One of the lessons that I learned in my PhD program that I should have had front and center when starting medical school is that we are all good at different things and we SHOULD NOT COMPARE OURSELVES TO OUR PEERS!!! When I was in my last semester of coursework in my doctorate, I had to take an advanced statistical methods class and my committee and methodologist suggested that hierarchical linear modelling (HLM) would be useful for my dissertation and future career goals. Math and statistics were never my strong suite and in undergraduate, I like to say that somehow, I screwed around and earned a B in the class. In graduate school, my biostatistics and epidemiology grades always hovered between B’s and B+’s. In contrast, I always felt at home discussing community & behavioral health theory, social determinants of health, and of course, I loved writing. Always earned A’s in those classes.
So anyway, I got to HLM and was soon in over my head. From where I sat, it looked like all of my classmates were getting it and I wasn’t. I thought that my professor, Dr. Deroche (God rest her soul) thought that I was the most incompetent student EVER in life! I was always submitting my work a little past the deadline and it seemed like there was always something that I was forgetting something in my regression models. Somehow, I messed around and earned a B in the class (and in retrospect, gained a ton of confidence in my abilities to be a quantitative researcher but that is a story for another day). Later, after my comp exams, I spoke with a classmate who’d taken the class with me and she mentioned that a number of folks struggled in the class and that there were only one or two students who really got it. I learned a VALUABLE lesson. Several actually. 1) We’re all good at different things but that doesn’t mean that you can’t be proficient at the thing that challenges you; 2) NEVER compare yourself to your peers; you never know what their struggles are (and as I am finding out, nearly everyone is struggling with something in medical school); 3) If you are determined enough, do what you need to do to succeed; though I struggled in HLM, I found some books that explained things in a better way and I went to Dr. Deroche for tutoring; and finally, 4) In graduate school, I discovered that its not usually the smartest who make it out. It’s those who work the hardest. Medical school is no different.
My Achilles tendon in medical school is gross anatomy. I don’t find it to be taught particularly well, at least for me, and I normally don’t do well in rote memorization type classes. And believe me, there is a LOT to memorize in gross anatomy. The course and my seeming inability to retain the information has been weighing on me (give me biochemistry and physiology all day! I LOVE spitting out pathways and talking about the conceptual nature of physiology) to the point where I was genuinely depressed. I decided to do something about it though and I went out and bought me a skeleton to help with learning all the muscle origin/insertions and actions. I dusted off my anatomy coloring book and Rohen’s atlas and I am re-watching Acland’s Anatomy. The biggest thing though, is that I am choosing a different attitude about gross anatomy.
Whatever you are struggling with in medical school (or grad school, pharmacy school, DNP, etc…) just know that you CAN master the material. It may take you a little longer and you may have to do something like buy a skeleton, but you can master whatever your weakest subject is. You got this!
