What I wish I knew before starting medicine

If you’re like me, as the end of the year rolls closer,  you start reflecting on the year that just was, and the year ahead. Well I’ve taken a bit of time to reflect not just on this past year, but on the past 3 years of my medical degree.

 

For as long as I can remember, I have always wanted to pursue a career in medicine. Throughout high school this gave me a goal to work towards and I did, I worked HARD! Since I had been working towards this goal for so long, I thought I knew exactly what I was getting myself into when I applied for and gained entry into medicine. But of course, halfway through my degree now, I look back at what I did and what I wish I had done differently to make a happier and overall more enjoyable experience.

 

1. Use holidays as holidays

So you’ll quickly find out that the weekdays and weekends meld into one during the university term and particularly around exam time, so it's easy to over work yourself and burn out – something many medical students will experience at least once throughout their degree. So when you get a 1 or 2 week holiday, don’t try and get ahead for next session, actually use that time to get yourself together mentally and physically. Whether this is by travelling around the world, or spending days inside watching movies and at the beach, do what you need to do to feel fresh and ready to start again with a kick in your step.

 

2. Don’t assume you can do it all yourself – network and make friends

It’s pretty natural to think you’ve got it all figured out when you leave school, and sometimes you get a little ahead of yourself with the whole ‘I can do it myself’ attitude. Take it from someone who made this mistake and quickly realized her error, take advantage of networking opportunities and get yourself in a good study group. When you have 10+ lectures a week, with practical classes and tutorials, and hospital visits sprinkled in amongst them, it’s hard to find time to properly learn and take notes for all lectures. If you find a good study group, you can divide up the work and talk through the content together. This ensures that you will never be behind, you’ll never have a question unanswered and you’ll have a whole lot more time to commit information to long-term memory.

 

3. Get involved in the societies and events

Sort of following on from the whole ‘networking is important’ idea, the best way to do this is by getting involved. Most universities have student run societies and they organize social events and networking opportunities such as ‘medcamp’ – a camp at the beginning of first year designed for everyone to get to know each other. It might cost a couple of hundred of dollars but this is where everyone will start forming friendship groups and as intended, get to know each other.

 

4. Learn what “self-directed learning” is.

Now this might sound a little dull but eventually you’ll NEED to understand this. Throughout high school you are essentially “spoon-fed”, meaning that everything is handed to you and all the teachers ask you to do is eat it/learn it. At university, although you have lectures and tutorials, a lot of what is covered in lectures will not be taught in enough detail for you to answer an exam question well. This is where self–directed learning comes in and essentially all this means is that you are expected to teach yourself some of the content using journal articles, textbooks and ‘peer-reviewed’ sources (Let's be honest though, we look it up on Wikipedia and if they don’t have a proper page on it, we assume it’s probably not important)

 

5. Once you get into medicine, your whole schooling experience becomes irrelevant, including your ATAR!

If you are currently in your last Christmas holidays of your schooling time and sitting the HSC at the end of the year, the ATAR is essentially, the most important thing in your life (Unless you’re sitting UCAT in July adding an equally important number to the year). But once you finally get through it all and get that offer to medical school, no one cares what ATAR or UMAT you got. Whether you got 99.95 at an elite Sydney school or 91 in a rural public school, you all become equals at the beginning of your degree. So while it might seem like a hard slog at the moment, as long as you do well enough to get in, it doesn’t matter if you had the best or worst score in the cohort.

 

6. Pay attention when they teach you how to reference correctly and KNOW which referencing style the university prefers

This is a less interesting tip, and right now if you’re at school reading this, you’re going to be like “what is she talking about?” but for the first year of my degree, I actually had no idea how to reference and this nearly got me and a lot of other people into trouble. When you reference poorly or incorrectly, you can actually be pulled up for plagiarism and if there is something that you absolutely don’t want to have stamped on your academic record it is exactly that. It can happen easily and will mar your record forever. Just get yourself on top of it early to avoid it altogether!

If I had someone to tell me how important these 6 points were at the beginning of my degree, I feel like I could have made my experience a lot easier and avoided a lot of mistakes along the way. I’m clearly not the only one with this experience and you can read about it from the perspective of one of our other UMAT tutors here. So hopefully you can take something from this blog and use these points to maximize your experience. Work hard and accept help whenever you can, even if it is by reading a blog on someone’s personal experience, or from a fellow older student, never turn down the opportunity to improve yourself. Learn from my mistakes and be the best version of you. You will make mistakes as well and hopefully you will pass it down to younger years also. Happy Holidays everyone!