 what is up guys karma medic here and welcome back to another dose you need to the channel hi my name is Nasser and I'm now a fourth year medical student studying at King's College London and today I'm joined by Ali Abdaal for the very few of you who don't know who Ali is Ali do you want to give like a little introduction sure hey guys my name is Ali I am sort of a doctor based in in the UK as well I was at med school for six years and then I was a doctor for two years and for the last month I've been taking a bit of a break from medicine and I also have a YouTube channel and so I've been watching you for a long time and so I feel like I've heard that intro so many times that it feels a bit surreal to be here right now with your mascot thing in the background or wherever it is what are you talking about Ali Abdaal has a YouTube channel he's very influential in the productivity tech time management space and so I thought he would be a fantastic person to talk about comparing the life of a medical student to that of a doctor we're gonna go through a couple of topics generally social life sleeping habits daily habits studying and things like that that would be different between being a medical student and a doctor so let's start off with social life that's cool with you of course so you know social life is obviously a huge part of university and I feel like the university sort of simplifies and makes it easier to have a social life because you're constantly surrounded by people in lecture you have like clinical partners when you're in the hospital and things like that so how does that translate over like being a doctor sucks in terms of the social life relative to university because you know as you said at university you're living with your friends you're breathing with your friends you're like all together in one place and once you're a doctor depending on which hospital you're at and what the vibe is that can either be pretty good or it can be not very good at all in terms of the social scene so for example in my first year I was at adenbrooks hospital which is a pretty big hospital in Cambridge the social scene vibe amongst the doctors wasn't like it was alright but it wasn't the case that you know you'd be going around to your friend's house every evening like we would at medical school and equally in my second year where I was working in as much smaller hospital in a town called various and Edmunds again there was a bit of a social vibe like the doctors mess would hold events you know every couple of weeks kind of this is pre-lockdown it obviously wasn't as nice as in med school where you're literally living with your friends and you can like you know walk two minutes to see someone and then walk back your place like that is the main thing that university is just so good for I feel like it's not really a difference between medical student and doctor it's more a difference between student and working professional like when you're a student you are literally hanging out with friends all the time and when you start to work whatever field you're working in whether it's medicine law like whatever other jobs exist in the world what you find is that you will see your friends a lot less and you have to make much more of an effort to hang out with people yeah I've heard that they have to constantly plan like weeks in advance what specific day and time you're gonna be available and honestly sounds like such a hassle and something that takes the fun out of socializing and meeting yeah yeah it's definitely a bit of a dragon and this is one reason why I was I was not very keen to go to London because I'd heard that in London specifically the vibe is very much that people get booked up weeks in advance and you have to plan three weeks ahead to see a friend you do have to put more intention into socializing in a way that I certainly didn't have to do it university where it just happens by default yeah go to pencil it in then along with everything else absolutely yeah it's just another part of the schedule it's exactly and it becomes another thing that feels like work like okay I know I should take my relationship seriously I know I should reach out to this person but you know that's not to say it's bad you just need to be more intentional about it than when we were at university so the next thing Ali that I really want to know about is sleep schedule because in my life generally I've never pulled an all nighter for work not once the idea of having to flip my sleeping schedule around between on calls and normal day shifts something that like seems kind of scary and seems so backwards how could you possibly socialize and maintain relationships outside of work when you have such a backward sleep schedule so can you talk to me a little bit about that yeah certainly when you're on night shifts usually if you do if you're doing nights you'll be doing it for maybe three like between three and six days at a time sometimes even longer stretches than that and so during that period your sleep schedule is completely wrecked like for the first night you kind of have to stay up all night and then you'll kind of want to sleep the next day you'll try and pre-sleep before your night shift but that's really hard to do and then you'll do this kind of nocturnal thing where you're sleeping during the day and working during the night and usually that means that actually there's not really much time for socializing so that was certainly the case for me when I was working in any overnight because you don't really rest when you're when you're doing that stuff just keeps on happening right but depending on what placement you're on like when I was on my psychiatry placement I'd be doing nights and often I would only have to do maybe one or two hours of stuff during the night okay and so I would sleep the rest of the time in the on-call room where would you sleep oh we had an on-call room like a bed like a bed like a little sofa