I’m in my third year. I did well on the MCAT (but not 520 well like everyone on Reddit has) and applied to a single school because of a requirement issue that I slacked on. I barely have any extracurriculars and only a few volunteering things here and there. I have no publications and am listed on one research project. Most of my test scores ranged wildly from mid 70s to 90s with most sitting in the low to high 80s. I was usually right around or a little above average for school exams and I consider myself a very good test taker. Med school is a rat race that I really don’t have an interest in taking part of right now or in the future. The people who are on all of the research projects and doing all of the extracurriculars don’t suddenly excel in clinic dealing with patients.

For me, I want to get through residency, get far away from academic hospitals, and work to help my patients and get money. Then when I actually have a work-life balance I’ll think about volunteering, teaching, letting high schoolers or college students shadow. The docs I shadowed as a pre-med were all private practice who loved what they did. It was pretty funny imagining them in med school in the city as they were all from farming families and lived in the countryside. But that is what the med school system only exposes you to - academic hospitals were the staff are underpaid and consult for everything and it feels like they do no actual medicine of their own.

Reddit has the same picture. It seems like it’s always someone crying because they played the game wrong and lost. For me, I always wanted to do this. The system to let me do this is utter shit. I have to listen to every doctor try to tell me their way is right, then the next shift it’s a new doctor telling me that what I was just told is wrong. They expect us to be experts in things that they do daily while it’s our first exposure to the clinical side or even their field like OBGYN (step barely covers anything for clinical OBGYB). But in the end I’ll make it through this shitty system and in five-six years be an attending doing my own thing. I can move somewhere, make bank for a while, pay off my loans, then go somewhere else I want to live. In the end, medicine is a job. It’s going to suck some days. I picked it though because I like it and even after the hard days, I look back and it’s crazy how much I’ve learned in the last three years. I try to just do my own thing and be happy with it. Laugh off the crazy dipshits in med school. Laugh off the classmates who are on medtwitter thinking it will bring them something in life. Laugh off the people going out of their way to suck up to rotation coordinators. You don’t have to compete with them if your goals aren’t the same. Imagine where you want to be in a decade and plan for that.