Long Weekends and Friday Night

Last week was our white coat ceremony.  It was lovely and my parents came and we hung out with my boyfriends parents so the whole weekend was one big family fest.  It was awesome seeing my parents and I was super sad when they left.  What didn't happen was studying.  Now, I did probably get in about 4 hours or so of studying over the entire weekend, which any medical student will tell you is peanuts.  The sad truth is I've spent most of this week catching up (as have most of my classmates).  Super unfun times for us all.  However, the silver lining is this weekend is a holiday weekend which means we have an extra day.  Now most people's minds go like this: "yay!  I have a day off!!"  for me the thought process is more like this, "Ha ha ha (continue maniacal laugh) they can't make me learn any thing if we don't have to be at school!!!!."  So, while it's not really a day off, it is a day where they can't shove hours and hours of more material down our throats.  Which makes me envision those geese that get force fed so they develop delicious fatty livers.  That's how I feel most of the time.  Like a tortured, force fed goose.  At least my school makes a special effort to make sure we have natural light in our study spaces.

I would like to close with a conversation between my friend (F) and I (Me) at the end of the day Friday.

M: What are you up to this weekend

F: Flying to california to see my girlfriend.  

M: What are you doing in cali?

F: Studying mostly but we might actually get in a whole 22 minutes of tv too.  You know, on the internet so there are no commercials.  What are you doing this weekend?

M: Studying mostly, but also moving.  My boyfriend wanted me to come into the city tonight for drinks but I think it's a bit much with trying to catch up from last weekend and also moving

F: Yeah, going all the way to the city for drinks sounds pretty awful.

M: Totally, way too much time and effort.  That's what I told my boyfriend, but he's not in med school so it's difficult explaining these things some times.

F: Yeah, he'll learn to just not even ask.  Asking just makes you sad.

M: Totally.

End

The MCAT really was useful!!

I just wanted to write a quick little post about how the MCAT really does come back in med school.

When you study for the MCAT, the studying is more about dissecting questions and coming up with the correct answer based on basic information than it it is about stuffing facts into your brain.  You have to be aware of words like ALWAYS, NEVER, NOT, ect.  For pre-meds suffering through the MCAT, I promise all your work and toil will not go down the toilet when you get to med school.  Med school exams are not comprised of simple questions.  You have to be able to break down the terminology, decide what is really important in the question and what isn't.  (ie. you see the name of some random disease you have never heard of in the question, but you need to replace it with "some pathology" in your head to make the question make sense).  This isn't because the professors are trying to trick you (once you are in, they are all on your side, they want you to graduate and become a good doctor), it's because, for the rest of your life, you will need to be thinking through complex, multi-step questions. 

As many of us are preparing for this first exam, I keep hearing people say "oh I feel like this is MCAT time all over again."  Most of us probably lived out 3-5 months of really intense study time.  You will need to sustain that when you are in med school, so not only is the MCAT good practice for dissecting questions, it's good training for developing effective study skills.  Remember, med school is about organizing a lot of material in your brain in a short amount of time and then being able to turn it around and apply it to real-world situations.  Sound familiar?

Med School, The analogy

Someone in my class posted this video on our facebook page as an analogy to how we feel trying to learn all this content.  Couldn't help but share:

MS1, day 1

Today was the official first day of classes at med school.  I think we were all expecting an easy day with course introductions, lab protocol instructions and the like.  The beginning of the day was pretty relaxed.  We started out spending 30 minutes hearing about histology, then went upstairs to meet our "first patients."  I was surprised as I was quite nervous in the moments before they removed the shroud even though I have seen 3 dissected cadavers and countless surgeries.  After lunch we had 2 hours of anatomy lecture.  The first lecture was pretty low key.... just basic anatomical terms.  The second lecture was where the pace picked up.  We learned a lot of material in one short hour.  It was the most fascinating, engaging lecture I have ever attended.  Our professor is awesome.  Even so, everyone was in a bit of a daze at the end, and my brain was more than fried.  My plans for an easy, low key weekend are shot, and I will definitely be spending the weekend in library.

Here we go.....

Shock and Awe

Two weeks ago, I found out I got my dream gap-year job: I was going to be a full time research assistant for a prominent surgeon at Hospital for Special Surgery.  For a pre-med with dreams of ortho, this is the most ideal job ever.  I would get to watch surgeries, I would do research, and I would get to network with some of the best orthopedic surgeons in the country.

A week and 6 days ago, I found out I was accepted to medical school.  After about 24 hours of deliberating, freaking out, and generally trying to convince myself that this was, in fact, reality, I accepted my position at New York Medical College, and informed my no-longer-future employers of my regrets.  

It is amazing how one e-mail can change the entire trajectory of an entire year.  I was in the middle of re-applying to medical school, and luckily, had only spent money on my primary application.  Mike and I had accepted the reality of continuing to live in a studio apartment for another year, and I was going to work full-time and finish my master's degree in exercise physiology.  We were going to take leisurely weekend trips upstate, and spend the year completing little projects that would ultimately lead us to entry into this next phase of our lives.  Now, we have signed a paper stating that we will be out of our Upper West Side apartment by August, we are looking for a home in the suburbs, and I will be a medical student in less than a week.  It feels sort of like walking across a nice bridge, knowing that you will get to the icy river after a leisurely hike, and when you get there, you are aware of the steps you will take to ease yourself into the frigid waters for a nice refreshing swim. Then a gust of wind pushes you off the bridge and you land in the water, reeling from the impact, and your partner has nothing to do but jump in after you.

