I don’t claim to be an authority on how we should approach life in medical school. I know that everyone’s experience is different, and we all have our own daily problems and battles. I am not writing this because I believe my interpretation is the only correct one, or because I feel compelled to bless the rest of the world with all the knowledge and experience I’ve gained as a first-year medical student (kidding). In fact, to be honest, I’m writing this for myself. I sometimes struggle to organize my thoughts and communicate them effectively, and writing is a medium that allows me to overcome that – I can hit backspace as many times as I want. Maybe the few of you who read this will have similar thoughts, or not at all. Maybe it will start a conversation, either in your head or with those around you, and that would be great. Or maybe you will stop reading this right now because it’s not that well written, which I’m aware of. I’m fine either way. I promise not all of this is so defensive.
Last winter, I flew back to my hometown of Mechanicsburg, which resembles the ninth circle of hell around that time of year. I was excited to see my family and escape the world of medical school for a week. Of course, I expected to be asked about how my time in Arizona had been and what medical school was like. I found that often, my sentences would start with, “Well, it’s really hard, but…” and something about how I still like it regardless of how hard it may be. My older brother — being how every older brother must be — would respond with, “What’s so hard about it?”. I would typically reiterate the analogy we had heard during our Intro to Medicine block: medical school is like trying to drink from a fire hose, symbolic of the amount of information you are asked to read/learn/apply in such a short amount of time. In my mind, however, I knew that the volume of information we were tasked with learning did not explain how difficult medical school could be. I knew that my brother was mainly joking, but like a good, anxious medical student, I overanalyzed this question.
I think part of what makes medical school so hard is that the threshold of success has been raised to something out of sight for perhaps the first times in our lives, and, frankly put, we like success. We have experienced success numerous times leading up to this point. It is the reason we are all here today. There is no doubt that getting accepted to medical school is hard – it is not a trivial path, nor one I would want to repeat. Still, acceptance to medical school was tangible. There were certain criteria we all had to meet, and through various walks of life, we received our white coats. Am I saying it was easy to get to this point? Of course not. I am saying that we have all been successful to this point, and for the most part, our successes easily outweighed our failures.
Stepping into medical school, that is no longer the case. In medical school, I believe one of the biggest learning curves is becoming comfortable with failure. One of the reasons this comfort with failure can be so hard is because we get caught on the idea that success is exclusive of failure. Going back to the analogy of the fire hose, it is as though we all expect to not miss a drop despite the obvious impossibility of that task. We have this perception that to be wrong is to be less intelligent than those who are right. We shy away from the vulnerability of failure because we see it as a weakness. Not only this, but we are cognizant of the fact that our audience — as we project these self-proclaimed weaknesses — are our classmates that we hold in high esteem: classmates who we see as devoid of these weaknesses we feel we have, despite how illogical that may be. In the past, this discomfort was masked by (almost) continual success. Now that we are in medical school, failure has become a close friend and that, at least for me, has been hard.
So, why am I writing this? I promise it is not because I think medical school is a futile effort destined for failure – I think medical school is a privilege, and I am thankful and happy to be here. However, we are entering a profession of uncertainty, and with that, there will undoubtedly be failure. I believe that medical school, in addition to teaching us the concepts and clinical skills to be a physician, is a place for us to be vulnerable. It is a place for us to be wrong, and to be okay with being wrong in front of one another. It is a place where we can get comfortable with this idea of uncertainty, and not let the fear of failure keep us from being our best selves. Medical school is hard, and it should be. Framing failure in a different light may just make it a little bit easier.
Ben Conner is a medical student in the Class of 202(1/4). He completed his undergraduate degree in Biological Anthropology at Pennsylvania State University and his Master’s degree in Biomechanics at the University of Delaware. He enjoys fly-fishing, hiking, going to the drive-ins with friends, and spending time with his cats. He is pursuing a career in academic medicine.