While Waiting for Med School Decisions, Try These 4 Diversions

While Waiting for Med School Decisions, Try These 4 Diversions

As you read this, tens of thousands of premed students are currently at the end of their ropes. I always say that the year you spend applying to medical school can be one of the hardest years of your life because at this point everything is out of your control and it is just a waiting game. Applications for med school are pretty much all in and a few have been playing the waiting game since August. Some have received interview invites, but many are still waiting. Interviews have mostly come and gone. Some have heard back with a few pieces of good news, but acceptance and rejection emails will continue to roll in for months.

During this period, it can be difficult to do anything but sit in front of your computer hitting refresh every few seconds.

https://www.reddit.com/r/premed/comments/9p3tla/every_5_minutes/

Some like to play mental games with themselves, like waiting for a certain time of the day to check one’s email. The fact is that there are any number of ways to distract yourself during this period. We’ve compiled a few of our favorites below.

1. Start A Ridiculously Specific Twitter Account

That’s what @skinnypremed did. This user has authored 679 tweets to date, and while we haven’t verified every single one, they all appear to comment on MTV’s hit reality tv show, Are You the One?

https://twitter.com/skinnypremed/status/1052924314419417088

While @skinnypremed has only 10 followers to show for her dedication, she has successfully landed 489 likes since joining the social media platform in 2016. That’s better than most grandmas.

2. Make Dank Memes and Share on R/PreMed

Reddit’s definitive community of premed students is a great hub for pre-meds to investigate, celebrate, and commiserate the long, grueling process of going from layman undergrad to a med school student. They’ve been waiting for you.

https://www.reddit.com/r/premed/comments/9oyexr/the_family_i_deserve/

3. Use Your Premed Skills to Absolutely Destroy Halloween

Whether it’s putting some of that leftover makeup from practicing wound dressing to use, getting creative with surgical instruments, or making your own (edible) panna cotta brain, premeds are in a unique position to create awesome costumes and Halloween decor. Premeds are also set up to truly scare others. A good many normies are downright scared of hospitals, surgery, and the icky tubes, devices, and pumps they carry around inside their own sacks of skin. Take a hint from one of those surgery videos you watch on a daily basis.

Photo credit to Stormy Stewart (You can find the recipe here)

4. Do Something Useful to Set Yourself Up for Future Success

The most successful premed students recognize that, at this point, there is absolutely nothing they can do. The truth has set them free.

Getting into med school is a huge step in the process of becoming a doctor, but there are many more along the way. Many of those will include being a positive, social human, establishing connections, and dominating both in and out of school.

Premed often diverts you into antisocial behavior. Why not take the minute wedge of extra free time you have while waiting for applications to reach out to friends and family, especially those with whom you don’t communicate on a regular basis.

Participating in the online communities of premed culture is great, and each like and upvote gets you a little dose of dopamine to the brain. But down the road, your residency placement will bear zero reflection to your dank memes or weirdly specific Twitter accounts.

Related Videos: