 I did it. I finally finished medical school. I graduated with the distinction and I was even selected for the gold medal Viva competition, which puts me in about the top six out of our 450 student cohort. This is a fantastic achievement. I'm really proud to have been selected in the first place. And even though I didn't win the competition, I'm really happy that I took part and I thought it was a great experience. Now medical school was hard. There's no getting around that. You've got tons of information to learn, plenty of deadlines to keep up with and never ending pressure coming at you from all sides. But I've learned a lot about studying and being at university in my nine years of higher education. And hopefully some of the things that I share in this video will resonate with you and help you find your own success and happiness in medical school. One of the things that I think is quite underestimated in medical school is putting yourself in uncomfortable situations. Unlike a lot of other courses where most of your learning is done through lectures and textbooks, medicine is largely a hands-on and practical degree where you spend the majority of your time actually in the hospital engaging with and talking to staff and patients. Because you actually have to do the thing yourself, whether that's taking a history from patients, taking bloods, making a referral over the phone, you know, watching other people around you doing these things is only gonna help so much. Now you can apply this principle no matter what year of medical school you're in. If you're in first and second year where a lot of your learning is mostly lecture or tutorial based, then take that extra step of talking to your tutor or your professor after the lecture or tutorial and ask them all those questions that you have. Ask them to elaborate on things you didn't quite understand or to explain it in a different way. Trust me, they're always more than happy to do this kind of stuff. They literally live for when students come up to them and ask them questions and you end up learning more, building better relationships with your seniors and getting more out of the teaching than if you were passively observing the lecture. If you're in third year and just getting started with clinical placement, then usually walking up to patients and taking a history can be the most daunting thing ever. And I feel you, I've been there, I remember what that's like very well, but unless you push yourself to go out there and do it, nothing in the curriculum is really gonna help you get that experience. Nobody's gonna sit there telling you to go talk to patients and take their history. A lot of it is something that you need to do yourself. Early on in clinical placement, what I would do for comfort is I would ask a fellow medical student, my clinical partner, to come with me so that we could each take half of the history or help each other if one of us blanked midway through or I would ask one of the more junior doctors, the F1s like myself now or the F2s to come along and sort of see what I'm doing and button or help if I get stuck. If you don't make this effort and put yourself out of your comfort zone, then it's all too common in medical school for us to just wake up, go to clinical placement, follow everyone around on the ward round, basically just shadowing and observing as if we were doing clinical experience back in high school. And finally, if you're a fourth or fifth year medical student, this is where you really need to start pushing yourself, you know, doing things like seeing patients on your own, clarking in A and E, asking the doctors if you can help with any bloods or cannulas or jobs, get scrubbed into theater and get involved there if that's what you're into. At this point, you're kind of nearing the end of medical school and in a couple of short months and trust me, they're very short, you're going to be the doctor. So the more experience that you're able to build while you're in medical school, the more things you actually get to do with your hands, the more interactions and words that you exchange with patients, the more comfortable that you become interacting with other people and doing the job of an actual doctor. You don't want to start your first day of F1 and only haven't taken blood a handful of times or not know how to use the computer systems at all or feel really anxious walking up to a patient. That was a bit of a long section but I think it's a really important one. I genuinely think that going through medical school alone is one of the worst things you can do. Medical school is long, it's hard, it's mentally and physically draining and to not be able to share that with other people going through the same experience can be really, really tough. I've said it before and I'll say it again, there's absolutely no way I could have gone through medical school without my friends. Everything from venting about clinical placement to studying together, to sharing resources, to having someone to talk to when things are tough, to going out and socializing, you know, the more that you make medical school a group activity, the better. And I know this firsthand, in my previous degree at the University of Toronto, in my first and second years, I kind of treated university as a single player game and when I tell you that it was one of the most difficult periods of my life, genuinely it was one of the most difficult periods of my life, I felt like I was playing the game on hard mode and literally for no reason when I look back on it. There was an easy mode sitting right there waiting for me to just unlock it but I was so stressed and focused on my studying that I just couldn't see past that. If you're watching this video and you think that this sounds like your experience then really, I encourage you to go out there, join some societies, introduce yourself to others in your lectures and tutorials and just try and branch out. Medical school is an infinitely more fun experience when you have other people to go through it with you. Suddenly, this huge weight that you've been carrying on your shoulders becomes evenly distributed across you and your friends and you all help carry that burden and that weight together. If you're looking for an online community where you can meet others, have discussions about your life, studying or experiences, then you can join the Karma Club. The Karma Club is my patron, which gives you access to all kinds of behind the scenes content for this channel like bloopers and other stuff including access to the Karma Medic Discord server. We've got channels on there to discuss everything from personal achievements, university, high school, food, music, technology and even a study room where you can sit down and study with other people in a little community to help keep you accountable. It's such a fun time and I think it's one of the best things to come out of this Karma Medic community. If you're interested at all in joining then click the link in the description down below and I'll see you over there. One