Year Three, Part I

Now junior year should be included as part of the prep work for med school applications and MCAT, but I've separated it out for personal reasons.

Between school years, there's this thing called summer. And if you're premed, you should probably be doing something during it. Like I mentioned earlier, my first two were spent volunteering at a hometown hospital. Don't get me wrong, this was an outstanding experience: I loved the techs I worked with and they loved having me (who doesn't like free labor?). I got to see a different side of medicine, through techs' eyes. I enjoyed running xray films, checking out CTs, and sitting in on nuc med. The techs were more than happy to teach me bits and pieces along the way. One of the coolest things someone's said to me came from an xray tech who said that "You'd make a good ER doc - you've got the laid back personality they seem to have." Self-promotion aside, the nuc med tech (Skip) and I were pretty tight and he is one of the wiser people I've met in my 21 years of life.

As one might surmise by this point, the summer between sophomore and junior year probably had something happen that I consider pretty important. Like I said, I was volunteering at a local hospital during summer 2005. That and this activity to be disclosed, however, were a backup plan. I was looking to work ( :-O money? nooo...) at a local hospital on one of the wards and was looking to a friend's father for a reference. It so happens that this person is a family practitioner. After exchanging emails, he said he'd be happy to serve as a reference. However, he also noted that he'd be happy to have me shadow him in his clinic. I figured if the hospital thing fell through that I'd fall back to volunteering and maybe take him up on shadowing. After a month of not hearing back from the hospital, I went back to volunteering and decided what the hell, why not shadow.

Hands down, best decision. Ever. After the first couple of days, it was just just like *bam.* And by bam, I mean "Whoa. Yeah, this is it. This is what I want to do with my life. I want to wake up and do this." Does it sound lame shadowing 13 hours/week for a summer, when said shadowing involves standing next to a wall (well-dressed, I might add) and observing? Some might say so. But when this lame activity is something I don't mind getting up early for and actually look forward to then that's good news. In addition to getting to hang around the clinic and see what a doctor's daily life was kinda like, I also followed him out for nursing home rounds and to a free clinic. At the latter, he let me interview patients before they were seen and that was pretty cool...especially when he was able to look at my notes and had nothing to add to my observations. Granted, that didn't occur too often, but still. And while at his regular clinic, I also conducted a mini-clinical (note: *very* small) study about prescription compliance. While the study was kinda cool, just talking to the patients was enough for me. If the doc trusted me enough to be around them, then the patients trusted me and opened up about whatever I asked - this was a phenomenal feeling. Along those lines, I was amazed at how no patients really objected to having some random kid in the room while they discussed their medical problems and lives. Overall, I learned a lot about medicine (informally) and about myself.

There it is. Shadowing. In addition to the extracurriculars I mentioned earlier, this is one thing every premed should do, as it both adds clinical experience and lets you get a more intimate look of what you're getting yourself into. After all, entering medicine is no light decision. I'm not saying that to sound like a badass or anything, it's just the truth. I mean you've got four years of undergrad where you have to worry about your grades and building up an application for med school. If you get in, then the next four years go something like this, from what I've been able to gather at this point. Your first two years are spent having a shitton of information thrown at you a lot faster than it ever was in undergrad. After said two years, you then get tested on this information on USMLE Step I (the first part of your board exams). After second year, you get no summer since you start clinical rotations. Again, going off what I've heard - you rotate through the major services such as surgery, psych, ob/gyn, pediatrics, internal medicine, family practice both to gain relevant clinical experience and let you know what you want to do in medicine. Fourth year you finish up required rotations, take elective rotations, and start applying for residency - kinda similar to applying for med school, which I'll talk about later. Residency: training in the specialty that you want to go into, ranging from three years in family medicine to upwards of seven for surgery. Oh, you want to sub-specialize? Hello fellowship and another couple of years of training. In addition to the time commitment and work, you'll be going into significant debt for med school and making not so much during residency. Like I said, not a decision to be made lightly.

So shadowing for me was the kicker (in addition to another activity to be named later) for letting me know that I'm making the right decision in medicine and that it really is what I want to do. Hell, I've mentioned shadowing and this future activity at every interview I've been to. Not because it's what they want to hear, but because it's my story. Well, I guess it's what they want to hear, but you know what I mean. Going into college, medicine was a logical choice. "Hey, I like science. Huh, I want to help people. Ooo, medicine." But shadowing gave me that gut-feeling that put out any doubt of medicine as a career choice. It made my junior year that much better, knowing that I was working toward something that I wanted to do.

About my junior year. In working towards getting into medical school, I had decided to do research. I'd been told that it's a pretty big plus to have on your application, so I decided to go after some of that. Ah yes, the theme of doing things you're interested in. My intro psych class was pretty interesting to me, so I decided to look around for a neuro-related lab. I interviewed with two labs and decided that one was doing cooler stuff than the other one. And so began my work in neuroscience. Why research? Well, neurogenesis just sounded cool to me, so I wanted a part of that. And now in retrospect, it's not a bad idea to at least have some experience in the field through which many medical advancements are made, aka research and academic medicine. Coincidentally, the lab I work in has quite a few M.D./Ph.D. candidates in it, and I don't know how they do it. But anyway, research involves being able to approach a problem, formulate hypotheses, and testing their validity, and then modifying your actions appropriately. *Gasp,* this is not unlike things you will be doing as a doctor with patients. Again, this is in retrospect, because I definitely didn't think about all these things when I was looking for research, I just wanted the coolest sounding lab (again, neurogenesis just sounded sweet). Having said that, I'm grateful for and happy about the experience and things I've learned and continue to learn from research and how it relates to medicine.

And with my shadowing experience kicking my ass and telling me to do what I can to help my application, I became more active in the organizations I was members to. I volunteered more often for the premed club I was in and ditto for the EMS club. And shocker here, I had fun getting more involved and walked away with things to talk about. The best effect of the shadowing experience is it gave me light at the end of tunnel, albeit a very long tunnel. Biochem is a good example. Sure I bitched and moaned about having to learn the Krebs cycle, glycolysis, gluconeogenesis, and oxidative phosphorylation (*enter nightmares of NAD/NADH and cytochromes). But I knew that it was a means to an end. Granted, it was still not fun - but at least I knew it would get me somewhere, hopefully.