First month of medical school

I suppose it's been a "transitional" month as I was told it would be. Having been out of school for some time, I felt out of my element the first week, but it didn't take much longer for me to feel at home again. Academia is a place I would like to dwell in forever, and just thinking about this reminds me of a Ghandi quote:

"Live as if you were to die tomorrow, learn as if you were to live forever."

Ghandi was apparently a pretty wise man.

My first exams were more than bearable. I have a feeling that the school intentionally scared us as much as they could in order to trick us into over-preparing. I actually realized that this was the case, and didn't study as much as other people did. Instead, I went running, lifting, reading, golfing, drinking, and TV watching. After all, medical school is supposed to be all about balance, isn't it?

Don't get me wrong. I worked. I put in the amount of hours I deemed necessary and then some more to make sure that I had everything down. But the main thing was that I was ready. I had been exposed to tough academics before. Granted, engineering was vastly different - crunching numbers for hours just to get one homework problem correct - it still prepared me for the rigors or medical school. I remember during my senior year at Michigan, my design project in Chemical engineering by itself required 40 hours a week out of me; add on my other commitments and I had an 80 hour/week schedule. In fact, after that year, the post-bacc program that I entered at a Ivy league school seemed as though it could have been much more difficult.

I made quite a bit of new friends at school. This is actually one of the biggest things that attracted me to Wayne State. The class of 300 ensures that there are people who you are bound to get along with, and of course those who make you tick. Fortunately, I get along with most people, and I love spending time with people whose backgrounds are vastly different from mine. People fascinate me, and that's one of the main reasons that I'm going to medical school in the first place. It's about people, not about me, not about me, not about me. I catch myself forgetting this at times because I study, study, and then study some more just so I...ME...MYSELF can get the best grade I can get. Passing is great. P(assing)=M.D. but why not desire more? After all, Wayne State, your motto is "Aim Higher".

So I'm aiming high. I don't know exactly what I want to do with my medical career yet. The possibilities are many and I have little time to figure out what type of medicine I should practice. But I promise to not practice a type of medicine because it is my only choice. I refuse. I will keep as many doors open as I can, and I won't just get a foot in each door. I'll be aiming to have as many doors as wide open as I can. Does this make me a gunner? Maybe. Is "gunner" a made up term that's more of a joke than anything else? Yup.

Motivation

In the past, there have been times where I lacked it. But in medical school, I am seldom without it. This is because everyone around me is always studying, or they're pretending to. This in turn causes me to study, or to pretend to. Thus, motivation is never lacking.

More specifically, I tend to play some catch-up on the material that we learn at school. That said, there are students who are always well-prepared and have no trouble in showing other students up. You can call them whatever you'd like - good student, douche bag, gunner, whatever. And often, I get shown up by students like these or those who went home the previous night and had HAM (hard as a mofo) study sessions. This is like a bucket of gasoline to the little ember that is my motivation.

So thanks for studying so hard my peers.