All of this said, I am thrilled with the turn of events.  

Run baby run

I decided about a month ago that I would start running.  I hate running, but I feel I need to add cardio to my life.  It's hard to continue to convince myself that yoga and the occasional dance class will suffice a exercise when I am constantly being told by every researcher, trainer, and professor in my master's program that it, in fact, is not.  I'm well aware of the benefits of cardiovascular training: increased metabolic rate, increased muscle tone, decreased fat composition, decreased heart rate, decreased risk of cardiovascular disease, better mood, etc etc.  I am also, now, well aware that yoga and dance do not provide the necessary duration or intensity necessary for them to be considered good cardiovascular training.  However, I have avoided activities like running, swimming, cycling because I find them torturous and incredibly boring.

So, why running?  It's free, it's one of the more efficient ways of getting in my cardio, I can do it anywhere, it's high impact so it increases my bone density, and I can catch up on the news while doing it.  All good reasons.  Maybe one day I'll even come to enjoy running, like when people in an arranged marriage eventually fall in love.

Now here's the masochistic part.  I haven't started running yet (though I did buy shoes and a whole bunch of socks), but have registered for my first half-marathon (in October).  I've also told as many people as possible that I will be participating in this half marathon so that I can't back out without being heavily shamed.  Why?  Because if I don't have a goal in mind, then I won't start, nor will I continue to torture myself with this boring, repetitive exercise.  I've been fit all of my life.  I mean, as an adult, I've been fit as part of my occupation: as a dancer and dance teacher, then as a yoga instructor, now as an exercise physiology grad student.  I'm also just vain enough to be willing to torture my self for the sake of wanting to look hot.  I should be able to do this, if not for my heart and lungs then at least for my ass and legs.  In fact, if I can prepare myself for the MCAT (4 hours 20 minutes of testing, 4 hours and 50 minutes total) in three months, then surely I can train for a half marathon in five months.  So, that's the plan.  Start doing a new form of exercise that I've never liked, train for a race that I know next to nothing about, and be ready to run 13.2 miles in a real race in five months.  Excellent.

Study like a runner not a ballet dancer

This round, I've been trying to think about preparing for the MCAT the same way I would train for a marathon.  The problem is I know almost nothing about training for marathons.  I do know that academics and athletics share common features: in order to do well, you must put in the work; overtraining can lead to reduced performance and burnout, and you need to take active rests.  Even though I've been an athlete for most of my life, I did not learn any of this in my years of ballet training.  In fact most ballet dancers (and teachers) are kind of idiots when it comes to smart training as the notion of extremes without logical reason is passed on generation to generation.  In my years of idiocy, I failed to recognize things like two technique classes in a day are not necessarily better than one (your ankle hurts? maybe you need to take even more technique classes! 6 per week just isn't enough), taking a break might actually enhance performance every once in a while (but if I take a week off, it'll take a month to get back what I lost!), and eating will benefit your training (I'm hungry, but if I eat the sandwich, then I'll get fat).  In my undergraduate studies, I went with my ballet dancer mentality of "more is always better" even though, like in ballet, this theory was never actually demonstrated to work, except in rare cases.  I failed to recognize that there is a threshold that anyone reaches and once you surpass that threshold the only way to go is down where you eventually crash and burn in a pile of burnout.  Taking a rest, stopping to recover for half a day, and admitting that I needed to cut back was not hard core, and clearly, only hard core people win.

My folly was to fail to recognize that smart people are actually the people who win.  What I have learned in graduate school, is that you must train in cycles, that there need to be active rest periods, and that one needs to plan so that peak performance occurs when it counts.  (Thank you exercise physiology course work) So, after a very long tangent, we come by to my attempt to approach my MCAT studying like one would approach a marathon: gradually increasing with variations along the way with efforts culminating in peak performance.  In addition to this overall approach, I've recognized that cross training is also important.  When I was dancing, I did Pilates and later, yoga (I never said I was a complete fool).  For the MCAT, well, I also do yoga.  The problem with academia is one can get trapped in this mindset of "I can't lose that hour, I need it for studying!!"  Often, this thought comes after 3 hours of being largely unproductive, except for maybe in updating my facebook status a bunch of times and watching videos of cute puppies on youtube.  For anyone, if this starts to happen, it's much better to take an hour, get some exercise (or eat ice cream, I don't know, to each his own).  In my case, yoga is perfect cross training for academics.  I physically get exercise, I stretch out all the parts that start to hurt after 6 hours of not leaving the couch except to pee and eat, and, most importantly, I take my mind to a place of calm focus.  For an hour I decisively do not think except for maybe the occasional "you want us to hold that for how long?!" or "action potential...gah... shut up brain...... downward dog..... the equation for volta....shhhh.....baby cobra...."

In summary, this method has appeared to work.  It still takes a level of discipline and hard-coreness (After all, the hour study break isn't beneficial if it turns into a half day study break) but it is much more manageable.  Rather than hopping between extremes of intense study marathons and drunken binges, as per college, or doing nothing but studying or working all the time (even though studying often consisted of looking at one page for a really long time and thinking about how much I didn't want to be studying), a la last year's MCAT disaster, I am trying to combine an effort walk the middle path (yes, I'm using honkey yoga language, I'm a yoga instructor, what do you expect) with the sensibility of a runner doing smart training.