of the things that I disliked most about medical school is how the system splits up friend groups by sending us to different hospitals all over the country for our clinical years. This forces you to build new groups to socialize with and have as partners throughout your degree which actually isn't a bad thing. I met lots of wonderful people while out on peripheral placement and it expanded my social circle quite a bit. The downside, of course, is that you're no longer with the friend groups that you built in first and second years so it's kind of bittersweet. But anyways, the point is, meet other people, be friendly, share your resources, your time and your help. You won't regret it. Trust me, when you're done with medical school you're not gonna remember the endless hours of studying that you did alone in your room. You're gonna remember the friends and the fun times that you shared together. Without a doubt, one of the major keys to finding success in medical school is to keep yourself organized. I swear, medical school isn't necessarily hard because of the actual material that you're learning but rather because of how much material there is, all of the exams and assignments that you need to keep up with, there's just a lot. Organization is essential. There's no two ways about it. Without a plan, without a to-do list, without somewhere to keep track of everything that you're doing, medical school can quickly become very overwhelming. I've said this before but I'm the type of person to get quite anxious and stressed if I don't know what I've already done, if I don't know what I still have left to do and if I don't keep everything organized. For me, throughout medical school, I've been organizing my entire life using Notion who are kindly sponsoring this video. If you don't already use Notion, now is the time to get started. Notion, if you didn't know, is like the best all-in-one app for just managing everything in your life. The great thing about Notion is that it uses these building blocks which you can display, organize, and move in any way that you want so that you can truly set up a personalized experience that works for you. Personally, I think my Notion is quite aesthetic with all of these emojis that I have on the covers up over here. But honestly, this is so basic. You can get really creative with it and I'll share some of my favorite templates in the description down below. I've gone into great detail about how I built my Notion setup in a previous video that you can watch somewhere up over here. But today, what I wanna share with you is some of my favorite things and best things that I use Notion for. So this over here is my Notion setup. This is my medical school page that I've used for the last many, many years. And now that I'm a doctor, I have a doctor life one. But probably my favorite page in my Notion is this conditions list. I have here organized every single, well, most, conditions that you could possibly imagine might come up in medical school or in your life as a doctor, organized by different body systems or specialties, as you can see here. And then every single one of them, if we open them up, has a lot of further information. And for any specific condition or disease, I have sort of the most important information at the top. So presenting complaint, how does this presentation show up when a patient comes into the hospital? What are some of the key investigations that you need to do in order to confirm it or diagnose it? And then acute management plans if it's an emergency or just general management and treatment of that condition. Now, the fact that I have this for practically every single condition you could possibly think of or need is very, very helpful. Even when I'm in the hospital, if I come across a condition that I just don't remember everything about, I can very quickly open up Notion on my phone, search up the thing that I'm looking for and have the information right over there. And the fact that you can have all of these pages here which are easily movable and customizable, makes it really easy to set this up how you want. The work harder to do list, this is something that a lot of you might have seen in my previous video. This is basically a sort of live updating dynamic to-do list that changes with you. Let me explain. So basically over here if I'm ever walking around during the day or if I'm in the hospital and I remember that there's something that I need to do, I come here and I write it down in my inbox. It's for example, let's say home mom in the evening. Now we can add a lot of context or tags to the specific tasks. So this is to do with my mom. I need my phone to do this. So let's add a phone and the due date is today. And then I can link it to a certain part of my life. So being a doctor, YouTube or life admin, calling my mom is not admin but it's the thing that fits best here. And then it will go down into that specific section over here. As you can see, call mom in the evening. When I'm done with that task, I can click done and it automatically disappears from here and goes into the graveyard that I have somewhere down over here. And I have these different sections for being an F1 doctor, life admin and YouTube. And as I finish them, I click done, they disappear. If something needs to be done urgently, I can select this ASAP button and it'll go into the due now. So if I ever need to see what needs to get done today, I just look at this due now section and I know what I need to do right now. And then also really importantly, this entire YouTube channel is run out of notion. So over here is where I keep track of all the ideas that I have for videos and how they sort of move through the production process from going to being a random idea that I had into a final video that gets uploaded. We start over here with planned videos, which are ideas that I have for upcoming videos, upcoming sponsors, and then I can assign them to videos that make sense that are relevant and that I think would make a good natural fit. Then these are videos on hold that I've kind of worked on but have abandoned research, so doing some wider reading on the video, collecting sources and things like that. This is the scripting stage, then need to review, writer to review, ready to record. Right now this video is over here in the ready to record section. And then it goes through an editing process and then finally goes to completed. And when I put it in completed here, it disappears and goes somewhere else. So this is kind of the main hub out of which my whole YouTube production process happens and trying to keep track of this many videos, okay, on a piece of paper is just never gonna happen. So long story short, Notion has changed my life in a number of ways and I honestly could not more highly recommend it. The best thing about Notion is that it's completely free to use for both students and educators. You can sign up with your school email address and get access to all the personal pro plan features. If you're not already using Notion, like I said, now is the best