desk sink everything okay with like curtain lights fan like like the whole shebang and you would just get get called on the kind of special phone thing or bleeped right if you had to I don't know prescribe a drug or to clock in a new patient could you switch on that fast though like from being asleep you get this phone call and then you have to go take a history yeah you become pretty adept at it because because like when you're sleeping you kind of know that okay that I'm I'm living on borrowed time here like I know I don't deserve right now I'm not allowed to do this but I'm gonna try and get a few hours and and so certainly I had a few days on psychiatry where I'd be sleeping the whole night and then you're free the next day and it feels like oh my god I've suddenly unlocked gained time I've gained free time because now I can kind of go shopping and go to the post office and pick up all the 18 parcels that have wrapped up because you know the post office doesn't open weekends and all of these little things or even grab a random coffee with a friend so I think it really depends on how busy the placement that you're on is okay but it does kind of vary that's really interesting to hear because obviously a university most of the time you can set a relatively steady sleeping schedule you'll usually have lectures starting at like 9 a.m. they'll almost never start at 8 and if they're starting later then you can sleep in or not but you almost always know what time you're gonna be waking up what time you're gonna be sleeping and it provides a bit of consistency in your life oh I don't know like for me I felt like my sleep schedule at university was a lot more wacky than it was working fair enough I will say that maybe I'm like not the norm for that so do you turn up the lectures every day oh I watch all the lectures but I do it online okay I'm sorry I don't go in in person yeah I'm like I'm there at the same time that the lecture starts but I'm just watching the previous ones online until that one gets uploaded oh that's kind of okay so I'm always a couple of lectures behind but I always watch every single one okay but back in Toronto I would attend every single lecture because nothing was online okay and if you missed what was said in lecture you were kind of screwed because there was nowhere else to get that information okay so yeah I did attend every single lecture for sure and so I had a really good sleep schedule I've always had a good sleep schedule yeah like seven hours and then I'm good yeah so for me working life was more like that because even though we do have night shifts usually it's like I don't know at the very worst it'll be maybe one week every month or one week every two months so actually most of the time you have a reasonably solid schedule and for me for the last eight months I was an obstetrics and gynecology thanks to COVID didn't swap over as we normally do every four months yeah but we didn't have any nights for that so it was pure daytime daytime work and so I would every single day without fail I'll be waking up at half past six to get into work by 8 a.m. whereas at university you know going into lectures is optional whereas when you're working going into work is not optional at all that's another thing like if you like when you're in university if you wake up late or if you miss a lecture like it's fine yeah but when you're at work you can't show up even like 10 15 minutes a it's just it's non optional it's just not a thing it's not a thing right yeah so in a way it kind of removes the optionality from your life and so you don't have that sensation of everyday thinking do I really want to go in today or like every hour really kind of reconsidering that do I really want to stay in placement or do I just want to go to the mess or do I just want to go home when you're at work you're at work and so that just that that strand of decision-making from your life gets completely obliterated you don't even think about it yeah yeah it's like going to school it's like you wake up you go to school it's not even an option or that university is every day is an option so moving on to sort of technology or apps or things that we use to keep us productive while we're in medical school I know for me the iPad has completely revolutionized how I take notes in university how I keep my life organized and I know that wasn't the same case for you when you were in university and then I also know that you started using your iPad in the hospital as well so can you touch on that a little bit yeah so I used to take my iPad pro with me to work and the cool thing about that was in my first hospital you know big central teaching hospital in Cambridge they were using an entirely electronic system called Epic which is used in like America and Australia as well and there and that had an iPad app so I could literally do whatever I wanted to from my iPad that's amazing and this was life changing because if you're on a night on call you can literally just sleep in on the sofa in the doctor's mess with your iPad next to you and if someone bleeps you and says I need a drug prescribed you don't have to do it on the app you can do it on the app you don't have to log into a computer right no it like it mimics the computer thingy on your iPads you can just literally do everything from the iPad okay equally when I was on surgery and we'd be doing ward rounds at seven o'clock in the morning because the surgeon has to rush off to theatre and you're going around different wards in the hospital it varies a significant ball ache to trying to find a computer logging in blah blah blah but I would just take my iPad with me and therefore I'd perch on the bedside and just type up and they'd be like oh down this is actually like genuinely making the whole team more productive and so did you use it for the four two years I used it for the first year where we had this electronic system in my second year we didn't have an