Medical School

This video has helped me remember my motivations for getting into medicine when things are a little rough going. Best of luck to everyone who has yet another exam on Monday!

What are your daydreams about your future like? If you could do anything you dreamed of in medicine, what would you do?

Personally, I hope to someday be a nocturnist ER physician in a critical access hospital that can also help with being the medical director for the rural EMS system, and to get a Master's in Social Work on the side once I'm done with fellowship. If there was some way I could also do a few shifts a month as a GP at the local Planned Parenthood on the side, that would be awesome as well.

I personally detest Anki (it does not play nice with my ADHD brain) but this will probably be helpful for someone else. :)

So, the ever-present question: what would you be doing with your life if you hadn't chosen to pursue medicine?

Personally, I probably would have been a database administrator specializing in Oracle/SQL. That's what I was studying when I decided I just could not bring myself to work for someone else's capitalistic profit and provide no true benefit to humanity. If I had changed paths after finishing my post-bacc, I probably would have gone into genetic research to make use of that aptitude for database management.

I'm particularly interested to see the difference in answers from traditional versus nontraditional medical students.

Pretty much every resident counts as an employee of a qualifying non-profit, so you should be signing up for the PSLF, and you should know that part of qualifying for the PSLF requires that you are in an income-driven repayment plan.

https://studentaid.gov/manage-loans/forgiveness-cancellation/public-service

https://studentaid.gov/idr/

Another thing to keep in mind as new graduates/residents: your IDR monthly payment is calculated based on your past year's earnings and taxes (so your 4th year of medical school with almost certainly no income). This means that your first year of payments is likely going to be $0/month or at least very minimal, so it is in your best interest to forgo the grace period so that you have more qualifying payments at a lower rate counting towards your 120 qualifying payments for PSLF.

If anyone has more information about this or has any corrections to what I've posted here, please share them in the comments so that I can update the post accordingly with the most useful and accurate information possible.

As we're just finishing up 2023's STEP and COMLEX season (the bulk of it anyways), I wanted to start a discussion on what kinds of resources people are going to be using over the next year to prep for board exams in 2024.

Personally, I'm using AMBOSS, Osmosis, and Kaplan (Kaplan only because our school gave it to us for free), and I'll be starting UWorld once our student government secures a good discount for us. I'd love to hear what resources others are using and if anyone has any suggestions on board prep materials to use or avoid. (I've seen it said that for COMLEX, just do all of UWorld and read the green Savarese book, but I'm open to other suggestions/strategies as I plan on taking both.)

I'm creating this community as a possible replacement for r/medicalschool, given that it doesn't look like reddit corporate will be behaving in a reasonable manner anytime soon. I really got a lot out of participating in that community and I want to perpetuate it in some form.

If any of the r/medicalschool mods want to moderate here, I'd be more than happy to hand things over. Realistically, I'm just the gremlin in the corner who likes to chime in every now and then, and I don't have a lot of experience with forum moderation.

I'm open to any and all suggestions folks have for this new little corner of the internet, and I welcome the medical students and members of the medical community who have come to participate!