How do I know being a doctor is right for me? ?

Question

I'm 17 years old and I'm nervous out of my freaking mind. I KNOW I want to be a doctor and help people but I have a small issue with memory. I'm working on it right now but can anybody give me tips about what it's really like to be a doctor, how I can get a head start, etc? I want to be the best that I can be but I'm worried that I will end up dropping out for whatever reason. I seriously do not want to. Any tips? Any help at all? Any responses from people in med school, or who are actual doctors/nurses, would be HIGHLY appreciated!!!!

Answer 1

all i can say is that don't worry about memory, you have to write down everything anyway.

Answer 2

First, don't panic!

You have all of college ahead of you to figure out how to deal with memorization issues.  I'm not going to sit here and tell you there's not a lot of stuff to pack away in memory--there is.  (There's a famous comparison of the amount of stuff you have to learn in med school to drinking from a fire hose.)  But it can be done--generations of us have proved that.  Anyway, you are not supposed to be prepared right now to be a doctor--what you want to be is prepared to be a good premed student.

The main things you need to do are to study consistently and to find the best methods that work for you.  There are tons of mnemonics and tricks, but to really learn things, you need to both really understand them and review them regularly.  People who drop out tend to be the ones who fall behind and then feel overwhelmed at the amount of stuff they still have to get through before the exam.  You can help yourself by developing good study habits BEFORE you get to med school, and the place to start is in college.  Lots of people get away with cramming in college, but it's well-nigh impossible once you're in med school.

Don't worry about what it's like to be a doctor before you're a med student.  Everyone has a different answer to that.  ;-)

Good luck!  Hang in there and I'm sure you'll do fine.

Answer 3

In some sense, you've already passed one sort of test to see if you'd be a decent doctor.  You've demonstrated concern for the quality of the care that you will eventually provide.  That's actually not trivial.  It's very hard to teach people how to care about their own quality.  You come to the experience already prepared, in that regard.

Ultimately, the truth is that you cannot know if "being a doctor is right for you" because that's a matter of choice.  If you try to treat it like trying on a pair of pants, you're just going to confuse yourself further.  Judging by the intensity of your curiosity now, you will likely choose to pursue medical education, and my belief is that it would be a rewarding experience for you.  Through that experience, you will come to form opinions about careers in the wide field of medicine, and you will choose one that interests you more intensely than the others.

There are a couple of things you might want to think about as you approach this.  First, the process of becoming a doctor transforms people, and sometimes in unexpected ways.  The person who goes into training as a doctor comes out different than they started.  To a degree, their motivations change and mature, and their interests and goals shift accordingly. Another thing to think about is that not everyone who goes through medical school does the same thing.  There are huge differences between the myriad career tracks originating from medical school.  

Few, if any, who go through medical school are unhappy that they did.   The "drop out rate" is quite low.

I applaud your drive.  You are probably more goal directed than many of your peers.  However, you need to be allocating the vast majority of your energies to the "here and now" rather than the distant future.  I would suggest to think about it as a 90/7/3 division of effort.  Spend 90 percent of your energy planning and paying attention to those aspects of your life and work that occur in the present and up to about a year into the future.  Plan your time and resources, for example, so that you will excel in the classes you're currently taking.  Spend less than 10 percent of your time and energy worrying about or planning your next 5 years.  Spend only a minuscule amount of energy, on average, on things beyond the 5 year horizon.

This strategy speaks as much to maintaining the quality of your work, since you clearly care about it, as it does to maintaining your sanity.  The fact is, life is short ... and sweet.  The sweetness is in experiencing the moment, not in constantly focusing on the future.  

Medical school is an unbelievable experience and I feel privileged that I was given the opportunity to go.  However, college was also an amazing experience, and it will be for you too.  It deserves your fullest attention with only small amounts of mental energy being paid to the distant goal of medical school, at this point in your life.

Not only should the bulk of your energies be dedicated to your college education for the sake of getting the most out of it, but also because it honestly doesn't matter much what you do in college with respect to whether or not you'll do well in medical school!  I was a double major in mathematics and philosophy before doing the science prerequisites for medical school applications.  I was not a "pre-med" till the very end of my college curriculum.  There were many others in my medical school class with diverse and interesting backgrounds.  There is no specific need to be a bioscience major.  It's fine that you know you want to go to medical school, but spend your energy in college developing and feeding a healthy intellectual curiosity that you can apply to all things, including medicine.

If you are interested in gathering flavors of what a career in medicine is like, you can volunteer your time in a hospital setting.  Many hospitals have specific offices or departments set up for exactly this, and you can obtain access with little more than a phone call.  Colleges have pre-med counselors who are often (but not always) helpful resources in terms of being able to find specific physicians that you can "shadow".  Know that shadowing a physician, though, is an extremely narrow view of the medical field!  If you do this, consider shadowing several different doctors in different specialties.

The most important suggestion I can give you, though, is to get access to a doctor who works in medical education and research.  Volunteer your time for working on a medical research project.  Mostly this will involve going through patient charts and abstracting information onto data forms that will later be tabulated for a study.  It's mind-numbingly boring.  However, out of this research you will get two things.  The first and most important is that your name will be put on the list of authors for the paper.  Having participated in research is an enormous advantage in applying to medical school.  The second thing is that you