What wrong with me lately? (past 3 years)?
I'm a 23 year old girl that is currently in graduate school, studying to get into medical school. I'm a fun person by nature, but I've found over the past 3 years, I have been quite distant to my friends. I have to force myself to open up to them. I think alot of this stems from dissapointment with myself. In highschool, I used to be on top of my class - quite literally, I would get the highest grade among hundreds of students. In university, I studied just as hard. I didn't get into medical school after finishing my undergraduate education due to low MCAT scores. I am going to re-write this exam but it's nearly impossible it seems for me to just free the anxiety I feel and dissapointment and jus tbe a happy person sometimes. If given the chance to have fun I usually sabotage it myself and opt to stay at home. I also refuse to pretty myself up sometimes.... I've never had a bf or a date before....
What's wrong?
stay at home and study that is..lol.
Hi there, I'm halfway through med school right now and sympathetize with the pre-med stress.
I'm going to give you some realistic advice, and some of it might be helpful and some of it may not-- the beauty of it is you get to pick and choose what applies to you.
1. On Low Mood, Well-roundedness and the Isolation of Academia
Low mood is often triggered by outside circumstances. You are probably feeling down right now because you are dissapointed with yourself and your circumstances; you tried really hard in undergrad and on the MCATs...but life didn't work out quite tidily. I can only imagine how stressed you are by it, but the solution to getting things in order is to maintain optimism, keep working hard (if not harder), and forget the past. Learn from your mistakes, if you can identify any, and mend them. Punishing yourself, however, will not get you anywhere. Punishing yourself, will not reverse the past.
You probably understand this logically, but may be anxious that even if you work hard, you will not meet your own expectations and that you will fail others. In highschool, you did well, and as such you probably defined yourself as being highly intelligent. You are questioning your skill and your identity now, and this is getting you down. This is understandable; most people feel down when they feel like they are no longer good at something they once excelled in. These feelings are normal.
However, you cannot let them consume you. Low mood propogates a cycle of lethargy and self-sabotage. You feel down because things aren't going your way, so you punish yourself. You feel like you don't deserve to be happy, until all of your other goals are met. However, if you punish yourself and push away your friends and everything that matters to you, you will soon start to feel isolated and lonely. As I said before, punishing yourself will not reverse the past but actually hinder your progress in the future.
Isolating yourself will only propogate your low mood, and make it harder for you to focus and concentrate.
The solution to this? Take care of yourself. In order to be a good student, in order to succeed, you need to be well-rounded. You need to have a social circle and a support network, you need to have hobbies, you need to have fun. Academia in itself can be so isolating, and medicine, can get so busy and overwhelming that depression and substance abuse are rampant among the professionals who don't have anything outside of medicine.
In order to be a good student now and a good physician later, balance your life. Remember that ignoring your friends, won't bring you a better MCAT score. However, having a date with friends to look forward to after a long, hard day of gruelling MCAT studying, can give you motivation to study and provide you with a much needed break!
Don't fall into a trap of self-loathing! Many of my peers studied the whole summer for MCATs and were dissapointed in their results. The next summer, they all rewrote and the majority are in meds now...maybe a year or two later than me...but what does that matter?In the grand scheme of things, we are going to be physicians. I got into med school early, but many of my peers and colleagues worked for years or did grad degrees before getting in! We are all on equal footing now that we are here....don't feel like you are inferior in anyway because you didn't get in after undergrad. It's partially skill to get in, but remember, with so many GOOD applicants and not enough spots, there will always be qualified people who don't get in initially.
There's no reason to torture yourself though. Just because things didn't work out the first time, doesn't mean it won't happen now. Just keep working hard and remember to enjoy life! You need the enjoyment to stay motivated about work...and when you do get into med school, you don't want to have only medicine define who you are...you want to make sure you still have you personality and your family and your friends.
2. On forcing yourself to be happy
If you are experiencing low mood and not depression (please see a doctor to differentiate), forced happiness can actually lead to real happiness. Force yourself to go out and do activities that were once appealing to you. Exercise! Exercise has been shown to dramatically elevate mood in people with low mood and depression. Do things that make you feel relaxed and happy. If you are feeling like you are really withdrawing, consider getting treated for depression. Medication may take about 6 weeks to kick in, but if you are feeling that low, it may increase your initial mood and give you the motivation to get things in order.
3. On dating
I'm 22 now, and I only started dating my serious bf ever, 10 months ago. Prior to this, I had never really clicked with anyone. It's not that there is a problem with most of our personality or looks, but because we spend so much time studying, it's sometimes hard to really get out there and find someone. It's the reason a lot of people start dating each other in medicine.
With the dating, you are young. There are still so many oppurtunities to meet people: at school, through your program, through clubs and interest groups, at the library, at bars, online.
If you want to start dating, great...it can be done...it's mostly just getting into the mindset of making yourself emotioanlly available and talking to guys.
If you don't want to date, that's fine too! But please, don't feel abnormal. I know a lot of my friends who aren't in professional school are married or enegaged right now, and I felt really behind because I didn't have a significant other and have never had one...but honestly, we all have our own pace. You still have lots of opportunity to find someone, and you shouldn't let worry about that hold you back; nor should you put yourself down because of it.
4. On med school
I would sincerely evaluate if you really want to do med school. When I was applying a lot of residents told me that their lives were hell and they warned me seriously consider medicine. They told me pre-meds think they know what medicine is about, but have no real clue. It's true. Until you experience it, no one ACTUALLY understands the all-comsuming entitiy it can be. I was still all starry eyed at the time and while I did spend time working with them and doing clinical observerships, and I saw how tiring it was...I was still young and energetic. Even with the warnings and the glimpses into their worlse, I still dismissed them as being jaded and cynical.
HOWEVER, if you haven't had real exposure to medicine, I suggest you get some now. Call up doctors, ask to shadow them. Spend days with residents on the ward. Try to really see the bread and butter of medicine...because let me tell you this: these 4 years of school plus 2-5 (or more) years of residency are going to be PURE HELL if you have no passion for it.
If you think medicine is all glamor, all the stuff of tv shows, if you are just living with the idealized notion of it: get some experience in it. Even then, you still won't fully know--believe me, I'm halfway through and still don't know--but at least you'll have a more realistic understanding.
You don't want to now spend all your time studying and devoting yourself to getting in, only to get in and find out that it isn't right for you. You don't want to waste this energy on feeling guilty, on being sad, on trying to get in, if you don't want it.
That being said, if you find that you still want to do it, I think anyone can get in with hard work and determination, and if you really want it, stay positive and don't give up!
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