- Hello, my name is Kaleab.
- And I'm Lily.
- I'm David.
- I'm Stephanie.
- And we are medical students and we're here
to answer your questions today.
(calm electronic music)
- Are you able to have a social life outside of school?
- Honestly you would not survive medical school
unless you are able to do that.
- I think there's plenty of time to have
a social life outside school.
- Studying together is one thing
but just hanging out and like,
decompressing together is so important.
- And it's a really good way to avoid burnout
and you know...
- Stay sane (laughs).
- Yeah, that's so important.
- Do you still check WebMD when you don't feel well?
- No.
- No we're super against WebMD.
- There's this website called UpToDate.
Basically like Wikipedia for doctors.
So now, instead of going to WebMD,
I'm just like UpToDate
- Nice.
- And you just throw in the medical jargon
and it gives you like a whole thing.
- I will check WebMD and then I'll compare it
and I'll be like, "Okay, do these look consistent?
"Do they look inconsistent?" Stuff like that.
- Do you rely on coffee to keep you going?
- Yeah, 100 percent, yes.
(laughs)
- Yeah.
- Every single day.
There's a schedule too,
it's like for three months coffee
and then 2 week break, so that it works again.
- I drink probably like one cup a day.
- Have you ever successfully diagnosed
yourself with something?
No, but I have successfully misdiagnosed myself
with a bunch of things.
- Not yet.
Unless like anxiety counts.
(laughs)
- I like threw out my back when I was lifting.
- How did you know you wanted to be a doctor/
go into the health field?
- That's a hard one.
- It's a medical school interview right here.
- I know right.
(both laugh)
- My dad's a scientist and my mom's and engineer.
And I was really bad at computers as a kid,
so I was like, "Maybe I'll go be a scientist."
And then I got really interested in--
well outside of science,
medicine is a very science heavy field
and as I explored that in college,
I kinda found my way there.
- To me, what I like about it, is it's like a puzzle.
Like you have a patient come in
and you have this very limited amount of information
and it's your job to kind of pull out what you need to.
So I've always been really interested in that.
- I think for me, I was sick a lot as a kid
and I really wanted to be someone
that could help someone else, in that situation.
- I wasn't really sure until probably high school
and I was in this-- at this magnet school,
we had a health science program.
During our third year, we'd go to the hospital
and shadow doctors and things like that.
And I thought it was really cool.
- What was your least favorite part of medical school?
- Step one.
(laughs)
- Step one.
Step one, also that.
- Step one is the first in a series of exams
that we get to take, that lead to our licensure as doctors.
It's the basic science one,
where they ask you all these questions
about how disease processes work and things like that.
And the beauty of it, is they can ask you anything.
And so you study everything.
- Just memorizing random stuff that feels super irrelevant.
What is actually super gratifying is
that I'm going into the hospital and shadowing,
or doing rotations or whatever.
That kinda like puts it back into perspective.
- Craziest/ grossest cadaver story.
- We have half of a head and it's plastinated.
And you can see every part of it,
like the nose hairs, the eyelashes,
every single part of this face.
And my professor will just hold it up to his face,
just to show you where it's supposed to be, as if--
- Oh my gosh.
- I--so it just grosses me out
when he grabs it with his bare hands
and is just like, "This is a face."
- There's one day where they had us do a fresh tissue,
a fresh body procedure-- not a procedure,
but just studying a fresh body.
So there was no preserving fluids or anything
and a lot of the smells were
the bona fide smells associated with...
- They warned us.
- And they warned us.
Yeah, they even gave us Vaseline to put on our upper lip,
so that we could block out the smell and everything.
The short of it is we had guy faint.
- What kind of doctor do you want to be and why?
- I wanna to be a cancer doctor, so I'm extremely interested
in helping patients with cancer,
just because I've had a lot of cancer death in my family.
- If I had to choose right now,
probably a psychiatrist.
- Oh really?
That's interesting.
- I feel like I'm more open.
I think that a lot of people go into med school
thinking that they know what kind of doctor they want to be,
but there's also a lot of people who go in thinking
they know and then later on change their minds.
So I'm pretty open to different kind of fields.
- I think I wanna go into internal medicine,
which is basically just adult people doctor.
- Does it get annoying when your friends
or family ask for medical advice?
(both laugh)
Nobody really asks me for medical advice.
- Yes because I don't know a lot of things,
so I end up Googling a ton of things.
- It's funny cause whenever people ask me,
no matter how private or gross it might be,
it's like no--all the boundaries of friendship are gone.
(laughs)
When people ask me about medical problems.
- What is something you wish you knew,
before you started med school?
- I kinda wish I knew
how much time I was gonna spend studying.
I guess I didn't think too much about that.
- Find the balance early.
Otherwise, it's gonna get too crazy, too fast.
- What's the hardest part of med school?
- I think staying motivated.
- Yeah, that's true.
- And staying on track with the study schedule.
Finding a plan and a routine that works for you
and sticking to it.
- Step one.
Yes step one.
- Step one.
- Is it true that a lot of med students
experiment with drugs?
- Caffeine, all the time.
- Caffeine, yeah.
- Yeah.
- I wouldn't say experiment.
(laughs)
- Have you ever tried to diagnose friends or family?
- Yeah.
- Yes.
(laughs)
- What is something you've learned in med school
that you weren't expecting to?
- I think it's the doctoring class
that we were talking about.
I didn't know that you have to learn how to talk,
like a doctor.
- We started doing clinical skills practice,
like learning how to talk to patients
and take histories, really early on,
like in our first two weeks of medical school.
So that was-- I wasn't expecting that,
but I'm super grateful.
- What keeps you motivated when school gets really hard?
- I talk to my mom everyday.
She really grounds me, I'm super close to my mom.
- I think being in the hospital
and seeing patients kind of helps balance that for me.
Cause it's so easy to get demotivated, when you're like,
"I have all this crap to learn. I don't care anymore.
"I'm tired, I just wanna go to sleep."
But then remembering like, "Oh wait,
"the thing that I learn right now,
"will help me take care of a patient better and faster."
- I just think about how there's a light
at the end of the tunnel.
It might be a lot of pressure right now,
but ultimately, you'll get through it
and at the end of the day, there'll be a brighter day.
- Probably just looking forward to goal.
- Do you practice a lot of techniques
and learnings on each other, like taking blood?
- Oh no!
- Oh yeah!
- I thought I was gonna fail out of med school
because in the first 2 months of medical school,
the first thing you do is draw each others blood.
And I'm so scared of needles.
I know!
I'm trying to be a doctor, but I'm scared of needles.
- I think there's a lot of good stories on that one.
- Oh my gosh.
- I was doing it with my friend
and she did it on me first and I've got huge veins,
so it's pretty easy, just stick it in there, it's fine.
And then it was my turn to do it on her
and I missed the vein and I was like, "Oh my god."
- I feel like a lot of times in medical school,
you feel like...
I don't even know how I got chosen to be here.
I feel like they gave the wrong person
the acceptance letter, or something like that.
You have this, like what is it called?
- Imposter syndrome!
They even sit you done and they're like,
"you're gonna have imposter syndrome,
"but it's gonna be okay."
- But everyone has it.
everyone feels this
and all I can say is if you got into medical school,
you can do it.
They already know that you can do it.
(electronic music)