electronic we had an electronic system but it was a bit more archaic it was a bit more windows 95 you couldn't use the actual iPad I couldn't use the actual iPad I'd still take my iPad with me because for example I have this thing called productive downtime which is when you're a doctor like there are lots of moments of downtime throughout the day like half an hour here and there where you're waiting for blood results to come back or you know you've got to breathe there where you just happen to not have any patients coming in to see you for that half an hour window if I had my iPad with me I find that I'd be able to bash out like a script for a video or something like that true and so that was sort of my productive productive procrastination when I was at work but I didn't use it for medical stuff but um that's actually very similar to how I feel now when I'm on placement because you know when you're on placement you have like pockets of learning that happened throughout the day it's very like spontaneous and it's not really that planned and so anytime I can I'll pull out my iPad and try and do something whether that's like updating my portfolio or like reviewing like a clinical exam that I need to do or something like that that's very good if you say no no or working on like YouTube scripts and things like that yeah I hope you mix up both um but it's like how much of the line are you gonna tow here the only thing I do at work is work on my portfolio I think is the technical thing you're supposed to say I do but I do both but yeah I know when I'm at the hospital I try and get as much work because I can't done there because once I go home that's when I enter like YouTube mode like extracurriculars or social life um so I try and get work done while I'm still there so something I've been thinking about a lot now that I'm in fourth year is how my role in the hospital has changed as a medical student so in my second year and third year when I show up at the hospital and introduce myself as a second or third year medical student you know people wouldn't really want you to get involved and they're sort of they know that you're almost more of a burden than you are a practical and useful part of the team and then now when I show up to the hospital and introduce myself as a fourth year medical student suddenly eyes light up and they're like oh okay you can actually help me you can write in the notes now you can go do an exam for me and report that back obviously it makes sense that every year you go up in medical school you gain more responsibility obviously as a doctor all the responsibility actually falls on you you're not really I mean you're still reporting to people but you do have things that you are directly in charge of yeah so can you talk about like what that transition is like because I'm scared I'm scared to go from 50 or two in f1 yeah it's it's definitely daunting initially and sort of I I was I was laughing about what you just said because for us like the first year of clinicals is fourth year and so if someone says they're a fourth year medical student you assume okay this person knows absolutely like less than nothing and you have to start from from ground zero definitely that transition of responsibility is a big one and the weird thing is that I think that that shift of when you're a final year medical student to when you become a doctor there is no difference at all in terms of your knowledge or anything like that in fact you probably know more things as a final medical student just having just passed the exams yeah you probably know no more medicine than I did because you've just passed the assembly yeah exactly but when you have that responsibility you kind of grow into the role that you have responsibility for okay and so I think if you're on if you're on a team whereby the registrar the senior is holding your hand a lot then you can feel you do feel a bit less involved whereas certainly I found that like on on days where I was the one who had to check up all the bloods and make sure everything was okay I was the one sort of the only one who was going to write these eight discharge letters right having that responsibility makes the job itself a lot more fun and I kind of joke about how being a medical student is less fun than being a doctor when you're actually at work being a doctor is quite fun because you are responsible for this thing happening and obviously you've got like senior support and stuff if you need it and you rarely you're out of your depth but when you're the one who has to do it then you and you end up just doing it you know if you tell me a patient's name I'll be able to recite their blood results for you because when you have that responsibility you just switch into that mode of knowing what's going on that's a that's a good point because I always I'm always asking myself like how do these doctors know who is in what bed and what their heart rate was their blood pressure their blood results and I'm like I was there with you I was on that wood round trying to follow along and I can't remember it but I guess it's the same with like driving like if you're the one driving to a destination you'll remember how to get there whereas if you're a passenger sort of observing you won't necessarily pay attention to that exactly yeah and this was something that they used to battle me as well like how the hell does it you know what's the patient's correct name how do you know that it's 497 but then when I'm in that position where I'm the only one who knows of course I know it's 497 it's just one of those magical feelings where responsibility leads to you kind of growing into the role yeah I mean I'm really looking forward to honestly and I'm excited to move from sort of the observing position to actually doing yeah and I think that's when it's going to become the most fun and the most engaging and everything and your own teaching and stuff so when you get your baby medical