Hello I’m Phei, I’m currently a 4th year medical student. I grew up in the Borneo part of Malaysia.
Starting your journey at Edinburgh Medical School can be both exciting and daunting! Whether you are wondering how to navigate your first lectures, explore the city, or keep on top of your stress levels, here are five essential tips to help you thrive in the whirlwind that is first year.
1.Don’t tip the scale
Life continues while you’re a medical student – love and loss, life and death, celebrations and heartaches, part-time jobs and caring responsibilities. So, always remember to balance yourself out. There’s a time for work, for not working at all, for enjoying time with those you love, and enjoying living life in general. You need to make sure you find the space for them, based on your needs and wants.
It is easy to get ahead of yourself in the first year of medical school, but remember that, as cliché as it is, medical school is truly a marathon, not a sprint. So,pace yourself; consistency is key.
2.Develop your daily habits
One of the key methods to maintain consistency is to develop a system. As quoted from Atomic Habits (worth a read if you haven’t heard of it), “You do not rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems”.
You should understand your own priorities and goals, and spend time developing the optimal system (collection of daily habits) to achieve what you desire.
In terms of academics, remember that what works for others may not work for you. Regardless of how you study, there are two key principles to practise: active recall and spaced repetition. These will help you manage the trickiest aspect of medicine – remembering the flood of content.
3.Self-care is never an unnecessary expense
Frankly, you can’t take care of others, including patients, if you don’t take care of yourself. Don’t skimp on sleep (fine, negotiable occasionally) and your health (non-negotiable), and that includes mental health. It is important to maintain your friendships, relationships, interests and hobbies outside of medicine because medicine alone won’t keep you warm at night. As stressful as it may get at times, the medicine course should not entirely consume the next five or six years of your life.
4. Embrace collaboration
Medicine is a vocation, a humanity and a practiced discipline in addition to being a science – as you’ll come to explore more in your Social and Ethical Aspects of Medicine (SEAM) module. You should embrace the opportunity to collaborate with your peers in your Problem Based Learning (PBL) tutorials and Student Selected Component (SSC) projects.
Outside of those environments, it is valuable to spend time learning from/with others around you, including those more experienced, at the same level, and often below.
5. If in doubt, ask
It is absolutely okay (and perfectly normal) to not hit the ground running immediately in your first year. For many of you, it will be the first time you’ll be seeing cadavers in anatomy tutorials. There will also be lots of new content in your biomedical lectures and you may find the learning curve to be slightly steeper than you’re used to at times.
Therefore, ask if in doubt – ask questions if you don’t understand a concept, ask for help if you need support or guidance. There are thousands of people who’ve walked your path before, and unless there are extraordinary circumstances, there is no reason you can’t thrive and enjoy medical school, and therefore, you will!