time to start before the academic year kicks in so that you can be as prepared as possible. If you're interested and wanna check out Notion for yourself, you can sign up using the link in the description down below. All right, so asking questions. I remember that this was a big thing for me. You know, back in high school, I always felt worried or scared about asking questions in front of the class. Some of the things running through my head would be, you know, what if the teacher thinks that I'm stupid? What if my classmates laugh at me? What if I get a random voice crack while asking because I'm all nervous, which happens to me all the time every day in my life. And sort of by the time I reached university and then medical school, I realized that, you know what, I'm fully entitled to ask all of these questions. I'm paying good money to be here and it is quite literally these people's jobs to help me learn and to help me understand. And asking questions is a normal and critical part of that learning process. And kind of once I got over that hump, I started asking questions more and more and more. And the best thing about that is that I'd be able to clear up my misconceptions that I had at the time when I had them. Instead of writing them down to look up later or even worse, just forget about it entirely, I would actually understand that piece of information. I found that this was particularly important for me Doctors and other healthcare staff often talk at the speed of lightning and use all kinds of abbreviations and acronyms that will fly over most people's heads unless you've heard them before or you know what it is that they're talking about. And without that essential context, it would be so difficult for me to figure out what was going on, especially in my earlier years before I'd heard some of these things over and over again. For example, if you're reading a patient's notes, it might say something like, patient is 81FBIBA with enough, their BP is 110 over 70 with a GCS of 12, FBC shows low HP and WBC with user needs showing a CR of 123. You get the point. When you're first going on the wards, this stuff can be really, really confusing. It takes a while to get used to the language used by medical professionals. I always made it a point to ask about any abbreviations that I didn't understand. And you know, sometimes I'd get a response along the lines of, go Google it yourself and come back to me and tell me what it means. But those types of responses were honestly few and far between. Most people were really helpful and happy to explain things to me. And then in later years, I'd have more difficult questions about why we're requesting a certain investigation for someone when I thought that we should do something else or why we're referring someone to a particular specialty. And without asking these types of questions, I wouldn't really be able to understand the physiology and pathology underlying the patient's condition and why these management decisions were being made. And the only reason that I was asking them was that I would be able to recognize them in the future and make the same correct decisions in the future. All this to say, I learned a lot by asking questions. And asking questions doesn't mean that you're stupid. In fact, I honestly think it shows the opposite. It shows that you're actively listening, you're trying to learn, you're being involved and you're trying to become better. Most clinical staff will recognize this and want to help. It's infinitely better than just sitting in the corner watching everyone in silence and not understanding what's going on, which is a complete waste of your time. And last but not least, probably what helped me succeed the most in medical school is simply putting in the work. I know that's probably not what you wanted to hear, but there's honestly no way around it. There will be times when you need to force yourself to just sit down, buckle up and grind out many hours of studying in the library. That's part of what being a medical student is. Without that, you just simply can't learn all the knowledge that you need to know for your exams. I think one of the best things that you can do about this is just to simply acknowledge it. Knowing that your upcoming exams are going to be intense and you're going to have to work really hard is honestly half the battle. If you know that, then you can plan accordingly, you can prepare and you can dedicate the time that's needed. If you underestimate what's ahead of you or you keep procrastinating it until some undefined time in the future, then you're gonna find yourself in a really tough position when exam season comes. As you probably know, if you've watched this channel at all, I'm a really big fan of not cramming and doing things in the last minute. I've honestly never pulled an all night for studying. I've never crammed for an exam. And the reason for that is because that just sounds really, really stressful. And I don't wanna put myself under that kind of pressure, so I just start studying early. The key to doing this, of course, is to put in work throughout the whole year. Small bits and pieces every day add up to huge amounts over the course of weeks or months. And then when it comes exam time, you won't have much new material to cover. You'll just need to review everything that you've already done before. On the flip side, leaving everything until the last minute means that when you sit down to actually get your studying done, you're gonna have this huge mountain to climb ahead of you. And I wouldn't blame you for being stressed out at that time either. It's a really difficult task. So decrease your stress, decrease your anxiety, start slowly, start early, bit by bit. You'll thank me later. The best motivator that I've had for this throughout my time in university is having encouraging friends where we can all keep each other accountable. If you check in on your friends and your friends check in on you, then you'll always be reminded of important deadlines that you might have otherwise missed and you'll be motivated to keep on going with your studying. I can't even begin to tell you how many times Kenji or Georgina would message me saying, hey, have you filled out this form or signed up to this thing before the deadline? And I literally would have never heard of it before. If it wasn't for that, I might have been completely screwed. So having good friends and accountability buddies like this is very helpful. Overall, I just wanna say that medical school is an amazing experience. It's an incredible time. Looking back, I think something that helped make it such a good experience was I had already done a university degree before. I had already learned how to navigate university life. I had learned how to study. And I knew all of these things that I just wish I had known back at the start. And so hopefully this video serves that purpose and lets you know things earlier on that might help you find your own happiness and success in medical school. Take care and I'll see you in the next video.