Wayfaring MD: Missionary Physician

Congrats on getting in!

Family in Poland, huh? Sounds like you’ll be getting to know them a little better now.

Sorry, let me just take a moment to chuckle at “8 months a year”. I don’t know, maybe things are different in Poland, but in America, med school is year-round (well, I got 6 weeks off after first year, but after that, nada). No more summers like in college. Get used to it. 

I am close-ish with my family. Well, my mom and grandparents. I hardly ever talk to my crap-ton of siblings. I’m extremely independent, so I don’t have to be all up in their business all the time, and I don’t really miss them (yeesh, that sounded cold) because I try to get very involved in whatever city I’m living in. However, I talk to my mom on the phone almost daily, and to my grandparents 1-2 times a week. Nothing lengthy, though. Just little updates. 

I got to the point where I had made my own little family of med school and church friends, and I felt just as bad about not seeing them sometimes as I did about not seeing family. 

My medical school (and undergrad) was about 2 1/2 hours from my hometown. In undergrad I started out going home every 2-3 weeks, and it gradually lengthened to every 6 weeks or so. In med school it stretched even further, to every 8-10 weeks, and my visits home were shorter. And now that I’m about to start residency, it’ll get even longer between visits because I now live a 6 hour drive from home and, well, residency doesn’t allow for many breaks. So I’m going to have to make my few breaks really count. 

Yeah, medical school sort of runs your life. Residency is worse, I’ve heard. Any time I went home during medical school (except 4th year), I had to study while I was there, which was near impossible, or I had to get ahead on my studying so I wouldn’t feel guilty for taking a day off. And don’t forget that once you start this whole med school process, it leads to residency, which likely will not be in your hometown, either. 

But being overseas doesn’t mean you have to cut off contact.

Get webcams for your family and have regularly scheduled Skype chats or something. Seeing people’s faces is better than phone or e-mail conversations. 

Separating from your family is not a bad thing. It’s important to learn how to be independent and function separate from your family.   If you do end up going to Poland, it will probably be very hard at first being so far from home, but in the end you will be a stronger person for it. It’s a little tougher to learn how to depend on yourself when mommy and daddy are close by, you know what I’m saying? You will learn a lot from being away from home. 

Thanks for letting me answer this publicly. I think a lot more people probably have the same issue as you and don’t know if they can bring it up in an interview. 

If you’re ever given a chance to explain a bad grade, take it, especially when you have a legitimate reason. 

Whether it affects the interviewer’s opinion of you depends on the interviewer. Some may not be very understanding and may see depression as an invalid excuse. Hopefully, though, your interviewer will be an MD or PhD who understands that depression affects all aspects of life, and that it is not something that you could have prevented from happening.

If I was your interviewer, I would see your struggle with the depression the same as a more physical chronic disease. Both would make studying and keeping up with school work difficult—depression maybe even more so because it affects your concentration and motivation and makes you feel completely blank.

How you approach the subject is important, I think. As an interviewer, there’s nothing I hate more than a canned response to an expected question. Be honest. If you are flippant about it and say simply, “I was depressed that semester,” the interviewer will probably not take you seriously. But if you expand on it and talk about your struggle, they will likely be more understanding. 

It’s equally important to talk about how you are managing to deal with your depression. As with any other obstacle in life that could hurt your performance in school, you need to let your interviewer know that you have tools to help you overcome it. Talk about what has worked for you, and if the struggle is ongoing, own up to it. You want your interviewer to know that your depression is under control (if it really is) and that your grades are not going to drop like they did before.

I’m sure you’ve heard that you always want to spin a potential negative thing into a positive thing in an interview, so talk about how you’ve grown from the experience or how you’ve learned to cope, and how those skills will be useful as a medical professional. 

I assume your grades are better now, since you said all this happened last year. One bad year, especially at the beginning, can be balanced out in the end. Keep up the good work, and whatever you’re doing to control your depression and anxiety, keep at it. 

Stipends? 

The vast majority of us do not have stipends of any kind. Those who are on military scholarships get stipends, and some state-sponsored scholarship programs offer modest stipends. But for the rest of us, it’s either mommy/daddy’s money, wifey/hubby’s money, or loans. 

My parents are regular middle class folks, and 

So…. I took out an extra ~$20K/year to live off of (I had a roommate to split costs with, so I was able to get by a little cheaper). Others took out similar amounts, or more or less depending on how many people they had to support with the money. Very few in my class had the personal funds to get through school. I can only think of one, maybe two, that did it that way. 

It’s a terrible system and we all hate it, but no other solution has presented itself. 

For ways to make money in med school, check this post. 

And of course I also have more legitimate answers to questions about loans and money. 

It’s totally cool if you’re not an officer. I didn’t hold officer positions in any of my undergrad clubs and my school wasn’t that big. Only a few people can be officers, and schools understand that. Plus, officers usually aren’t sophomores. 

So if you can’t be an officer, be an active member. Don’t just go to meetings and be done with it.  Go to meetings, help plan events, be on committees if they’re available, do all the volunteering and fundraising stuff clubs usually do, etc. If you’re an active member one year, it sets you up to be more likely to get a leadership position the next year.