Non-traditional medical students: some things that may surprise you

I started medical school at 27 years old, after working full time as an engineer for 5 years. I was apprehensive to come to medical school after such a long break from academia, and worried that I would be older than most of my class. This post is about the top 5 most surprising aspects of medical school for me as a non-traditional student. 

1. The average age of first year osteopathic medical students is 24. The AACOMAS reports that in the 2021 application cycle, the mean age of matriculants is 24 years old, but up to13% of matriculants at osteopathic medical schools are between the ages of 26-30. My school had an average age of 26 at matriculation. I found myself mostly spending time with classmates between the ages of 25 and 38. I was surprised by how many of my classmates were other career-changers! I also found that age and work experience did not exactly correlate with maturity and ability either. Some of the most mature, respectable classmates of mine were 22 at matriculation, and some of the most immature, untrustworthy students were in their 30s. I very quickly stopped using age as a way to identify with any of my classmates. In an academic setting, age truly is just a number. Maturity level, capacity for responsibility, and ability to take care of yourself are much more important than the year you were born!
2. Studying for the MCAT prepared me better than I expected for medical school classes and standardized testing. I felt woefully unprepared to study biological sciences after two degrees in engineering. I had considered the MCAT as a box to check. Surprisingly, the basic sciences, function of human body systems, genetics, and biochemistry laid out in MCAT study resources was plenty for me to be on track with my classmates in the first week of class. Even more important than the content itself was the ability to take high-level standardized tests. Medical school exams and quizzes, licensing exams, USMLE Step 1, and COMLEX Level 1 are all multiple-choice tests. If you can teach yourself to understand the question stem, the purpose of the question, and how to eliminate distractors from your answer choices for the MCAT, you are halfway to mastering any exam in medical school.

On the flip side, working a desk job for several years set me up really well to take the MCAT and to study for hours on end. I was conditioned to sit at a desk for up to eight hours a day, looking at a computer screen, and not taking very long breaks to distract myself. This felt like a benefit to me first semester, but in hindsight I would have rather been more physically active during those years of my life. You live and you learn.

3. I had to learn how to study. I think that most people who studied engineering, math, accounting, or any major that requires a lot of math skills would all struggle the way that I did. In engineering, for example, my classes consisted of learning how to model real life situations with idealized equations, and find out how big, hot, concentrated, long, or fast a design needed to be to meet a task. Most of my exams in college were open-book exams. (I assure you they were not easy.) The tests were all about procedures and applying engineering concepts to real world applications. I never had to memorize anything because equations were always given, or could be derived fairly easily if needed. 

Fast forward to medical school where you have to memorize EVERYTHING. I’ve heard several times that medical students learn approximately 10,000 new words in 4 years. So, you’re memorizing an entire new language, the mechanism of action of drugs, the virulence factors of pathogens, the histopathology of countless diseases… it wasn’t necessarily harder than advanced thermodynamics or transport phenomenon, but I did have to learn how to memorize countless facts first, and then apply them.

If you care to know, here’s roughly how I set up my study structure.

1. Go to lecture and try to take notes during it
2. Condense lecture notes onto a whiteboard
3. Copy everything from the whiteboard onto a piece of paper
4. Close my eyes and try to recite everything on the piece of paper
5. Reread paper notes every couple of days
6. Do practice questions before the exam covering all topics

This was pretty different from engineering school where studying meant: “do problems until you can’t get them wrong, and turn in your homework for credit.”

4. High school never ends. We may not have organized sports, but there’s jocks and they all sit together. The stoners are still stoners and sit in the back row. The nerdy loners sit in the front row, closest to the professors. There’s theater kids. When everyone is on campus and you need to find somewhere to sit and eat lunch, it feels a lot like walking around the cafeteria in 9th grade looking for people you can join. People get crushes on each other, they hook up, some might get pregnant (and it is scandalous). People have enemies. Friendships come and go. I kind of thought that would all be in the past, but I realized it’s just what happens in a school setting. Aside from any drama, my classmates are all friendly and wildly supportive of each other. I have not encountered a single bully for the first two years of school; I’ll leave that for my preceptors during 3rd year.
5. Medical school is not as hard as I thought it would be. Now, don’t get me wrong. It is hard. It is one of the hardest things I have ever done. However, there was more hype than it was worth. You always hear stories about people getting in and failing out. People talk about pulling all-nighters, being delirious without sleep, and being miserable throughout. I think of it this way: the admissions committee let me in because they think I have what it takes. I put in my best effort, but that effort stops at 9 pm so I can go to sleep. Before any exam, I remind myself that thousands have gone before me; the vast majority of people who have EVER taken the exams I am taking have passed. It is in the school’s best interest to graduate its students. So overall, the school is rooting for you, statistics are rooting for you, and I am rooting for you.