Things That I Wish I Know Before Entering Medical School

1. Your family members expect you to help with their diseases. They will be complaining about their pains and you will be clueless on what to advice them.

2. Reading non-medical texts or do non-medical activities will make you feel guilty.

3. Your lecturers will always have these quotes :
"back then, i had to handle the whole ward by myself but you cannot even prepare 1 patient well?"
" back then we did not have technologies like MRI or CT Scan, but we survived. We did not have Internet but we could still study"

4. Whenever it is your turn to present the case, you will not wonder how perfect it will be but instead, how many scoldings will you get this time.

5. No matter how long you read, you lecturer will never be satisfied with your answers.

6. You feel guilty for not spending the night in the hospital.

7. Your friends will regard u as a nerd or goody for doing medicine.

8. It is a sin to think of money or complain about not getting high salary. Everyone wants you to be sincere working as a doctor.

9. Your holiday will be shorter than other courses.

10. You have thick and numerous books that you may not even finish reading.

11. You will never remember anything. You read it last month and the chance is, you may have forgotten it by now.

12. Expect long hours of standing during ward rounds. This can even be up to 3 hours of continuous standing.

13. If you whine a lot, mostly you will be told to quit medicine.

14. They want you to have good communication skills; being able to interpret body languages, to always be nice and courteous towards patients, to not have miscommunications with your colleaguea.

15. you will be comparing yourself with your non-medical friends in terms of number of classes and the numbers of holidays. By the end of it, you will also compare their salary to yours.

16. You will feel extremely excited when you first own a stethoscope and a labcoat. The tendency to show off these apparatus is high! Afterwards, you will feel lame coz you don't know how to interpret the sounds.

17. There will be times you wish you can drop medicine or switch courses.

18. You realise medicine is not as what the TV series "House" displayed.

19. You will be confused with the techniques of physical examinations coz different doctors have different styles. In the end you just don't know whom to follow.

20. You pray hard that you will not be picked to answer questions during rounds.

All these are things that i experience during my 5 years training as a medical student. Hence, some of the facts may not be reliable, depending on where you study. Perhaps, my next list will be that on housemanship.

Sent from Hanani's iPhone! Woo!