A Medical Student's Worst Enemy
If I should go into a tools shop, guess the first tool I'm going to buy.
(I said guess, not continue reading)
I'm going to buy a big hammer strong enough to do this…
But the big question is: “If I break the clock, do I stop time?”
That's highly impossible, and that my friends is why time remains a medical student's worst enemy.
Hi, my name is Chimfoun and this is Últimos Días, the newsletter where I document my last days in medical school.
Before we continue, I'd have you know that there's no frequency to these issues and the only way to know when there's a new issue is to subscribe.
Now let's get into the meat of today.
The Time Dilemma
I was invited last week Friday to speak to the year one students during their orientation on the topic, “Productivity and Mentorship”. I ended up speaking on “Achieving Balance as a Medic”.
For a topic that direct, I still ended my session with the statement, “You can never achieve balance as a medical student, the best you can do is to keep balancing. It's an intentional effort.”
Well, those were not my exact words. They were more sarcastic like “If you ever relax and say you have achieved balance, you are finished.”
Just like I mentioned in the last issue, medicine is a jealous course and like every thing jealous, it will never derive joy whenever you are doing something else. But, as a medical student, something else must come up and that is why balance must be attempted.
The speaker before me, Dr. Onos, said it better using the stew analogy and I'll love to borrow this to make my point.
The Stew Analogy
Consider the stew to be a medical student. To make a perfect stew, you need the following ingredients:
Tomatoes likened to personal academic efforts
Pepper and Onions likened to school lectures
Groundnut oil likened to religious duties/activities
Salt & Seasoning likened to social life
Curry & Thyme likened to extracurricular activities
Meat & Fish likened to additional tutorials (which are optional)
Using these ingredients, four types of students were suggested:
Type 1: Tomatoes-Pepper-Onion Oriented Student
The main ingredients of this stew is academic activities with little to no groundnut oil included.
This student prioritizes academic success at the expense of spiritual & even social development.
This type of stew doesn't taste so good and get soured easily as there's no groundnut oil in them to preserve them.
Type 2: Groundout Oil Oriented Student
This student is preoccupied with so much spiritual duties and activities while neglecting the pursuit of their academic goals.
Such stew with so much groundnut oil with little to no tomatoes, pepper and onion is bad for the health.
Type 3: Salt-Maggi-Curry-Thyme Oriented Student
You can imagine the taste of this stew would taste. With little to no groundnut oil, not enough tomatoes, pepper or onions, such would be highly carcinogenic and may need to be thrown away.
Type 4: The Balanced Student
This is the stew of best quality, with all the ingredients properly combined and in the right proportion.
However, to stir up a debate, I doubt the existence of the best quality stew. What I believe in is the cooking process which involves ensuring there is always enough of every ingredient - the process of balancing.
The model I presented to the students was “The Shift” model and I'm going to show you how it works, especially for me.
The Shift Model
According to scientists, the most stable shape is the Triangle. This is because its three sides and three corners work together to keep it from bending or collapsing easily, even when you push or pull on it.
This is the ideology behind the term “The Triangular Student”. The triangular student is one whose activities revolve around three things - school, study and sleep.
However, the “perfect” triangular student does not exist and that's why I created a new term called The Quadrangular Student. The last activity being a “shift”, something outside the regular school, study and sleep.
Pay attention to the fact that a quadrangle is no longer a stable shape. Therefore it is prone to collapsing like the image below.
To prevent this, one must ALWAYS be in the process of balancing and that is where the Shift Model comes in.
Prepare your mathematics brain because we are about to do some calculations now.
A week has 168 hours. With this knowledge, let us calculate the time spent on the regular activities (School, Study and Sleep).
School
A normal school day starts at 8 am and ends at 4 pm. That is 8 hours a day every Monday to Friday. A total of 40 hours per week.
Study
It is recommended that a good student reads a maximum of 6 hours a day. A total of 42 hours per week.
Sleep
Science recommends that a good night sleep should be about 8 hours long. A total of 56 hours per week.
If you do the math, the total number of hours doing regular activities each week is 138 hours leaving an extra 30 hours unaccounted for. These are the hours allocated to shift.
The idea of the shift model is that nothing is written in stone and therefore the allocated hours are fluid and can move into any of activity of the quadrangle.
Take a look at this image:
From this, you can see that it's possible to do the following:
Increase the average study time per week by reducing the shift hours.
Reduce the average sleep time in order to get more shift time.
Skip school time and use the additional hours to sleep and study.
And many more
The shift model is so practical because it reveals how much time you spend on the major activities each week and supports my ideology that there is no balance but constant balancing. The most important skill needed for this is time management.
I won't be talking about time management on this issue but I believe you should know something about it that you can can apply to your new found knowledge of the shift model.
My Week in Pictures
Updates on my Preparation
This week, I changed the task in the Show Up Keep Up Challenge. Instead of reading one topic everyday and summarising, we will now be answering one theory question from a question bank I compiled.
The goal is to finish answering the total questions by the ending of June. This will give us 2 extra months to go over the compiled questions and answers in preparation for the final exams.
Also, I intend to start practicing multiple choice questions every night with interested colleagues before I retire to bed. This would keep me on my toes if I implement it.
That will be all for this issue.
See you in the next!