Welcome to the Med School Admit (MSA) Blog AKA Office Hours, where we will discuss everything premedical and provide insight on how to get into medical school. We’ll also discuss what medical school is like, what residency training involves and the practice of medicine. 

Our desire is to build a community that we can call the MSA family, so please engage with us. Since I don’t read long posts, MSA blog posts will be short and packed with useful information. This series of posts will address why you want to go into medicine. Hope you enjoy!

Whenever you decide to commit to something, it’s important to understand your WHY. Too many people get focused on something without knowing why it’s important to them. If you don’t know why something is important, it will be easy to get discouraged, tired and annoyed when things are not going well or get tough.

Negative feelings can lead people to give up or quit because they don’t have anything to keep them moving forward in difficult times. But when you have a good understanding of why you set a certain goal, made a specific commitment or decided to be involved in an activity, then when things get hard, you can reflect on the underlying reasons you started on the journey in the first place. This is often enough to keep you moving forward.

As a premedical student, it can feel like a long and bumpy road to getting into medical school. The science coursework gets harder as you move along, then you have to study for one of the hardest standardized tests, the MCAT, and complete an arduous admissions process. This would be discouraging to anyone, and students often slack off or give up all together.

If you know why you want to be a doctor and pursue a career in medicine, you can reflect on this along the premedical journey. Hopefully, this will keep you performing at a consistent level and engaged to maximize success. I encourage EVERY premedical student, no matter where you are in the premedical journey to write down why you are premed and why you want to become a doctor. Don’t rush this exercise! Spend some quality time reflecting on your WHY and share in the comments section. Join us next week for Part II as we dive further into this topic.

To receive a notification email when we publish a new Office Hours blog post, subscribe below!