Arya Shah, MS4

Los Angeles as a city was probably responsible for my decision to pursue a career in medicine, as it’s a city fraught with inequities. Most glaring was what I saw working on Skid Row at a needle exchange clinic. We had patients who were homeless but we also had patients from affluent neighborhoods of Orange County. Folks would bring in hundreds of used needles in the hopes of minimizing the negative effects of their addictions on themselves and on other people. Some may have called them non-compliant patients but to the people who ran the clinic, they were individuals doing their best. I would hear stories from clients about doctors who refused to treat them, or health care providers who yelled at them. I had one homeless man tell me that his doctor jumped backwards when he found out he was an injection drug user with an abscess. This shocked me, as I know drug use is a universal issue that so many people deal with on a daily basis; I couldn’t fathom a physician being so terrified, disgusted, and unprofessional in the face of something that I see as a sign of human suffering. I wouldn’t say that my decision to pursue medicine was based on my time at the clinic. I’ve wanted to do medicine for as long as I can remember, but my time in the clinic really showed me why: health issues, addictions and all, are some of the most graphic examples of human suffering. Even if I can’t cure you, or even if I can’t make you stop using heroin, at least I can work with someone to show them that I value their efforts to shoot up once a day instead of twice.

What does your typical day of medical school look like?

A typical day in medical school depends on the year: Year 1: 8-12 class on most days, with some 8am-5pm days when we have standardized patients, extra class for anatomy, etc. Mostly a lecture based year with some standardized clinical encounters. Year 2: 8-5 lectures with one or two weeks a morning dedicated to hospital-based doctoring small groups. This was when we had systems-based lectures, as well as when we started learning how to take a basic H&P. Year 3: Clerkships, in which days vary based on the service and the schedule that you are following. Certain days may be longer when you have to study for shelf exams or for Step 2. Year 4: Totally variable, as schedules work around residency interview season. Elective and core rotation requirements vary by school.

I would say structure of classes is similar, in that there is a mixture of large group lectures and small group discussion. The one difference is that students are treated like adult learners with enough autonomy to make decisions about how they learn best. Lectures are taped, a word document syllabus is often provided, and attendance isn’t always mandatory. Additionally, lectures frequently provided the basic information, but synthesizing it and finding ways to use the information to answer complicated questions (as opposed to just memorizing rote) is something that’s a little bit different in medical school.

To be honest, it hasn’t really. I was always a person who liked to study the material on my own at first, and then discuss it with other people to solidify the concepts. I also learn well by teaching to others. That was something that helped me in undergrad and continued to be useful for me in medical school.

Looking back on when you were applying to medical schools and deciding which school was the best fit, what do you think are the most important things to learn about a medical school when you are deciding which school is right for you?

When you do interviews, I’d recommend telling someone your dream job. Whether that’s to be an internist in aerospace medicine, a child a family psychiatrist that uses art and narrative, or a surgeon that does in utero fetal surgery, tell them and see how they respond. The school that is the best fit for you will have people that are excited about your passions and willing to connect you with people who will support you, no matter how far-fetched the idea.

I think my decision to pursue psychiatry was solidified by my mentors. It wasn’t because they convinced me to chose it. It was that I was so taken by their personalities, by their conversation styles, and how they were so different as people and yet all so effective at connecting with the individuals they worked with. Also, most importantly, I felt like I connected with them as people in terms of interests outside of medicine as well as in terms of perspectives on health care practice.

I’ve realized that the medicine I’m being taught to practice now is not the medicine that we will be practicing 10 years from now. I’ve learned how important it is to recognize problems in the system that are going to have to be resolved. I also know how important it is to keep up with research and literature, as half of what we learn in medical school will undoubtedly proven wrong sometime soon!

I come from a very small medical school, where each class is usually somewhere between 40 and 50 students. No two people are even remotely alike, and yet I feel that I’m close to every single one of my classmates. It’s a tight knit community in a small town that revolves around it’s large academic medical center. This makes it a really unique environment to go to medical school. I have 50 people that I learn with. I’m totally different from all of them, but I’ve become close to them. It just goes to show that in life we’ll never only be working with people that we know or get along with. In the end, we have to find ways to jive with whoever ends up on our team, and that was something that happened naturally among our medical school class.

Take more time to pursue my interests in the humanities. I think that undergraduate education forces us to pursue all the things that we think that we are “supposed” to do to get into medical school. However, what I’ve learned is that medical schools are looking for genuine human beings, with lives, interests, and passions outside of research and hard sciences.

Like I said above, dedicate time to writing, painting and literature. It’s important to nurture your passions outside of medicine, both for your sanity now and to sustain a lifelong career that can otherwise be extremely draining.