I think far too often in too many things we focus on just one side of the coin.  And that's not necessarily a bad thing, but it can be counter productive if you're looking at the side that prevents you from succeeding, and succeeding big.

While I don't have any specific role models that I look up to, one of the things I have come to admire are people who are masters of their trade - those considered "great" in their respective fields.

One of the things I have come to realize is that a key characteristic such individuals have in common is that they are fearless.  To be more specific, what I mean is that they are not scared to lose.

I think it's important to make this distinction between being fearless of losing and simply being fearless because fearlessness is all too often misconstrued as foolishness when it need not be.

Yes it is true that there is foolish fearlessness.  For example, a fearless person who takes a test without studying is foolish.  Fortunately, that's not the type of person I am talking about and clearly not the type of fearlessness I am advocating for.

A master who is fearless is one who recognizes the failures or losses he may experience, but chooses to not focus on them.  Instead, he focuses on succeeding.

There are many reasons why being fearless is critical to being successful, but there are two that stand out to me.

Focusing on Failure Prevents you From Taking Advantage of Opportunities to Succeed

This past Monday I took my Metabolism and Nutrition mid-term (I think I passed...)  As usual (and as expected) the weekend was a major cram session, and I finally turned into bed at 4 am (where I proceeded to roll around in bed with my mind constructing random thoughts about hypokalemia which made no sense whatsoever).  Basically my whole weekend was spent between phases of studying and whining about studying.

In undergrad, I usually only spent one or two days studying for a test or exam.  Here, I had to start like 3-4days in advance.  So basically, the amount of material I needed to know for my medical school exam was 2-3 times as much as for an undergrad exam.  All that said, the exam questions weren't any harder than any undergrad exam.

If you ask any medical student about whether medical school is challenging, I'm sure they'll say yes, but I'm sure they will also tell you that it's not intellectually harder (though I guess it depends on what their undergrad major was.  But I would say this is probably true for any student with a science background).  Rather, the reason why academics in medical school is more challenging is simply because you have to learn a significantly greater volume of information in a shorter period of time.

Why is Your GPA Important to Admissions Committees?

I have to say that today has been a pretty good day.  Only had three hours of class, and the professors today were actually good.  I think I space out in class more than anyone (e.g. I don't think during class and mindlessly take notes unless the lecturer is really good and/or the material is particularly interesting).

For someone like me, today's main professor did everything right.  First, he had all of the important points listed in his notes.  It really gets on my nerves when lecturers hand out extremely bare notes that makes it impossible for you to both listen/understand AND have all the necessary information.  Don't get me started on lecturers that provide slides with three word sentences where the context of those words is completely unclear.  

Second, he went at a good pace - not too many slides/info, not too few.  Nothing freaks me out more than opening up my lecture notes and seeing that we need to cover 100 slides over the hour (obviously exaggerating, but you get the point).  Conversely, there are those lectures where the lecturer obviously did not need an hour to teach everything, but chose to anyways instead of letting us out early.

Finally, the material was explained in a straight forward and easy to understand manner.  It's never a good sign when everyone is confused by the end of class.

But today's professor did a great job in all three categories, so I was quite happy that I finally felt like a good medical student today (lol).

Passed my DOCH exam

Last fall I went to a talk run by the UofT Internal Medicine Club and at the end of the session there were sign ups for medical students interested in being matched for a shadowing experience with physicians from various non-surgical specialties.  I can't remember what specialties I wrote down, I think it was internal medicine as a first choice (e.g. general internist) and then neurology as a second choice.  I wasn't really thinking too much at the time.

Well I got hooked up with a neurologist (sign, anyone? haha) at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre.  I'm not going to mention his name out of sake of privacy, despite the fact that I thought he was fantastic and I thoroughly enjoyed the experience.

It was my first time going to Sunnybrook, and I was using their shuttle bus service to get there directly from Women's College Hospital (which is downtown and fairly close to me).  Because I didn't have a pass for those hospitals, I had to get a bus pass directly from the hospital, and the person who gave me the pass told me to just tell the driver that I needed the pass for the round trip (even though the pass says it's only meant for one trip).  Obviously, when I hop on the bus, the driver tells me no, I can't use it for a round trip, despite me giving the name of the person I talked with and everything (they were just being responsible of course, so I can't really be upset or anything).  Good thing my buddy had negotiated another pass for me last week from Sunnybrook!

This past Wednesday our first year medical school class was given our final lecture on Management for the year, along with the assignment of producing a one page document that shows where we see ourselves in 10 years (and considering that most of the lecture was about career planning as future physicians, I’d guess they want us to have some sort of focus on where we see ourselves fitting into medicine). There’s a ton of flexibility with this assignment (I know Mike made something in Photoshop), but as you can imagine, I’m choosing to write. And what the heck, I might as well write it here.

The truth is that I have no idea where I’ll be in 10 years. “Obviously you don’t”, you say to yourself, since I can’t see the future. But I really mean that I’m pretty conflicted over where I actually want to be in 10 years. I always thought I knew what I wanted, but the older I get (and presumably the wiser I get) the more I realize I’m not exactly sure what I want when it comes to my career. Perhaps it will help if I give you a brief time line of my thought process since I first began to be interested in medicine.

