ok, but how do you refresh your mind? Well I think this one is different for everyone. Personally, I thought about why I was learning medicine. Sure I wanted to study during the summer to stay caught up, but what good is studying in a cluttered brain. I mostly lounged and did activities I enjoyed. Originally it stressed me not studying, but as I poured over what happened last year as I transitioned to fear motivation, I came to understand just how important that time away from material was for me. Ultimately, I came to a peace with my personal failures from last year. That is the past, something which I cannot change, but only learn from.
After I had sorted everything else out, I am left here. Just over one week away from the start of my second year of medical school with just one task left. To Believe. I know that I have the ability, the determination and the drive as proven with my performance in and out of the classroom. Now it’s time that I believe in myself as a learner, future doctor, and most importantly a person capable of whatever I set my mind to. I am confident that by the time classes roll around next week I will be ready to go, ready to learn as much as I can motivated only by my desire to understand as much of medicine as I possibly can in the hopes of treating as many sick patients as I can in the coming years.
And so I leave you with one question, what are your goals? Even more importantly, do you truly believe?
