Second year of med school has been a blur so far. I arrived back from my trip to Africa on the day my classes started, literally dropped my bags at home and went straight to class. I do not advise doing that and will not be doing it again.
My brain was not ready to jump from Chad straight to classes. So while I tried to adapt to being back, I started running behind class materials and felt like I was playing catch up. The entire semester. My stress levels went to record highs, and I even had insomnia, something that, with rare exceptions, I had never had. I passed all of my classes, but my class ranking suffered a bit and I'll have to work extra hard to recover.
The result is that I finished the semester utterly exhausted. But since I'm an overachiever at heart, instead of taking advantage of winter break to recuperate before second semester, I went ahead and signed up for an elective. Because I'm insane. I did escape for a week to go to the beach, because I felt that I could simply not start 2nd semester without recharging my batteries at least a little bit. I'll talk about that on the next blog post, suffice to say, it worked! A week in paradise was just what the doctor ordered. :)
However, I realized that I need to cut myself some slack, and not be so hard on myself. This semester was pretty tough, but I passed. Beating myself up because of class rank is stupid, and I know I can do better next semester, when I won't start out stressed and already playing catch up. Plus, we start out with Neuro and I love neuro!! So it should be fun.
So the two lessons to take home are: 1- don't come back from a stressful trip to Africa (or elsewhere) the same day your classes start. Give yourself some time to arrive and adapt before classes start. 2- do your best and don't beat yourself up if the results are not exactly what you expected. After all, it was just 1 semester and I passed!!
My brain was not ready to jump from Chad straight to classes. So while I tried to adapt to being back, I started running behind class materials and felt like I was playing catch up. The entire semester. My stress levels went to record highs, and I even had insomnia, something that, with rare exceptions, I had never had. I passed all of my classes, but my class ranking suffered a bit and I'll have to work extra hard to recover.
The result is that I finished the semester utterly exhausted. But since I'm an overachiever at heart, instead of taking advantage of winter break to recuperate before second semester, I went ahead and signed up for an elective. Because I'm insane. I did escape for a week to go to the beach, because I felt that I could simply not start 2nd semester without recharging my batteries at least a little bit. I'll talk about that on the next blog post, suffice to say, it worked! A week in paradise was just what the doctor ordered. :)
However, I realized that I need to cut myself some slack, and not be so hard on myself. This semester was pretty tough, but I passed. Beating myself up because of class rank is stupid, and I know I can do better next semester, when I won't start out stressed and already playing catch up. Plus, we start out with Neuro and I love neuro!! So it should be fun.
So the two lessons to take home are: 1- don't come back from a stressful trip to Africa (or elsewhere) the same day your classes start. Give yourself some time to arrive and adapt before classes start. 2- do your best and don't beat yourself up if the results are not exactly what you expected. After all, it was just 1 semester and I passed!!
