 So what are the skills that you need for medical school? In fact, what are the five skills that if you master them, we'll just take you to another level and talk about that in this video. Let's get to it. All right guys, welcome to the MD journey. My name is Lux from internal medicine resin helping people just like you succeed on their medical journey with luxury. Welcome to the channel. If you're new, make sure you hit that subscribe button, that like button as well as that notification bell to be notified with our two weekly videos coming out. You just like this one. So today I wanted to talk about a really important topic, which is what skills do you need to master in medical school and as a medical student to separate yourself from the pack from all of your other classmates to get away from that stereotypical stressed out overwhelmed and overworked med student master these five skills. I promise you you're going to enjoy med school, but you also want to be at the top of your class. Let's get into it. So the first skill that you really need to master is the ability to putting ideas together. Now, here's what I mean. When you're in college or when you're first starting off med school, you're going to try to go through that memorization kind of approach when you're studying, but then you realize that when the test comes around or when you get to more important things like clinical rotations and actually take care of patients, simply memorizing a fact for an ABC D exam doesn't correlate to becoming a good physician. Instead, you have to be able to take topics from a course you learned, you know, a year ago to topics you just learned recently and being able to put them together to eventually take care of a patient as a doctor right now. Whenever I take care of patients, you know, I look at their labs and say, could it be their kidneys? And I think about all the different things that could be wrong there. Could it be their heart? Could it be, you know, their nervous system? You put together all different concepts to help and you put together different types of concepts to eventually help and take care of the patient as well as manage them. So you have to get better. So one of the most important skills in medical school is putting various ideas either within a specific class and obviously within many different organ systems and courses together. The second skill that we're going to talk about is you have to be a driven learner. Now medical school is sometimes anti-learn because you're forced to do so much as part of the classes and exams. Now it's not uncommon that there's some days we're going to have to read 20, 30, 40. I think there's been days where I've had to read 60 pages for just one day's full of lectures. And that's a lot. You know, it's very easy not to be motivated and not want to do learning when you're not forced to. You know, if you have a weekend off, the last thing you want to do is to learn more information. But as you start getting into the clinical rotations, as you start becoming a physician, you realize that not all the information that you learned in medical school is able to fill in like apps to where you can take care of a patient. There are little things here and there that I still don't know. And so I have to look up. There are things that are always changing in medicine, you know, different forms of treatment, things that we wouldn't do back then that we're doing now or things that we weren't doing. Now we realize this is complete BS and we should probably change our style of practice. And so to be able to grasp those concepts, you really have to be a continual driven learner. And I'll go ahead and link down a video below the different resources that I like to use to keep me up to date on things while also keeping learning medicine fun and entertaining and the third skill that's extremely important to develop the medical school and as a medical student is you have to develop an intrinsic source of motivation now between intrinsic and extrinsic extrinsics are things like people praising you people, you know, respecting you, putting you on a high pedestal for the things that you accomplished or it can be things like if you're working and things like a monetary award or a medal if you're running a marathon. Those are examples of extrinsic motivators where things outside of your internal drive are causing you to continue to move on, but unfortunately medical school doesn't have a lot of room for that. You're going to go from test to test without really anyone saying good job with anything people will know you you're stressed out in medical school. That's pretty much all you get. You may get a pat in the back from working hard and eventually you will get a diploma and graduate medical school. But even that's not even the biggest source of motivation because there's still so much more left to do in your medical training. So you have to understand that to move along this journey and to be happy to be driven to kind of always want to move forward and progress source of motivation has to come from within and a lot of med students don't learn this until much later on and they're burnt out. They don't feel like maybe this was the right decision and unfortunately that happens to a lot of people. So as early as you can find out what your intrinsic sources of motivation are, you know some cliche things are things like find your why why are you doing this and other things that I love to talk about to build your intrinsic motivation are things like my golden nugget philosophy which basically say you know what experiences have I had that have motivated me to this point and where can I find more of those experiences where I find more patient encounters more experiences and examples of me studying really hard and getting a great grade things that will keep you going. I feel like this is one of the biggest things that kept me going through med school and still kind of have a smile on my face four years in. So if you want to be that kind of student make sure you master your intrinsic source of motivation. Now skill number four and this is a big one because I feel like this is a pitfall if you don't do it as you have to be prepared for failures. I think sometimes med students and students in general especially type