Reflections on a tough semester

Pardon the train-of-thought writing, but there will be very little editing in the words to follow. Part of that is due to my wanting to preserve memories as they come to mind, and part of that is because I'm so incredibly tired from my first year of medical school.

In short, there are very few positive things to be said. Read no further if you wish.


I can't count the times that I laid awake in bed at night, precious few hours of rest lost to anxiety and praying that all my studying wouldn't be for nothing.That's basically how I spent my last four months--in a kind of precarious balance of numbers and percentages, driven mostly by fear of failure.

It couldn't have been that bad, they said. You're smart. Berkeley students are smart. You got into med school right? Therefore, you're smart.

There's smart, but then there's Smart. The former smart is how I got through Berkeley: cramming, browsing through readers hoping to associate words on exams, filling essays with well-worded fluff, strategizing which classes to take to boost my GPA. It sufficed up to a point.

I found it incredible that the entire semester of Carlson's IB 140 (Human Reproduction) was covered in more detail in the two 50-minute lectures in my med school physiology course. I remember being amazed that months of what I thought was at least somewhat difficult to my early-twenties Berkeley brain, was distilled into two hours that we were expected to not only absorb, understand, recount, but also apply to vignettes...one week before our cumulative final exam. That's the Smart. It's impossible. Yet we're held to it. 

I'm sure by now you're heard the phrase that med school is like drinking from a fire hydrant through a straw. The flow of water is the relentless pouring of information into a too-small drinking apparatus: our brains.

Has anyone ever wondered what happens to the person drinking from the fire hydrant? Surely something happens to him. Maybe he get water poisoning from drinking all that water. Maybe he becomes dehydrated from not being able to drink enough. Maybe the blasting water pressure takes the skin off of his face. Maybe he gets so frustrated and overwhelmed and depressed that he gives up. Either way, it's not a happy ending for the person. No one ever mentions the fire hydrant flow diminishing over time--that's because it doesn't. Just like med school doesn't get easier, taking on the responsibility of healing and saving lives surely doesn't get easier right? It's a comforting thought...hah.

I was extremely frustrated much of the time this semester. Even things I did well in, like Physical Exam Skills and simulation patient interviews, weren't enjoyable to me. The small victories weren't able to compensate for the great disappointments and emotional turmoil. They weren't able to affirm my talents because most classmates wrote off those courses as somehow being lesser to the basic sciences. As if interpersonal skills like empathy and communication were lesser measures of a student than a biochemistry grade. Excuse me, but I'm preeetty sure I can learn spinal cord pathways given enough time, but douches will always be douches no matter what.

And then there was the bane of my existence, neuroscience. The course I was failing for half a semester (even though I only failed one exam--that one exam was that bad). The names and concepts was so foreign to me, so unapproachable that I couldn't begin to understand it. On one Skype session in April with my parents, I wasn't particularly responsive, and all of a sudden burst out in tears. I rarely cry in front of my parents, and certainly not over school. But there I was, sobbing uncontrollably while my poor parents, so far away, longed to reach through the screen to give me a hug.

I considered the worst case scenarios on a daily basis. The worst part about med school is that you struggle alone for the most part for fear of alienation, pity, or that people would see you differently. I shared with a few close friends that I was struggling (and they in return shared the same). I felt powerless to help them, because I myself was suffering. I withdrew from everyone to "avoid drama" so the mantra became. "NO DRAMA!" A and I would chant at the slightest hint of a boy's affection toward me, because everyone knows that adding a new relationship at this state in my life might just set me over the edge. My goal in life at this point was to not have a life aside from school. It was the only way.

On the third neuroscience exam, I was able to score well enough to put me over to passing with a comfortably margin. It was a tremendous relief. Life seemed brighter that day. How relieved I felt to finally be passing neuroscience! How grateful I felt to God for it! How sad in retrospect that my self-worth in that moment was determined by numbers on a screen. But I was, and am, nonetheless grateful. Some of my friends were not as lucky. A few didn't pass neuroscience, and a few opted to take the Extended Track, a hush-hush journey through med school in five years instead of four. It's a safety net that our school has in place for those who fail one class--fail two classes and you appear before an academic jury whose job is to swiftly boot you out of school. It's rumored that those who fail neuroscience must go to Omaha, Nebraska to retake it. Omaha. What the hell.

Anyways, those were the overarching themes of this semester. Miserable, huh? I thought I struggled last semester through all the changes, but now that I'm past that, the struggles are mostly academic. In comparison, I did better last semester going into the finals than I did this semester, and really had nothing to worry about.


There were a few good things this semester. I made new friends (which sounds elementary and pitiable, but it's true) I did well in certain classes. I got my first 100% on a final exam. I baked enough treats to keep myself sane and my classmates well-fed. I started swimming again, much to the protest of my pectoral muscles. I was loved on by a whole lot of people, even though I was terrible at giving it myself.

So there you have it. I schlepped through and finished first year.