students you can send you can send them off and do stuff and you'll empathize with the role of a medical student so you'll actually get them involved in doing things rather than treating them as an accessory yeah I've promised myself I'm going to involve medical students as much as I possibly can yeah and certainly I found that anytime I have students I feel like yes I have another I have another team member with me I'd be right you and I find that when you when you give them responsibility that it's your job to take the history and come up with a plan tell me what's wrong with this patient if you don't know google it and then we'll we'll take it from there because I'm busy doing something else and the feedback I've gotten is that they really appreciate having that responsibility thrust on them as it were we're almost looking for times when someone senior tells us to do something because it's so much more difficult there's so much friction in putting yourself out there and asking to do that thing it's I mean it's easier when someone tells you to do it so the next thing that I want to tackle is sort of studying habits research academia and things like that so obviously as a medical student we spend a decent amount of time studying especially there's a lot of lectures we need to go through clinical skills and exams that we need to learn and I found that throughout the first three years of medical school it was sort of easy for me to go to the library and block off four hours to do some learning or like two hours here two hours there yep no problem now in fourth year that's becoming quite a bit more difficult we're in the hospital from nine till four almost for sure ready yeah oh yeah we're like signings and stuff yeah we have to sign in with a qr code on our phone no and it gets tracked oh my goodness um so yeah we're in there quite a bit and I find that you know after a long day of being on the wards it's hard to schedule in like studying time and especially by the time I get home after I've commuted like an hour or so all I want to do is chill I want to have dinner I want to work on my other things like enjoy life a little bit and you know as a doctor obviously you still have exams you still have sign-offs you have your portfolio so when do you squeeze in time for these things yeah that's a good question um I think when you're in the run-up to preparing for an exam for the sort of two or three months before then or sometimes even one month then people will go get home from work and bang out two hours of work every day studying for the exam when you're not in exam prep mode you basically don't do any studying at all you just like completely don't care about anymore if you need to learn something you'll google it there and then and then you'll know it and if you prescribe a drug enough times you just memorize the dosage of it just just kind of by default so I found that for my first two years of being a doctor I basically didn't do any extra work beyond yeah once I got home beyond if I was thinking about preparing for the USMLE for example and think oh let me bust out some bit of pathoma or whatever but like the portfolio things you do have to keep on top of it usually you can find time at work to actually do it so I would find and and this is true from basically all of my friends as well we it's a much firmer separation between work and life when you're working as a doctor compared to when you're a student because when you're a student there is always one more exam to prepare for there is always another publication slash project that has been in the works for the last three years that you're working on there's always something that you signed up with some society to do three years ago and now you're regretted but you signed up for it so you have to keep doing it like the work is never ending when you're a student but when you're a doctor you come home and you can switch off that's true that that's a really good point that once you leave the hospital you don't have an exam study for most of the time you don't have any like extra homework to do or like research for a quality improvement project or something yeah so yeah I'm actually really looking forward to that when you can draw a line in the sand and sort of move into a relaxation mode that's quite nice so moving on to extracurriculars so things like exercise hobbies and things like that we're obviously both quite heavily integrated into this whole youtube thing we're pretty committed at this point pretty committed so yeah that's something obviously that for me it's like a non-negotiable in my life I know you've talked about this non-negotiable idea before a youtube video has to go live every thursday at 8 30 a.m like pretty much no matter what unless i've given myself a very good reason for why i'm taking a break and similarly with exercise you know every two days i have to do exercise whether that's gym running like whatever it is basketball it has to happen does that translate well to when you're a doctor or do things just come up and you run over time like you're supposed to finish at five but then you don't how do you organize all of that and make sure it still happens again this kind of depends on which placement you're on okay for some of my placements i would finish at five p.m on the dot and so i would know that okay it takes me half an hour to drive home i will be able to get to squash club every tuesday without fail at 6 p.m and then that is kind of scheduled into my life when i was a student i couldn't really do that because we were always on placement and i certainly from clinical years onwards there's almost no way you can actually stick to a defined commitment unless you're willing to commute quite a long way but a lot of the time depending on which placement you're on again like when i was on surgery sometimes officially we're supposed to finish at half past five realistically we'd end up finishing at half past six seven