A future doctors don't like the word failure. But I've learned of anything that the quicker you fail the quicker you learn and the better you're able to be in future challenges and opportunities. So if you're always worried about oh man I'm gonna struggle on this exam or I'm not sure if I should try this different study technique or try this different approach on my rotations because maybe it'll make me look bad my grades will suffer and then it's a whole circle of you just kind of getting in your head. But instead being okay with making little changes and just seeing how things work out the sooner that you're able to understand that one failure is inevitable in every phase of life. That means not getting the test grades you want not getting the valuations you want or things just not going your way in general. The easier it is for you to say okay what can I learn from this how can I move forward to ideally avoid a similar situation. So be prepared for failure just going to happen to lower extreme as well as some fortunately sometimes on the higher side so being prepared for it and understanding how to look at it as a lesson is really one of the biggest skills you need and medical school as well as about the students and getting into skill number five which is you need to develop the skills to remain steady and consistent. You know I like to talk about this a lot of my philosophy med school I even made a video about that you guys can check out what makes med school hard and really it's about being consistent for years in a row. That's a lot to ask for for anybody in addition to remaining consistent was so difficult sometimes we're in that middle zone where we're in the second third year of med school we're kind of going through the flow we know how to do things but it doesn't seem like we're making any progress and it's easier to be burnt out during that time. There's a concept known as cancer law which basically says that everything looks like a failure in the middle essentially you know you may have that nice upclimb originally in the start of med school when you're learning a lot becoming more efficient your second and third year you know you kind of are steady at that amount of output and amount of work you're putting in but during the middle it doesn't look like you're making any progress so it's very easy to be burnt out because you don't see yourself improving but instead take a step back and say how much have I grown how much have I improved also keep in mind what you're trying to accomplish these are all important concepts to become a steady inconsistent medical school because you may find these short spurts of videos that keep you motivated but then you know that motivational eventually go away so one you got to have that intrinsic source and two you just have to be going and working at it if you're getting the results you want keep doing it if you want better results than make small changes remain steady and consistent that way the failures don't drag you down and the successes don't make you feel like you're on a pedestal kind of stay nice and even keel now I know I said five but I want to give you one more skill honestly is probably number one but just left till the end of this video and that is you have to you focus on improving your people skills obviously doctors interact with patients all day but sometimes what I learned from my medical school experience is that people don't work as much on their patient interactions they do their medical knowledge and unfortunately we spend at least fifty percent of our time with patients interacting with them and it doesn't matter how amazing you are a clinical if you can't convey to the patient that one you understand what they're going to and two that you're able to kind of essentially dumb down all have medical knowledge into a piece of information that they can understand on what's going on what you're doing for them all your medical knowledge is kind of useless because a patient could just say based off what you told me I don't want not interested in any of that because simply have been a lack of communication and inability for you to connect and build rapport with that patient I see that all the time to make sure that you're working on your people skills and essentially an easy trick that I would do is when I was interacting with patients when I was on my clinical rotations each day each week I would ask myself how could I've had a better experience with that patient it may have been a great experience still ask yourself what ways could you have made it even better you know how could you have listened to them better how could you have had some more directive questions and how could you have made that patient feel like you were there to take care of them these are all kind of things that I would do to make sure that my people skills are getting better both my classmates as well and my patients feel at least three four years of medical school that definitely made huge strides to there so I definitely recommend you guys try out those guys are my five to six skills I think you need to medical school to become a successful medical student hopefully you guys enjoyed it like I miss something or you want to give your thoughts and go ahead and drop them in the comment section before you leave I want to give you two places to go to ideally get more help and more kind of advice if you enjoyed a video like this one I'll link down a playlist that's all about how to succeed as a new med student because I'm presuming that you're just starting in school if you're watching this video and two if you guys are interested and you want a step-by-step blueprint on different kind of parts of medical school you can check out the courses that we have on the MD journey website so I will link that down below to before you click off this video make sure you know if you enjoyed and got anything out of the video and you want to support the community go ahead and at least hit that like button go ahead and consider subscribing and hitting that notification bell to get to the videos thrown at you each week on Wednesdays and Sundays just like this one but thank you guys so much for joining me on my journey hopefully I've been a little help to you on yours I'll see you guys in the next one peace