YOU BELONG HERE
a fast-paced summary of my first & second year in medical school.
1
The first year of medical school is always a blitz. You really don’t do much save for the basic sciences, a couple of general studies, and yeah, if your school is like mine, they’d throw in a couple of advanced biology just to roughen you up a bit.
You will pass with distinctions. Everyone does. In fact, on the day your final results come out, you will see a few people with a 5.0 CGPA, tens of 4.98 and the lowest CGPA would be 4.5. Basically, it is normal for medical students to finish their first year with a first class. This is why they get shortlisted for many scholarships afterwards.
In your first year, you will attend zero classes and you’ll still cop those A’s. They’ll come naturally, like you were created with a different kind of brain. You’ll feel special when you see your friends in sciences and education complaining about the courses after your exams at the Prometric Exam Hall. And then, there’s you who did not even finish reading the handouts yet scoring A’s.
The first year in medical school will literally be the softest year of your life. You will also realise very quickly how mundane you are when you meet your colleagues. More than ¾ of the class were the highest scorers in their respective secondary schools. You’ll meet the Olympiads, the one who won the national debate years ago. You’ll meet the ones with near-perfect photographic memory who could finish an exam and recall all the MCQs and their options. You’ll meet the ones with a first degree and those you were damn sure are younger than your third junior sister at home. You’ll also meet the fashionistas, the beautiful clique of girls everyone wants to be their friends, the extremely quiet ones, and the extremely loud ones. You’ll meet the wannabe artiste, the writer, the hijabis, and the religious fanatics.
It is Year One and everyone is still kinging on their own lane. You will write your final exams in February, and as expected, think your break should be six months or longer. You’ll express shock when your Class Rep comes to the group in April to announce that the posting letter is out and that lectures begin in May.
This will rudely wake everyone because here, in your medical school, you can’t move into a new class until the current occupants of that class are promoted. And your resumption means they’d be two Year 2 sets. They will paste the list of those who are promoted to this new class and only 2 people out of your classmates will not make it.
You–unfazed and unprepared–will reshuffle your existence in preparation for the second year of medical school.
2
On the first day of classes – a physiology class – you will wake up late and find yourself inside the 500-capacity lecture hall with other glistening-eyed medical students. The lecture is an introductory one and is more of orientation than a normal class. Everyone will be on their Sunday's best except you. On that day, your first class as a preclinical student, you look like someone that was roughly woken up, thrown into clothes, and dragged to go listen to Zee Baby teach Physiology.
Afterwards, you’ll start community medicine classes. The anatomy department does not have your class’ time yet; they have two sets preparing for their promotional exams so your class must wait. The medical biochemistry department won’t even recognize your presence yet. And physiology department would extremely stretch the introductory part of the course. All these delays were to round up with the senior classes before giving attention to your class.
So, you’ll do community medicine majorly. Frequently, the senior classes would pick on your class and call you people names. Some lecturers would also attempt to scare you with only half of you will proceed to the next class, we will weed you out, many of you don’t deserve to be here and other depressing talk. The old Year2 class would eventually sit for their promotional exams and 46 out of the 190 students would repeat and join your class.
You will look at their results and think it was poor preparation that made 70% of their class fail BCH. You’ll tell yourself that your own case will be different. That it can’t ever be you. The senior, senior colleagues will hold bouts of orientations for your class. They’d tell you guys a lot of invaluable things. They’d hammer on the need to start reading early but you’d think it was over-exaggeration based on the stories they shared.
The pass mark is 50, how hard could it be to get that? You are used to scoring 92/100 in Yr1, so how difficult is it to score 50/100 now?
Classes won’t start properly until August and a quarter of your classmates still blame the Rep for the early resumption. Here is when your suffering would start and it would be multi-factorial.
First, you did not do the pre-reading your seniors had been emphasizing, so when classes start it won’t be too smooth because the lecturers will assume you have a little bit of background knowledge. It won’t help matters that almost all your classmates are ahead of you in terms of reading and offered positive confirmation when the lecturers assumed that you’ve learned something.
This is when you begin to hate some of your classmates, since some of them would make it their life’s mission to intimidate those of you who are still clueless.
Anatomy dissections will never look like what's inside your Atlas. And the gross would not be as grossing as you thought. Physiology lectures would be part comic relief and part business. But what you’ll despise the most is 8:00 AM classes and you missed them a lot. Biochemistry will not start on time and it wasn’t until the middle of the session before you have a grasp of what the heck that course is about.
3
The first serious test you’d write is introductory physiology and you would end up with a ridiculous score of 37/100. It would look like a film trick to you. Actually, you knew you did badly in the incourse because of the negative marking in place. Also, you did not fully revise before the test because Anatomy was already pressing your neck.
It is introductory physiology and it is just about cells, so you did not give it the needed attention. That would be your first F and it would hit you hard. You’d cry to the DM of your best friend and she would console you. She would remind you about how much greatness you carry and that there is always the chance to do better. You’d also take solace in the fact that your score isn’t the lowest in the class and feel gut-wrenched that there were people who scored 80’s on that same test.
