Aspiring Doctors

Not your average med student

Anonymous asked: I'm going into my sophmore year of high school, and am 97.335% sure I want to be a doctor. What are some things you wish you knew in high school to prepare yourself? Thanks (:

Hello!

Wow, that is some precise math right there. What formula did you use? Let’s see a graph or something, I know you have your TI graphing calculator somewhere nearby.

It’s so funny to think about high school. It seems like a lifetime ago, like I was someone else. I did not want to be a doctor when I was in high school, actually.

I thought I was super good at drawing and really smart and basically an adult. Turns out, it’s easy to be better than everyone at a lot of things when you have less than 150 total people in your high school, and the curriculum focuses more on dogma than actual education and critical thinking. I wanted to marry the guy I was dating at the time and become an artist and stay at home mom (we were pretty much told that is a woman’s place).

College was a wake-up call, obviously.

I learned that I am at the very low end of mediocre in drawing, nowhere near as smart compared to many of the amazingly brilliant students around me, and had so much growing up to do (and am still doing, but I’m getting pretty good at it, I hope). The guy I was dating turned out to want very different things in life than me, and I realized that the life of a stay at home mom would not be good for me personally (it works for some ladies, and that’s great!). I discovered that I loved science, and that my desire to help people wouldn’t be fulfilled by art alone, that I could do more good with medicine. My high school didn’t really prepare me for college, especially not the pre-med route, so I had to get my time management skills and study habits in line asap.

As a high school student, you need to have good grades to get into college (good grades and a good ACT/SAT score can mean free college! YAY!). Take some AP classes like chemistry, physics, and/or calculus. There are more, but my school didn’t offer them. Do some volunteer work or see if you can find some summer internships related to healthcare.

Anyway, if you are a typical American teenager like my blogging senses are assuming, you have a sweet life right now. You live at home! You don’t have to buy your own food or pay bills or work or anything that makes existing in the grownup world crummy. Savor this! Don’t spend your days pining for when you turn 18, because when you turn 18 you pine to be 21, and after that you pine to graduate and get into med school, and after that the whole evergreen cycle starts again. Go do fun high school things, have a silly job at an ice cream parlor or something, listen to really bad and really good music, experiment with your personal style, start to figure out who you are (it will probably change in college and later, I promise that too).

Since you are a sophomore and high school is your world right now, I hope you are having a great experience and have sweet friends. But, I promise you this, in my experience nobody cares about high school after you get that diploma.

Crap, this was much longer than I intended.

SUMMARY:
+ my personal high school experience that none of you readers actually cares about, sorry about that
+ nobody cares about high school once you get out, but
+ get good grades
+ AP classes that mirror pre-med pre-reqs to get a feel for the material and if you like it
+ volunteer/internships
+ develop fledgling time management and study habits, subject to change
+ really the time and place to start fretting about med school is undergrad
+ so enjoy being a teenager, do silly teenagery-stuff that I am out of touch with in my old age, you vivacious adorable whippersnappers

Thank you for asking, I hope in my travel-fatigued way I adequately answered it.

  1. aspiringdoctors posted this