Every day, I find myself blending more and more into our swamp’s conglomerate of pre-medical students. I never knew a community of people that were just like me would be the most suffocating part of my undergraduate experience. I try not to think of numbers, but it becomes difficult when medical schools expect near-perfect quantitative performances from their applicants. As I’m writing this article in my biochemistry class, I’m looking around the room and seeing other aspiring students just like me. Except this classroom holds roughly 300 students, and medical school acceptance rates guarantee that not everybody in this room will achieve that goal. But the 300 other hopeful students surrounding me is the number I’m least worried about. If you share the same aspiration as I do, you’ll know that the numbers “3.8+” and “516+” bring some type of reaction. I’ve genuinely thought of these two numbers so much that I’ve conditioned myself to panic upon their announcement.
Once I developed this phobia, I realized I needed to change something in my routine. Except, with what time? Balancing college life on top of the 528 different extracurriculars that I need for medical school leaves me absolutely no time to breathe, let alone think for myself. Every meal I eat becomes a date with my assignments, and every real date with my partner becomes focused study time. In fact, I might as well be cheating on my partner, as even when I’m having heart-to-heart conversations with him, I’m thinking about somebody else. But this somebody else is just my older self in medical school, when all of this application chaos finally ends.
Re-reading that last paragraph is already overwhelming me, and I haven’t even begun to dive into what exactly my responsibilities are. To be completely honest with you, I hate the way this anticipation to apply makes me feel. I have horrible imposter syndrome, like everybody else at UF, except it even makes me doubt my need to take breaks for myself and do anything else besides school for once. I incorporated recorded lectures into my gym routine and cannot sit on any bus without pulling my laptop out. I dream about biochemistry pathways and often use enzymes and amino acids in my daily conversations to express how I’m feeling. While this last statement highlights how active my curriculum is in my daily life, which is good for the MCAT, it also carries a curse of causing high irritability and fear. I’ve been a lot more hot-headed and impatient since starting this journey. I admit that I find myself judging somebody’s intellectual level if they aren’t as science-obsessed as I am. But most importantly, I find myself hurting the ones I love the most. I snap at them over minor inconveniences and I give everybody around me the silent treatment when I am the one undergoing something, not them. Knowing I do this absolutely breaks my heart, as they have always been supporting and loving me through the literal agony that this last semester has put me through. So, once I stepped out of my own little world for a second and gained awareness of the rage monster I had become, I knew I had to make a change as soon as possible. To my loved ones reading this, you are all my world, and I’m so sorry for realizing three years too late how I’ve been treating you all.
I don’t want this article to be a sob story of how I was victimized by my pre-medical journey. Instead, I want to teach the other 300+ students in my biochemistry class—as well as the rest of UF’s pre-medical population taking the time reading this—what I learned from my mistakes and why I’m still applying to medical school despite my imperfection. This article is a bit of a vulnerable one, as I will be focusing on my shortcomings instead of my successes. This is almost never seen in online forums, but it’s important to start normalizing mistakes.
During my first semester at UF, I was convinced I was going to graduate within two years. I completed my AA during high school and had a huge head start in my major, so I decided to take general chemistry and physics at the same time. I was still coming off of my ego-trip from high school, as I thought I could do anything since I had a 4.0 GPA while taking college classes before 18. This ego-trip humbled me very hard. I lost the perfect number that semester, and it absolutely destroyed me. I got my first (and hopefully last) C in a class, and it made me doubt whether med school was a good choice for me. Looking back at it now, I don’t think I ever reached that level of disappointment in my life, but I’m really glad I felt what it was like to hit my version of rock bottom. I made an effort to make up for my GPA every following semester, and while pre-med students aren’t recommended to apply with barely-passing grades, I still decided to go for it even if it felt like my chance was ruined.
I’ve also been rejected from 15+ clinical-related jobs all across Gainesville. It was extremely difficult for me to find clinical experience, so I didn’t gain any until the end of my sophomore year, which isn’t really recommended for students applying their junior year due to the lack of longitudinal involvement. Now, I find myself playing catch-up and racking up the hundreds of hours I need for my application so late in the game. While cramming these hours might be seen as leaving clinical hours for the last minute to med schools, I still decided to go for it.
It’s so easy to do things just for the sake of building the perfect med school application. But I realized that this commitment to achieving statistical perfection would never be possible if I didn’t allow myself to be imperfect. If it’s anything that will make me a doctor, it’ll be my human element to make mistakes, learn from them and use them to make me a better person every time. I know that my undergraduate experience will be overlooked by statistics, but these numbers will never even begin to show the mistakes I’ve made along the way to make me a better person. I’m nowhere near the most perfect applicant, but imperfection will never stop me from trying to be a better person for myself, my loved ones and the patients I will one day learn to love. After all, learning how to be a good doctor takes more than just learning about the human body; it also takes learning how to be human in your own body.