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- What is up everybody?
I've been reading the comments
and I notice a trend amongst those comments.
A lot of you wanna know what my pre-med journey was like.
I'm incredibly happy that you wanna know my story
and I will be telling you everything
from why I went into medicine,
what college was like,
what med school was like,
and give you some tips along the way.
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So right now I'm 27 years old
I'm fresh out of residency a couple of months out
but I think a good place to start
would probably be somewhere in high school.
Maybe sophomore year of high school.
Because I remember it was at that point
I was pretty firm that I wanted
to go into the field of medicine.
And I'll tell you how I got there.
My dad is a doctor, he was a doctor back in Russia
before we even came to the states
and when we came to the U.S.,
he decided to go through medical school
for the second time in his life.
And this is in a new language,
he didn't speak English, in his 40's.
I had a very unique perspective
watching my dad go through medical school.
Take all the classes for the first two years,
then go on his clinical rotation the next two years,
and then going into his residency.
I mean when it was take your kid to work day
he brought me to the hospital
in his residency.
And that's the good part about it.
The bad was that I wasn't able to complain
and if I ever did,
he's like "Shut up, because I did it
"in much harder circumstances."
and with that, I will not argue.
Let me tell you how I went into medicine,
or how I decided my heart was in medicine.
First of all when I was in high school I loved science.
That was my number one class,
I performed best in that class
and I was always curious about the human body.
I wanted to know why certain things happened.
Why your stomach hurt, why your head hurt,
but that's not what made me decide to go into medicine.
When I saw my dad with his patients,
and it happened quite frequently,
I realized, medicine is a field you can go into
and not have a responsibility to a client,
to a shareholder, to a board member,
but it was to the person sitting directly in front of you.
And I started to look into the different options there are
to go into the field of medicine.
You have M.D. schools, you have D.O. schools,
you have Caribbean M.D. schools.
But after spending some time watching my dad
go through D.O. school
and doing some of the manipulations
and the hands on OMT things that we do as D.O.s,
on me after injuries in TaeKwonDo and soccer,
and seeing phenomenal results,
I said "I wanna be a D.O."
and I became really passionate
in finding a route that will get me to be a doctor
in the fastest way possible.
In high school, I'm not gonna lie,
I wasn't the studious type,
I didn't spend hours studying,
a lot of the information pretty much came to me.
I had a really good memory because
when I was in middle school
my dad actually, when he came home from med school
and he was exhausted,
he would give me my social studies textbook,
ask me what my required reading for that night was,
and then tell me that I have to memorize each page
while he holds the book,
and I have to rehearse and tell him exactly word for word
what's on that page.
To some people in society they might see that
as something horrible.
"Oh you're forcing your child to do this
"when they don't want to."
But he was very disciplined that way
that he said "You wanna have fun?
"You have to do this first."
I learned how to memorize,
I almost got a photographic memory at one point
when I would read these pages
and I would have to tell them back
I could imagine the page in front of me
and doing that practice in middle school
really set me up for success in high school
I decided in my junior year
to start applying to combined B.S./D.O. programs.
B.S. is Bachelor's in Science,
and D.O. is Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine.
And it's basically a combined program,
an accelerated program,
where you do three years of undergraduate studies
and four years of medical school.
And all you have to do is maintain
a pretty significant GPA,
I believe it was like 3.5,
and then get a sort of, a mediocre MCAT score,
and continue.
I believe it was like 27 or 28 at the time.
And I remember I applied early decision
to NYIT's B.S./D.O. program.
NYIT being New York Institute of Technology,
it's in Old Westbury in Long Island in New York.
I believe they only accepted like 90 applicants
or something around there,
so it's very competitive.
I did fairly well on my SAT,
I didn't get like a 1600 or anything like that,
but it was like mid-1400's.
So you know, I did fairly well on that.
My GPA was pretty solid,
and I was lucky enough to get into
the NYIT B.S./D.O. program.
So college.
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I took all the necessary classes,
I had to maintain a very high GPA of 3.5,
couldn't let it drop below that
and that was obviously tough because every class,
your grade was very important to your future.
It wasn't just "oh if I get a B+ I'm fine."
like a B was not good!
A B was a 3.0, so if you got a B,
you were worried how that affected your GPA.
I'm finishing up my third year,
which is my last year of undergraduate studies,
and I have to go in to take my MCAT.
