Medical school overloads you with content and you often have insufficient time to cover the materials required but you must keep going on, day after day, being on the ball always. Medical students might be the selected people who can take all the stress, etc but how do you keep yourself motivated always?
This question was originally posted on Quora.com, and below are some of the best answers:
Drew Young, works at Boston Children’s Hospital
The most successful students share something in common. There’s no technical way I can say this other than:
There’s a fire in their belly.
In my first year of medical school, I signed up to be a “big brother” to a 6-year old boy with congenital deafness and chronic renal insufficiency (I am reasonable in ASL so it was a natural fit). I was able to sit with him during his clinic visits and renal ultrasounds. We read together during his 3-hour dialysis sessions trading comic books. I sat with him as the anesthesiologist was prepping him for his much needed kidney transplant. I remember trying wildly to distract him with bad jokes during his IV placement. I saw him buckle on the ventilator while nurses hastily tried to sedate him. I learned of not one, but several medical errors during his hospitalization. I saw how happy his family celebrated his home-coming followed by their desperate struggle to administer the numerous immune-modulating medications. He refused. His family felt overwhelmed and unprepared. When we learned his body was rejecting his new kidney, I couldn’t believe how much I would be affected.
Having this experience as a student lit a fire in my belly. In class, when we were taught about the clinical manifestations of renal failure, the role of hemodialysis, and the peri-operative management of transplant medicine: I was goal-directed in my learning. I was desperate to learn more about mechanical ventilation and how to make patients more comfortable while recovering from surgery. When we encountered child psychology, the content wasn’t elusive – it was familiar and revealing. When we disussed quality and safety in healthcare, I viewed each lessons through the eyes of my paired family and my little brother. I challenged my instructors and I remember believing we, as a medical community, can and must do better.
Take a stroll through the halls of a medical ward, observe a surgical operation, or regularly chat with a would-be mentor. And if the opportunity exists, connect with a patient who sits in the middle of everything we do as a medical community.
The most motivating influences are to find ways that brings focus into your journey, the very fires that lit your passage to medical school.
Peter Wei, Monkey with a pen
Let’s do a quick back of the envelope calculation. Assume that you’ll be practicing for 30 years – although many physicians practice well into their 70s and beyond. And let’s give you a leisurely clinic schedule of 10 patients a day. This means that you’ll have 75,000 patient visits over the course of your career. Many of them will be sniffles and scrapes – common problems that anyone with some training can manage. But some of them will be more challenging, testing the limits of your skills of diagnosis and management. And this is where the depth of your knowledge will make a difference.
Maybe one in 50 patients – 2% of them – have an unusual presentation or require unconventional treatment. They’re the rare “zebras,” the ones where you have to go above and beyond cookbook medicine. Over the course of your career, the number of such patients you will encounter is 1,500. Throughout medical school, residency, and the lifelong learning beyond, how well you learn your craft will have a massive impact on 1,500 lives.
Medical students already been selected by a process that rewards diligence and perseverance. And medical school uses the normal array of academic carrots and sticks – grades, evaluations, and standardized test scores. Most of the time, this is enough reinforcement to study obscure biochemical pathways and the intricacies of human anatomy. But at the end of the day the realization that this is not just an academic game – that how effectively one learns the important stuff will have far-reaching future consequences – can be a powerful motivator.