How not to study medicine

I've learned a few things in my seemingly endless first six weeks of med school. The most important thing I have learned is how not to study medicine. This is very important because I used to be an engineer and I was very good at studying engineering. Which is to say, I was very good at goofing off for 13 weeks then busting a gut in swot-vac and cruising through those exams. So here are some things NOT to do:

1. Don't leave it until the night before you really need to know it. In mathematics, if you understand it, you've learned it. End of story. In medicine, you have to actually try to remember stuff too.

2. Don't expect that you'll be able to use a bottom-up approach. In mathematics, you learn some axioms, then extend these the theorems, and so forth. In medicine, you get thrown straight into the middle of some god-awful mess of undefined terms, vague descriptions, assumed prior knowledge that you don't actually have, and seemingly unintelligible consequences. You just have to deal with the chaos.

3. Don't get freaked out and stop studying for two weeks while you wonder if this really is the right decision for you. It is. You've already been through all that. Just do the work and put up with it. It'll all come good in the end.

I love it all.