This is an incredibly stressful time for everybody.
Some people didn't prep enough for the MCAT,
some people decided that medical school wasn't for them,
and my program suddenly shrunk from
like 90 or 88 or whatever it was that it started with,
to like 20.
But there are certain things you can do
to succeed with your MCAT.
Number one, it's a predictable test.
There are Kaplan courses, there are free courses online,
there are boot camps that you can go to and study
for a couple of weeks at a time.
And I know some of these things cost money
and maybe you don't need the boot camp that costs the most,
but you can sign up for a Kaplan class and put in the time.
To hear people say "I can't do well in this test
"no matter what I do."
If you find a tutor, if you find an online study program
there is no reason why you shouldn't get the score
that you need to, to get into a medical school.
People say "Well how do I know if medicine is right for me?"
That's a very common question.
And it's a question that you need to answer for yourself.
I didn't know if medicine was right for me
so I watched my dad do it.
I experienced it, I worked in a medical setting,
I knew what it felt like,
at least a rough concept,
of what it's like to work as a doctor.
Now there are some of you, who's parents are doctors.
There are some of you have heard from your friends
that being a doctor gets you rich.
These are not good reasons to go into medicine.
Now I'm not saying that to discourage you,
I'm just saying medicine is a long term commitment.
Residency hours are brutal.
Med school is a lot of studying.
Undergrad pre-med studying is a lot of studying.
And if you don't wanna be there for the right reasons,
"My dad's a doctor, my mom's a doctor, my sister's a doctor,
"Grey's Anatomy looks awesome, Dr. Oz looks cool."
Good reasons to go into medicine:
You can't see yourself doing anything else,
you have an insatiable curiosity for the field of medicine,
you wanna make a difference in the world,
and science falls within your skillset.
Those are good reasons.
A big thing I have to tell you about.
This maybe applies more to medical school,
but I think it applies to college as well.
There will always be another test,
there will always be another exam,
there will always be something else you're preparing for.
If you start to stress out about every single test,
you won't make it through the process.
Or you'll make it through the process and be really unhappy,
Or you'll make it through the process
and be really unhealthy,
because stress really sucks long term.
So you shouldn't expose yourself to that.
If you as an undergraduate student
who's looking to go into medicine
start worrying about the test you have next Thursday,
and then start thinking about the test you have
the following month,
and then the following month,
and then your MCATs, and then your boards,
and then this and then that,
you'll go crazy.
Approach each test as an obstacle that's
immediately in front of you that you need to surpass.
Now, you've taken the MCAT, you've gotten your scores,
and it's time for you to do interviews.
My journey through interviews was
I had an interview in NYIT, in med school,
which is more of a formality.
And yes, they ask you some difficult questions,
but again, as long as you don't say anything too wild
you're guaranteed a spot in the program
because of the seven year contract
that you went into in the program.
But, that doesn't mean I don't know
what questions med schools traditionally ask.
All of that information is available to you
on the internet.
Scour Student Doctor Network,
look on different forums.
If you're going into an interview,
you have to know how to answer the question
"Why do you wanna be a doctor?"
I mean you have to know.
If you don't know the answer to that,
or your answer's that "My dad's a doctor."
I mean, that's awful.
There's no way around it, you have to know why you're there.
And you have to be a person first.
What does that mean?
That means, when I ask you a question,
whether that's as an interviewer,
I ask you a question like why you wanna go into medicine,
or "Why this medical school?"
I don't expect you to have a brilliant answer,
but I expect you to have an answer that's based
on your experiences,
based on something that you did,
based on something you felt,
because if you tell me a generic answer,
I'll know it's generic,
because I hear those answers all the time.
But if you tell me a unique answer,
that might not even blow my mind,
but it's unique to you,
I know I'm getting a human applicant in front of me.
Someone that can feel empathy,
who can verbalize what they're feeling.
Be human, be appropriate,
at times of sadness, be sad,
when it's time to be angry, be angry.
You know, experience all your emotions
don't feel like you need to put on a front.
Am I saying don't be professional, use profanity and slang?
No, be professional.
I'm saying be you,
in a sense that you should tell your story.
It's not enough to just practice
having read questions and practiced answers in your mind,
You have to verbalize it.
And that goes for public speaking too.
Visualize a person in front of you
asking you a question, and answer it.
You'll stutter, you'll no doubt stutter.
