9 Enlightening Things That Med School Has Taught Me (Besides Anatomy Of The Human Body)
By Aditi Vakil
1. It’s all about prioritizing
If something is that important to you, you’ll find a way to make it happen, or else you won’t – and it’s really that simple. There’s no question about not having enough time – you’ll cut back on your hours of sleeping if acing Physio is more important to you than sleep. At the same time though (which is number 2):
2. It’s critical to find and maintain balance.
It’s so easy to turn into an insomniac and destroy your health and peace of mind in the process – but that’s where you have to draw a line. It’s alright if you don’t get everything. Nobody’s perfect. Along those lines:
3. Doing your best is really all that matters, not whether you’re the best, because you never will be.
I know, it sounds defeatist and discouraging, but don’t forget that everyone’s a different blend of talents – and you just can’t be better than everyone at everything. Ideally, you shouldn’t even be comparing, but at the end of the day we’re all human, so I find it’s easier to look at it this way.
4. You’re capable of more than you think you are.
In high school, I thought I was studying quite a bit and doing my very best. Fast forward three months and I’m finding that where I thought reading for eight hours was a huge deal before, now I’m ‘average’. That just goes to show you though, that:
5. Growth only comes after you do something you’ve never done before.
It’s very easy to think you’ve maxed out your potential – a new situation is the only way to find out. In fact, it’s when you get to the new situations that the possibility of even doing more comes to exist.
6. It’s very possible to be completely wrong about people, and not ever know.
That raises the question though: How then do I know? A casual comment from someone in high school told me how misguided my belief of them, and probably our ‘friendship’, had been. It doesn’t matter now, but does go to show how easy it is to be wrong. Heck, even at this moment, I’ve probably got people pegged down all wrong.
7. Your best friend will only ever be you.
You can have buddies who seem to understand you exactly and are always there for you, sure, but at the end of the day, you are the one in the driver’s seat and by that virtue, the only person you can count on for everything.
8. Past failures or successes only make for good (or bad) memories, nothing else.
They have nothing to do with what you’ll accomplish ahead – only as long as you don’t hold onto what was. If you think that just because you were the top in your class in high school, you’ll automatically be the highest in your biochemistry test, you’re wrong. And if you think that because you barely passed chemistry in high school you’re going to flunk the aforementioned biochem test, you’re wrong again. Simple as that.
9. Keep learning – the ‘life skills’ you pick up will help you more than you realize.
My case-in-point is ridiculously simple – I learned how to type quickly and now I save a ton of time on writing notes. The point though is: at every opportunity you get, try to learn a universal skill. You never know when it’ll come in handy.