Personal Development
Things I Wish I Knew before starting Medical School
It has been a month since I last blogged. To be honest, blogging has not at all been on my mind up until this past week when my “summer break” finally started (I use that term loosely because I am, like many of you guys, working this summer, but it’s a break from school nonetheless). [...]
Hidden Luck
Luck, variance, randomness – whatever you want to call it, it has an undeniable influence on the course of events. Taking a simple case, you get lucky when your medical school interview is conducted by a physician who turns out to be life long buddies with one of your referees, or perhaps you get unlucky [...]
The Fear of Failure and Why You Need to Stop Being Afraid to Lose
I think far too often in too many things we focus on just one side of the coin. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it can be counter productive if you’re looking at the side that prevents you from succeeding, and succeeding big. While I don’t have any specific role models that I [...]
Reflection on 1st Week of Medical School
I woke up at 7:50am on this beautiful Saturday morning after sleeping at 2am. I was exhausted from the entire first week of medical school, and I was looking forward to finally sleeping in. Of course, my biological clock is apparently broken now, and I woke up around the same time I normally would to [...]
Why You Should Job Shadow
The other day, someone asked me if I could write an article on shadowing. While I don’t have any real advice for finding mentors to shadow besides “just asking”, I remembered an article I wrote a few years ago about my experience shadowing a physician, and why I thought job shadowing as a whole is [...]
Understanding Expectation and Avoiding Being Results Oriented
I have always done well in school my whole life. Throughout both elementary and high school, I had rarely gotten close to a failing grade in anything. And even the few times I did, the weight of those assignments or tests was not that significant, and as you eventually learn, high school marks don’t matter [...]
The Secret to Consistent Success – Part 3: Adaptation and Innovation
As you learned in the first two parts of this series on success, my first Independent Study Project (ISP) for my gifted program was on the Brain and Nervous System, and I was able to achieve success by mimicking a technique I had observed from older students. However, the following year in Grade 6, every [...]
The Secret to Consistent Success – Part 2: Resourcefulness and Mimicking Success
To better explain what I mean by this title, let’s go back to the story in Part 1 of this series. As I was saying, the Grade 5 gifted students were not expected to achieve the higher objectives in their projects, such as synthesis. In the end, I was one of a few students who [...]
The Meaning of Life vs. a Meaningful Life
I don’t claim to know the meaning of life because I don’t know whether such a thing exists, and even if it does, I don’t know how one could discover it. Every type of opinion on the meaning of life is essentially a belief – an idea that you might live your life around but [...]
MedHopeful @ Premed101