Last Updated on June 26, 2022 by Laura Turner
The minute the tasseled hat flew off of my head after “Pomp and Circumstance”, I knew I was no longer a kid. What a startling realization–one I’m sure many of you have experienced–for someone who has led a fairly sheltered life! Let me confess one little thing: I was scared. Not just an ordinary level of scared. The kind of scared that catches you by surprise to the point where you start bawling on your graduation day with your bedazzled cap and a brand new bachelor’s degree in your hand. I was taking a gap year and had no idea which direction my life was going to go next. I knew what I had been working for my entire life: medical school. But this was not the feeling I had anticipated when I completed my undergraduate career. I had practically planned my life out since I was in middle school: I was going to go straight from high school to college to medical school to a career. But things had changed; I had grown a little tired of the academic life and wanted to experience something new. I wanted to live a little! But figuring out what to do next and how to do it was intimidating.
I pondered exactly what that entailed. I toyed with ideas of leaving the country just to explore or embark on a medical mission trip (because you know, how can my life as a pre-med be complete without checking that off the list?). Little did I know that “living a little” meant moving back in with my parents and working a full time job with a one hour each way commute in heavy traffic. It sounds horrible, and I’m not going to lie about that fact that it was for a little while. I had to adjust to living with family after having near complete freedom for four years, which is no easy task. I was also not used to sitting in one place, one desk in one area for eight hours at a time. In college I could manage my time however I wanted to, spending time with my friends, undergraduate research, various extracurricular activities, and studying. So being cramped in the same setting day after day with all of my coworkers talking about their children and grandchildren was quite a shock. This feeling carried on for a few months . . . until I realized that my coworkers cracked jokes about last night’s episode of John Stewart. They were pretty cool for three ladies in their sixties, and I discovered they enjoyed much more than knitting and quilting patterns (sorry for the stereotype, but they really did remind me of my cute old grandmother–almost to the point where I wanted to ask them to bake me chocolate chip cookies). And when I came home to an empty house, I was disappointed that I couldn’t hang out with my parents after work. Wait, what? Hang out with my parents? No, really. They are actually regular people with really cool personalities and, to their credit, they’re hilarious. No longer were they just the people who had financed me for 22 years and fretted over every cut and scrape. They were my friends. I had never, ever anticipated this. Looking back, I thank my lucky stars I got a chance to take a year off. Gap years are not for everyone (I’d really like to emphasize this), and as scared as I was after graduation to embark on mine, it turned out to be a lot better than I expected.
Now I am a mere week away from starting my first year of medical school. I want to take all of you along with me, so I’m committed to capturing every fleeting thought, memory, and raw experience as I begin my journey. As many of you SDNers know, this is an experience that is hard fought for and few people are lucky enough to get. And even those that do get in are afraid that they are alone in everything they are feeling. I want to share my journey so that hopefuls and medical students alike get a peek into someone who has been through the rigorous application process and is going through the daunting adventure that is medical school along with them. Medicine is much more than a pretty white coat and a shiny stethoscope, so I’m here to expose its raw underbelly. Strap in and join me on this crazy ride!
“Chronicles of a Med Student” is a monthly column by Adelle, a first year medical student at a university in the Midwest. She enjoys hiking, baking, traveling, and eating scrambled eggs on the weekend.
Adelle is a 4th year medical student who loves to hike, bake chocolate chip cookies, and doodle on the corners of papers.