What is the best advice a medical doctor can give to a medical student?

By Patrick James Boland, studied at St. Olaf College

Keep a routine. If you don't have a routine, make one. If you don't like having a routine, LEARN TO LIKE A ROUTINE. You won't have any time to do anything. As a friend of mine told me before med school: sleep, family, friends, school, exercise - choose any three. It's true - you won't have time for anything. The way to have time in medical school is EFFICIENCY - efficiency in every single thing you do. If you can create a routine where you're dressed, showered, clean-pressed, and well-fed in the morning in just 35 minutes, you are ready to be a medical student.

Sweatpants are for college. Appearance matters. A lot of medical students will dress casually for lecture. They'll throw on a T-shirt, a pair of sweatpants, and lounge in front of their iMacs with glazed eyes. BE BETTER THAN THEM. The professors of your classes might later have you in clinic. They might even be the ones who write you a recommendation. Medicine is a small world - people talk. I once had the head of the general surgery department tell me, "You're always clean and well-dressed. I like that." And like most surgeons he walked away and never spoke to me again for the rest of the rotation. He later offered to write me a recommendation, without my asking. Appearances MATTER.

Sleep when you can, but it's overrated. I'll sleep when I'm buried in a coffin six feet under. I do sleep in, but it's a luxury. There's a reason humanity invented the depth charge, or whatever they call it at your local coffee shop - a mix of espresso and drip coffee. Caffeine is amazing. Coffee also has health benefits (which I wrote about in a blog post, but let's be real, it's Quora, you DON'T CARE). Get sleep. Love sleep. Relish sleep. But don't sleep. It's for later.

Learn what matters and cut out the rest. Be ruthless. Do grades really matter? Does your Step 1 score really matter? Does doing research matter? Do your hobbies matter? When thinking about priorities, DON'T think about a particular school or a particular residency in the future. Instead, imagine: in fifteen years, what do you want your life to look like? What kind of person do you want to be? What kind of relationship do you want to have or not have? What kind of house or apartment do you want to live in - urban, suburban, rural? Now, to have that dream life, think: what do you NEED to do now? When you've identified that, take everything else and cut it out. Perhaps you decide that you'll just pass most of your medical school classes with a few rare honors, but to balance it you'll get a 265 on Boards because that's what you NEED. In med school, don't try to do and be everything. You'll fail, you'll look worse than the people who focused, and you WON'T be the doctor you always dreamed of being. One of my best friends, a brilliant pediatric ENT surgeon who trained in the Ivy League schools for years, once told me he realized part of the way through residency that he HATED doing research. So he didn't do it anymore. Now he's happy, successful, and doing the things he always loved to do. BE RUTHLESS with what you love.

Ask for help. This is the single hardest thing for medical students to do, but one of the most important. In medical school, you will struggle with at LEAST one thing. I say 'at least one' because I know what you're thinking, you, like every other doctor, are completely infallible. Just like we all say when we're 40 and a doctor that we were born a surgeon or an internist, and were NEVER a med student (or so the attending will tell you - it's kind of a classic joke). The point is we are human. We are vulnerable. There will be a class that is hard, or a rotation where the attending does not like you, or a day you did not sleep enough. It is completely ok to admit the truth. It's ok to say you just ended things with your boyfriend or girlfriend and thus, you might sound a bit incoherent in your case presentation (this happened to me - and it ended up one of my best days in clinic). Be real. Tell the truth. Ask for help when you struggle. When all is said and done, no one will put in your recommendation that your grandma passed away, but you forgot to take a social history and had to go back to the room and ask again. Just be real, and you'll be a fantastic, incredible medical student.

Eat well and PLAN. I cook most of my meals Sunday night. I also have a morning smoothie with Greek yogurt + hemp seeds (for protein), almonds + chia seeds (for healthy fats), fresh berries + banana (for healthy carbs + antioxidants), and spinach or kale (for the fiber and green goodness), every single day. This is not me bragging (yeah, that smoothie sounds super pretentious...). There is no substitute for giving your brain the energy it needs to learn. There is no substitute for the time saved by planning your meals ahead of time. Do it. Learn it. Even study it - we know you're good at that.

Study hard, but remember the end game. There is no substitute for studying hard and studying a lot. You need to know this material. Patients and your attendings depend on it. Just know that you WILL learn it. Medical school wasn't designed to fail you - it was designed to teach you. All I will say as a counterpoint is that you will eventually work with patients at the end of their life regularly during third and fourth year. And when you do... you'll see a lot, a lot of regret. A lot of people realizing they'd never travelled, they'd never written that book, they'd never challenged a system of routine and comfort and truly LIVED. Don't be that person. If you leave the library everyday drained and unhappy in undergrad, consider the fact that you'll feel that way everyday in medical school. There's always the chance, as unfortunately happened to a recent brilliant neurosurgery resident, that you'll die of a rare cancer in the midst of your residency (ps, read his book, it's incredible and poignant for all of us). That could very well happen to me.   It could very well happen for you.  So yes, there's ultimately no substitute for studying. But there's also no substitute for your life if you don't live it now. I backpacked Europe alone for a month-and-a-half between first and second year. Recently, I went to Mexico for vacation for a week and hiked to a hidden beach along the coast. I don't regret a thing. In fact, when I come back, I study all the harder for it. And guess what - when the patient walks in that door, the first thing they see is me smiling.

Smile. You'll do just fine.