But that's a good thing, get the stuttering out now,
create your story so it flows.
Once you verbalize and your brain has heard you say it,
it forms that pattern,
those neurons link together within your brain,
and you will have a much easier time
verbalizing all those things at the time of the interview.
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Now it was time to get serious
because noone's holding your hand in medical school.
If you start flunking, bye, you left.
If you don't pass your boards, bye.
I came into medical school with the philosophy
that I will overstudy,
and then sort of decrease the amount of time necessary
to study for my exams,
so I can find the best amount of time
that I need to dedicate to do well on the exams
but also to have a substantial life,
a healthy life, outside of medicine as well,
because that's important.
You can't just bury your head in a book for four years
and forget society exists.
There were a lot of people who were into
what you would call like performance enhancing pills,
some people were taking caffeine pills
to increase their ability to study longer,
some people were taking illegal things like
Adderall without even a prescription
they were buying it on the street.
I urge you, do not fall into this trap
of starting to take pharmaceuticals
in order to improve your performance in med school.
It's gonna make you unhappy,
you're gonna build a dependence on them,
you're gonna change the way you view your success,
and you feel like it's not rightfully earned.
Don't do that, you will regret your decision,
I've seen people do it,
seen people get sick from it,
it's not a smart choice.
So let me talk about my med school experience,
and a lot of medical schools work in a similar fashion
but not all.
The first two years are learning in the classroom,
lecture based learning.
And then the second two years are clinical rotations
that you spend in the hospital.
And those hospitals are ones that carry
an affiliation with your med school.
NYIT luckily had a lot of great clinical affiliation,
so I was able to do rotations
at a lot of sites.
My school was great in the sense that
it streamed all of the lectures in addition
to going and viewing the lecture.
I wasn't a fan of studying the packets
that they gave.
So I watched the lectures on accelerated speed.
And a lot of people were like
"Mike are you crazy I don't even understand
"what they're saying when you put it on
"1.5 speed or two speed."
But look it worked for me.
I was able to watch the lectures
two times over, in the time that most people
watched them in a single session.
If you have a dream school, great.
I'm happy that you're dreaming,
I'm happy that you have a goal.
But if you don't get into your number one,
or even your number two or number three school,
it's not the end of the world.
It really almost doesn't make a difference.
If you wanna learn, in this day and age,
all the material's there for you.
Yes you should go to the best school that you can
for your circumstances.
You know, what your abilities are,
what your surroundings are like,
where your physical location is,
unfortunately to say, how much financial ability you have.
But if you don't get your number one school,
don't panic.
Work hard, work harder,
but don't think it's the end of the world,
I promise you it's not.
So you finish your first two years of learning,
and now comes my favorite part:
Step 1 Boards.
This a tough phase because not only
are you studying for your current classes
and trying to do well there,
but you also have to study for your boards
and your Step 1 exam is probably
the most important exam
that is gonna decide which residency you get
which residency you go into in the future.
It's not the only thing that matters,
but it's one of the most important things.
So it's one of those tests,
similar to the MCAT, that people freak out about,
and it's important to not do that,
it's important to prepare.
The more questions you do,
the more preparations you get,
the better you're gonna do on the test.
That's the bottom line.
Especially if you're already doing well
in your current classes.
The number one advice I can give you
is do questions, questions, questions,
because it's been proven in scientific trials
that recognition and fetching that idea
from your mind, retrieving it,
bringing it back to paper in a question form,
is the best way of memorizing material.
So don't be afraid to do two question banks
even if you need to.
In your third year you start something known
as clinical rotations.
Where you'll get a schedule of either one hospital
or multiple hospitals,
and different departments that you can be rotating in.
This was my favorite part of medical school,
because I love experiencing stuff,
I love getting stuff done.
My first rotation was internal medicine,
where you're treating hospitalized patients
for all sorts of illnesses.
I didn't come in pretending I knew everything
or I didn't come in with an attitude.
I'm eager to learn, and what I don't know
I promised I'll learn in the future.
The residents really liked that about me,
because when they needed help,
I would volunteer my services as much as I could
without obviously being annoying
or overstepping bounds
or pushing other student's learning after mine.
I always try to make it fair.
But any time that I could help somebody out,
stay late, do an extra procedure,
I would do it so I could learn it.
Or if I didn't know how to do it,
I asked if I could watch someone do it.