In high school, I thought I wanted to be a doctor. Not just any doctor, but exactly a “pediatric neurosurgeon”. Boy, that sounded cool. Imagine how awesome it must be to remove brain tumours from kids and completely change their lives. Not to mention how prestigious being a neurosurgeon seemed.

On Monday I had lunch with Alex Shipillo, a good friend of mine who is very smart, driven, and talented, and whom I always have good discussions with and learn a lot from.  The funny thing about my friendship with Alex is that I had talked with him and formed a friendship before we had even met in person (no, it wasn't E-harmony).

Alex and I both attended Shad Valley the same summer, but at different programs, but one of his best friends attended Shad Valley at McMaster with me.  We found each other on Facebook, discovered we had a lot of common interests, and began chatting and sharing ideas.

Since the start of this year, Alex has been the President of Impact - Canada's largest student-run entrepreneurship group.  The funny thing is that it was I, a few years ago, who got Alex in contact with Kunal Gupta, the founder of Impact, after not really even knowing Kunal (I had just met him briefly the week before).  But it seemed like a good person for Alex to contact.  Funny how things turn out.  (Or just my way of reminding Alex that he is in debt to my for life.  Just kidding though, as Alex is talented enough to have gotten to where he is on his own, I'm sure).

At lunch, we started off by catching up with how each other was doing.  I shared with him my progress with a project I was working on (and one you will all soon learn about).

But the biggest thing we talked about was basically about turning my life around and being more productive.  I think I don't come off that way, but I am super, super lazy and am very unproductive.  Really, I am.  I was very busy in high school and kept myself occupied with many cool things, but since undergrad, I have gotten very lazy.  I think it's partially due to my interests changing (and not finding things that really stimulate me) and partially due to my being way to lazy/burned out to take initiative.  I also think it's because I like instant satisfaction, and in the real world, you really got to put in the work and effort before you reap the rewards, and I struggle with that.

One key thing Alex talked to me about was developing better habits.  He told me that if I could pick up a habit and perform it 21 days in a row, it would likely stick.  So my plan is to pick up a new habit every 7 days, and hopefully after 21 days of performing each habit, it'll stick.  And I'll slowly pile on new and improved habits that will become a part of my everyday life.

So the first habit I've decided to pick up is getting at least 7.5 hours of sleep every night.  To be fair, I already broke this habit last night (in my defense, I was studying for my Determinants of Community Health Exam today).  Hopefully I won't break it again for a long time.  Some future habits I'm thinking about picking up include a small bit of daily studying, daily workouts, regular productivity with my blogging, etc.

I feel really unproductive a lot of the time, and hopefully this will help.

Oh yeah, big changes coming - like I've been mentioning for a long time, but things are finally ready.  MedHopeful is moving onto bigger and better things.  More to come in my next post.

As I have mentioned many times before, I feel like our education system was developed with altruism and nobility at its core. I have seen it all the way from elementary school to undergraduate university (though obviously much less so at higher levels at education). While I think it’s nice that we’re taught to do “good” things, I think it is very problematic when this obsession with an ideal world clouds our ability to think rationally and critically. One of the most common examples I remember is being taught over and over again that “desiring money makes you a bad person”, etc. I don’t want to talk about money today because that’s a big topic I want to save for another day, but suffice to say, I think making simplistic statements like “desiring money makes you a bad person” is pretty ridiculous and dangerous, especially at a time when we should be helping young people to think instead of shoving ridiculous statements with no context down their throats. I’ll just stop here with the whole money thing and say that if you’re going to judge someone, judge them based on not just how they use money, but also realize that there is diversity in personal preference regarding luxury and even diversity in how that relates to our moral obligations to share with others.

I am not saying altruism is a bad thing. Being unselfish and serving others is something I highly respect and value, and is an important quality we all need to have at one point or another, particularly in the medical profession. It does become problematic, however, when you start taking it to the extreme and believing that only altruism is good and selfishness is bad in everything.

We all need to be selfish at some point, and anyone who denies ever being selfish needs a reality check. If you’re reading my blog right now (and I’m assuming because you want to and find enjoyment/value in it), I dare you to ask yourself whether this isn’t a selfish act considering that you could be out volunteering or cleaning up the park or something more altruistic. If you agree with me that we can’t be altruistic all the time (or that even if we could, it’s unhealthy), then let’s keep going forward. Clearly, there are times when altruism isn’t in our best interests and it has nothing to do with being a good or bad person – sometimes it’s just a choice.

I sit here typing this relaxed and in a pretty darn good mood. Although my first semester of medical school actually finished last Thursday, I've been too busy/lazy to actually sit down and write anything.

As I mentioned previously, one of the courses I take in medical school is the Arts and Science of Clinical Medicine (ASCM I) where we learn basic clinical skills. So far this year we learned to take patient history, vital signs (heart/respiratory rate and blood pressure), and some physical exams (precordial, peripheral vascular). Next semester we will learn more physical exams like neurological, abdomen, etc.

Okay not really much of a roller coaster, but definitely some ups and downs - sort of.

This morning I did my last anatomy dissection ever. We looked at the posterior part of the forearm and dorsal part of the hand (i.e. the back of the arm from the forearm to the fingers). Being able to see all of the muscles and their tendons, and essentially knowing how the arm and hand works mechanically was pretty cool.