even sometimes half seven eight and so when there's stuff that you're scheduling kind of in that sort of danger zone between 5 p.m and 8 p.m you always kind of know that this i'm probably not going to make squash club today so you've got this like buffer where it's like probably don't schedule something in there but if it's like you know grabbing dinner with a friend at like 9 p.m at that point you think you can think okay i'll definitely be home at 9 p.m and able to make it today yeah i think like the worst thing about that if you knew from the morning that you were going to be delayed till like 6 37 like you could come to terms with the end sort of plan ahead but the worst thing is like halfway through the day or towards the end of the day extra work comes on and then you realize you have to stay later oh mate the worst thing ever is when the consultant rocks up at half past five when you do to leave and says right let's do a board round where we go through all the patients or even worse let's do a board round where we go around all the patients for a second time and you're like oh no and then that generates more jobs and you think oh crap i need to discuss this Odin CT scan with radiology and the night team is not getting it until 9 p.m and i can't leave because there's no one else to do this and then you stay behind because so whilst in medical school you know you're sort of obliged or supposed to be watching lectures or in clinical placement from Monday to Friday and then when the weekend comes Saturday and Sunday you have absolutely no obligation to do anything for medical school unless you're working on some sort of extracurricular project or studying for an exam as a doctor sometimes you're working Saturdays and Sundays and sometimes you're working Friday Saturday Sunday Monday so how does that work in terms of rearranging your other parts of your life your social life because everyone else is free on the weekend yeah there's probably one of the worst parts about having a job that makes you work weekends and nights and stuff is that inevitably a friend says you know do you want to go to Cornwall this on the 14th of September and your response is right let me just check my rotor you know like look oh crap i'm gonna call that weekend um right i know uh johnson called me before i know sannik called me after i know that he's busy i think there's basically no chance i'm gonna be able to swap that because you can only request leave for stuff where you're not on call and so if you're on call at a given date and you want to get leave on it you have to swap it with someone for a normal day and then you can get leave on that day and so this is like a real huge negotiating act what me and some of my friends used to do and still do is that at the start once when well once we've all got our rotas we would send out a doodle poll and be like right which weekend is everyone free on and then we'll arrange a holiday book the airbnb people can request leave two or three months in advance that's a great idea at that level but there's so many birthday parties i've missed because i've been i've been working so many things i wanted to go to in london so many like magic lectures so sad it's like yeah you can't go because you're like well i could maybe get to london for 7 p.m but what if i finish later that day there's no way i'm gonna make it and therefore i don't want to commit to it fair enough fair enough oh yeah so i think that's everything that i wanted to ask you and everything that i wanted to discuss just to end this video i wanted to ask if you have one piece of wisdom or one piece of advice that you could give to a fourth or fifth year medical student what would you say oh man what i'd say is that happiness is not found on the next rung of the ladder like you really want to enjoy the hero now because the hero now is all that we have and when you're a medical student if you're in that mode where you're thinking oh my god med school sucks i hate it i can't wait to be a doctor i basically guarantee you're going to hate being a doctor as well because a lot of it a lot of enjoying the job and enjoying the stress and the long hours and the work and the responsibility a lot of that is the story that we tell ourselves about it and if we tell ourselves the story that this is fun i'm enjoying this we're going to enjoy it if we tell ourselves the story of i freaking hate being a medical student i can't wait to be a doctor because it's going to be so much better it's not going to be better you're still going to have those negative thoughts you're still going to be telling yourself the negative story that what you're doing right now is not fun and so i couldn't agree more that's right you know please don't believe the myth that you know when you become a doctor suddenly you'll be happy because that's just not the way forward be happy right now enjoy your time and you'll be a doctor and you'll absolutely smash it yeah that was excellent like i completely agree with how you frame the situation that you're in plays such a huge role in how you enjoy your experience like people who complain constantly about whatever is happening around them i'm like you're literally putting yourself in this vicious cycle you're asking to hate everything around you you're you're attracting things that you don't like and you're making everyone else sort of go away from you as well i think that's some great advice yeah man i'm very jealous that you've got another two years of med school left because i'm very happy and i'm going to take full advantage of them fantastic all right and that brings us to the end of this video if you did enjoy it please don't forget to leave a like and also subscribe to my channel to more content from me in the future also if you're not already subscribed to Ali Abdel's channel make sure you go do that immediately and we will see you in the next one peace ready what is up guys karma good start good start