And that old mantra of
"See one, do one, teach one" really applies here.
When I saw a resident do it, I learned how to do it,
then the resident would watch me do it,
approve of how I did it,
and next time I would teach another student how to do it.
And really that's the ultimate way to learn
by repeating that process over and over again.
Enjoy the process man,
that's the thing I have to tell you.
I would hear some people say
"Ah I just wanna get out of here,
"I wanna get out of here early."
or "I don't wanna come in so early,
"this rotation sucks."
You chose this career, you wanted to be here,
this is what you wanna do,
this is what you're gonna be doing your whole life.
How can you be complaining about being here
when you said you wanted to be here?
A topic that I need to touch on,
and I wanted you to pay attention to me very carefully,
is do not be a gunner.
Let me define what a gunner is.
A gunner is a person, a medical student usually,
who will do anything to succeed,
will throw their fellow students underneath the bus.
Underneath the bus.
Will throw their fellow students under the bus,
they'll speak out of turn to make residents look bad,
they'll tell somebody something negative about somebody
in order to get ahead.
Don't be that person.
Medicine is a community.
Build each other up, if you see a weakness in somebody
help them fix it.
And for God's sakes I see this happen a lot,
somebody will read some chapter in a textbook,
think they're experts on a subject,
and then start critiquing residents, attendings,
lecturers, about something they just read
and they think they are an expert on,
when someone that has 20 years of clinical experience
is telling them otherwise.
Look, don't get me wrong,
you can get really knowledgeable
by reading a textbook,
but it doesn't replace real life knowledge.
Plus, don't make someone feel stupid
just because you know something
when you looked at it the day before.
So don't try and show somebody up.
That's a gunner, don't be a gunner.
So during your third year,
you'll have some time for electives,
and going on these different rotations
where you can sort of figure out
what career trajectory you want.
At this point you'll know your Step 1 score,
you'll know what that Step 1 score can get you,
residency wise.
This is where it's really important
that when you go to all these hospitals,
you go to all these clinical sites,
is that you leave a good impression.
You leave the impression that you're eager to learn,
that you're eager to get better.
Some people call these showcase electives
where if you want to do a certain residency in a hospital,
you go do your clinical rotation there
and you show them your abilities,
your skills, your ability to lead,
your ability to do hands-on things.
That's a good time to make connections,
that's a good time to show off your personality,
that's a good time to see
if you're a good fit at the program.
Remember, you're still learning about yourself,
even though the program's equally
learning about you at the same time.
I did my family medicine rotation
and I fell in love.
I said that, you know, I love the ability
to influence someone's life
outside of just talking about their disease.
I fell in love with the field,
I fell in love with my ability
to communicate with patients,
to grow older alongside with my patients.
I made a lot of the electives that I had planned
to be family medicine.
And I did those electives in
a bunch of different hospitals,
just so I could see how family medicine is practiced
in different areas in New York.
I even did a rotation in Florida,
and that's when time comes
and you have to do your showcase electives,
where you show your abilities
to the programs for that month,
that you essentially wanna do residency in,
and the last part of that would be
filling out the Match paperwork.
So I went into the Match,
ranked some of these programs,
it's a time where you have to do some soul searching,
you have to get ready for your interviews
all over again.
Get used to talking about yourself,
get used to talking about your accomplishments again,
like I said before, verbalize.
So I went on these interviews,
went to interviews in Florida,
went to interviews in New York, New Jersey.
Picked Overlook, couldn't be happier now,
looking back four years later.
Best choice I made.
I was so happy with my training there.
I'd love to tell you more about my residency
and my social media and how all that came together
but I feel like that warrants it's own video.
If you're curious to see that,
leave a comment down below.
As you can tell, I'm very active in the comments section.
I try to answer all serious questions,
I know I get a lot of you jokers out there
but I even answer those, so.
I really hope that you enjoyed this long video,
I know it's longer than most of my other videos,
but it was an opportunity for me to tell you my story.
So thank you for listening,
hope you got some great tips and points
from this video that you can use in your own life
and do even a better job in med school than I did.
So, stay happy, stay healthy, see ya next week.
(static) Med school
is not for the weak.
This is what med school does to you kids.
(static) J-Point elevations
can be a normal variant in an EKG
in a young adult, but it could also mean
that you're more susceptible to a sudden cardiac death.
Talk to your doctor.
(coughs) (static)
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