You will shake off the feeling and pay attention to your other incourses. Anatomy’s first incourse is Upper Limb and you vow not to be caught unprepared. So you attended more dissections and waited behind to study all the cadavers. Formalin would almost gorge your eyes out but you won’t mind. When the results come out, you’d have a 57/100 and feel okay. At this point, you just want to have 50 and move on.
You never once envisage yourself as the class best or one of the hypers. In fact, a couple of your classmates would tell you that your lifestyle is more befitting of an MFA creative writing student than a second-year med student. You’d tell them that you belong here and have what it takes to do medicine.
Physiology second incourse would come and you would do better. You’d realize your mistakes from the first test and this time, put everything in you into physiology. You read the handouts back to back multiple times, formed your own notes, and memorized steps and values. The test was 12 essay questions and you wrote so much as 3.5 complete foolscap sheets. You wrote so much, your hands ached at the end of the test but when the result came out, it was 56/100.
In October, three months into the gruelling workload of med school, you’d be so burnt out that you would pick up your phone, call for an emergency family meeting and break down into tears before announcing that you are no more interested in this medicine. Your family would hold you down, and do a series of interventions for you. They would support you in all ways possible and tell you to just push harder. They’d beg you to finish the session and if you still felt like dropping out afterwards, there would be no questions asked.
So, you changed your orientation. You tell yourself that you will put in the work but if the results are not correlating with your effort, you’d gracefully bow out rather than be withdrawn from school.
4
Towards the end of the session, after a bout of tests and their results were out, you’d realize quite a few things about your studies. You performed considerably well in all the assessments that involve essays; you did badly in some of your MCQ types of assessment; you love practical sessions except anatomy dissections; you have a fairly decent memory and can recall structured texts. And you don’t forget answers to MCQ questions that you failed and got corrected.
Earlier in the session, you used to talk to almost everyone in your class. You were the extrovert, living-in-the-moment type of student. You don’t put too much emphasis on grades, you think everyone is one big potential and try to be nothing but accommodating. To see people beyond what they present.
However, you would slowly realize that a noticeable percentage of your classmates are indeed retards who operate beneath the realm of human comprehensibility. You would meet ridiculously selfish individuals who hoard vital information from the rest of the class.
You’d meet the cliques of dumbasses who carry themselves with this tinge of i-am-better-than-you-academically. You’d meet the subservient girls and the too-proud-to-respond-to-your-greeting geng. You’d meet the intrusive ones with an IQ of a door knob who’d lift your posts from social media and bring them to the class group for discussions.
You’d meet the users who are only interested in what they could get from you. You’d meet the liars, the jokers, the ones who just don’t fit anywhere. You’d meet the overly competitive, cutthroat, and just plain wicked classmates. You’d meet people who don’t mind sabotaging others as long as they move ahead.
It will be exhausting and you’ll slowly fight your way until you regain your sanity. You realise you don’t need many friends to survive med school. You will quickly learn to depend on yourself only.
You will also meet classmates who are absolutely top human beings for real. The kind ones; the bookish ones; the ones that are CPU of all available past Q; the ones that form notes for everyone. You will meet the motivational speakers. All these amazing people will be the anchor on your worst days. You’ll fall out with friends and patch up with some. You will learn, albeit not too quickly, to see your class as what it truly is – a wild mix of good, bad, and uglies.
At the end of the session, you have re-evaluated not only yourself but the kind of relationships you want to be involved in. At the end of the session, you’d feel comfortable with the majority of your test results. However, you still lack a lot in terms of reading capacity and how much work you have to cover.
In December 2023, your New Year goals will include coming up with strategies and sticking to them. You tell yourself you needed just a few day's break and start 2024 differently. Until things started to get real. Until your Class Rep came with the announcement.
It is the last days of March 2024. A few days after you finish your promotional exams, you will sit down and ruminate about how your second year went. You remember all the big things you did.
In 2023 you served: as Local Officer for NiMSA; as associate editor-in-chief of your medical students association; ran for an executive post in the MSA; led creative groups. In 2024: you became a research assistant and a local officer for NiMSA; you planned and executed multiple awareness walks; attended scientific conferences; writing workshops; became a member of all the clubs you wanted to join.
You are indeed living your 2024 prospectus, and in the words of the Olórí Ebi of SWEMSA “Don't let anyone deceive you, all of you belong here.”
Indeed, you belong here.
This is beautiful. I could personally relate to some things here. Like the 'get only 50 part'. Amazing stuff, Ololade. You belong here, in medicine✨
Sincerely I want to say thank you for writing this. Words won't even suffice. I'm a medical student too and I will not lie, it's the hardest job in the world, at least for me. Most times, I feel like giving up. I have thought of dropping out more than I should. But just having someone, I can resonate with really helps and gives me hope in a weird way, I don't really know how. Either way, I am brought to believe we will get through this together with your writing. Love you for writing this, friend. See you at the brighter side of the tunnel 💜