Recently, I found myself waiting for someone at Mount Sinai Hospital. To my joy, there was a Chapters bookstore on the main floor (a bookstore in a hospital! How awesome is that?) So there I was, in all my frazzled med student glory, with my coat and backpack on, wearing sweatpants and Uggs, as I picked up the closest book to me and started reading it.

I happened to pick up The Book of Awesome. It was truly the most awesome book. It’s essentially a laundry list of all these priceless life pleasures that make you smile and feel great. Examples? Walking into a bakery and deeply inhaling warm bakery air, finding unexpected money in your pocket, and actually fixing electronics by smacking them. Even though I was standing there with my coat and a 20 lb backpack on, with 3 hours of sleep the night before, I just couldn’t stop myself from chuckling out loud. After all, you have to get a dose of happiness once in a while.

Inspired, I decided to put together a list of 5 little life pleasures that make me, as a medical student, smile. So here it is! Enjoy!

1. A Skipped Lecture on the Exam

This one is where you get to finally beat the system- instead of the system beating you. This is the story of that one 1-hr lecture you skipped, with the intention of relistening to it and studying it later.

• Someone texts you from class during that lecture and tells you, “I hate you for skipping, this lecture is impossible”
• A week later: The course coordinator tells you that she has received a few complaints regarding that lecture’s difficulty level and is looking into removing the lecture’s material from the exam – this is all before you’ve looked at the lecture, of course
• A few days before the exam: The course coordinator readdresses that lecture issue. She tells you that the material will indeed be on the exam, but will only be one multiple choice question, and reassures you that the question will be easy – you still haven’t touched the lecture up to now, but you mentally make a note to do so later
• 11pm, the night before the exam: You still haven’t looked at that lecture. You’ve spent more than an hour trying to read the slides, but it just doesn’t make sense to you. Your friend was right, this lecture is impossible. You reassure yourself that it’s only going to be one mark out of 100, so it’s not worth it at this point.
• During the exam: You arrive at the multiple choice question based on that lecture, and you sigh. You use your logic and reasoning skills, and make your best possible guess.
• After the exam: Your friend tells you that you got the answer right. Woohoo! My true story. Beating the system? AWESOME.

2. Tupperware and Lunch

In our class, we have 224 students, who hail from a million prior clubs and extracurricular activities. It’s not unexpected that the clubs and extracurricular activities continue on in medical school. As a result, every day, we get bombarded with at least ten emails, telling us about an info session for this club, or a meet and greet for another, or a guest speaker, etc. Commonality between all of these? Free food. The Medical Society gives money to all these clubs. Most clubs will elect to use a portion of this budget to entice hungry students into listening to their information sessions. You can always expect pizza, sandwiches, wraps, pop, or juice, and if you’re lucky, Chinese food. Once, we even got to eat the remains of the lunch provided at the 1T4 (class of 2014) admission interviews – Pickle Barrel-catered gourmet food, with Starbucks-catered hot coffee. Heck, even the pop in the tub was being chilled with dainty little ice cubes. My friend whipped out his Tupperware, stuffed it full with herb-spiced chicken wings. Unsatisfied, he borrowed my lunch Tupperware and stuffed it with more food. After a few minutes of rampaging, we were politely asked to leave the food and pop alone. Free food and filled bellies all year long? AWESOME.

3. The Colourful Backpack

Yes, this is the MD financial backpack that as a pre-med, you notice, judge, and envy. I remember the extra bounce in my step and the tremendous pride that the backpack gave me in the first few days of medical school. You go to the library, and pre-meds stare at you; you go on the bus, and random passengers stare at your backpack; heck, you can even travel to different ends of the country, and still get picked out by other med students. It’s like an invisible community that you join – and you announce to the world that you are a medical student. It can give you that confidence booster when you need it. (Granted though, nowadays, my backpack only serves the purpose of reminding me of the smell of Gerstein Library and their hard chairs.) Anyhow, backpacks? AWESOME.

4. Having a Friend Always Behind You

I don’t mean having a friend backing you up in times of hardship here. Well, I am referring to times of hardship here, but in a different way. I’m referring to the time where you panic about school and feel like you are incapable of doing anything right – this usually happens when there is a deadline or an exam looming. For me, I tend to have my little pre-exam panic session a week or so before the exam. Because I panic so early on, I actually manage to study efficiently for that week and end up doing well on the exam.

Anyhow, what I’m trying to say is that I feel better during this panic session because of a friend who’s always behind me: Josh. If you’re behind in studying, he probably hasn’t started. If you are panicking about the test, he’ll tell you that he has to go because he going to eat out with his friends. If you’re feeling not ready for an exam the night before, Josh probably hasn’t finished his first pass yet. And lastly, if you got a bad mark, chances are that Josh got a worse one. This is not to say that Josh can’t encourage you in other ways, but having a friend always behind you? AWESOME. (Disclaimer: I got Josh’s permission to post this. He had a good laugh.)

5. Battles Against the Lecturer

This is purely about winning personal small battles against the lecturer. With a lecturer blaring a million words per minute at you in class, you easily get arthritis from the speed at which you’re writing and also get thrown into shock with regards to how much material you have to learn for the upcoming exam. You know full well that even the small words only seen in a blurry figure is fair game for a test. When the lecturer gets a technical mishap (e.g. can’t load their presentation, or their microphone battery dies out on them), you sit there and think “Aha!”. It’s one personal small battle won – the battle where you elevate yourself from that puny poor medical student, to become one who crosses your arms and says, “Ha, the lecturer can’t screw me over ALL the time!!”. Once the class let a lecturer talk for a full two minutes into a dead mic, before someone raised their hand to tell them. It was another small battle won. AWESOME.