It’s not always hunky-dory as a medical student. In no particular order:

1. You don’t have an MD after your name. There’s plenty of times when I’ve wished I was just a resident already. (I know, I know, I’ll be eating my words in July.) It’s frustrating when I can’t just sign off on something harmless and have to get approval for everything.
   It’s also really, really frustrating when patients ask to “see a doctor, not a student.” This happened maybe twice during my whole medical career, so I certainly lucked out. You want to say to the patients, “Wow, maybe you shouldn’t come to an academic teaching hospital then,” but you bite your tongue. It’s hard not to take it personally. Sure, I don’t have as much experience as a resident or attending, and it’s certainly a learning experience to deal with that comment in stride, but you’re going to be seen much faster if a medical student is assigned to see you than if you get put back in the pile, and all the other residents and attendings are seeing patients already. But hey, go ahead and wait.
2. Loans, loans, loans. I haven’t added it all up (mostly because I’m frightened to), but I’ll probably end up with around $110,000 of student loans by the end of medical school. The average debt is somewhere between $100-$135k, so I’m somewhere in the average. (Add in undergrad loans and you’re easily looking at $200,000 for many people.) It can really suck going through your 20s accruing up debt, living the student life while your friends are working, making money, buying homes, cars, and other nice things, building up their investment portfolios and retirement IRAs. Again, wouldn’t trade medicine for anything, but there’s certainly been times where I’m jealous and wish I was doing something different.
3. Pre-clinical curriculum. In medical school, you spend your first two years in the classroom, memorizing literally books of information in preparation for actually seeing patients. These years, from an academic standpoint, suck. Sure, you have time to get to know your classmates, party, etc., (think college but more hardcore), but the rote memorizing sucks. You have no idea what of this information is going to be useful, and what of it is going to be an absolute waist. You don’t have any clue about what real disease is like, and you’re just memorizing random little facts like: Rose gardner = sporothix shenki and reheated rice = B. cereus. (I’m not kidding.) You’re memorizing a ton of facts about drugs that are not used anymore, and that’s just pharmacology. Which brings us to…
4. Med student syndrome sucks. If you’re at all high-strung or anxious or neurotic as I tend to be (if you’ve met me: I hide it well), you have this fantastic ability to diagnose yourself with every possible disease you’ve just read about. Since you have no clinical acumen, you don’t appreciate the fact that if someone has colon cancer, they have more than just blood in their stools. They are also usually old, have other constitutional symptoms, etc. Medical student syndrome tends to go with the unit you’re studying: I was absolutely, totally convinced I had lymphoma during our hematology block. So convinced was I that I made one of our hematology attendings feel my neck to feel one particular lymph node. On the positive side of things, it was then and there that I learned the ability of a physician to provide instant emotional and mental relief, as he told me it was nothing.
5. As we all know from being 9th graders, it stinks be the lowest on the totem pole. You know the least, you get picked on the most, and as we all know, “Shit runs down hill.” Eventually I began to jokingly volunteer for the blame: “It’s usually the med student’s fault, so I guess I did it.” Everyone you’re working with is also evaluating you, so even if the residents have to stick around and do paperwork, and you have little-to-no reason to be present, you end up sticking around more often than not–at least until you’ve proven to the residents that you’re a reasonable, decent guy who will not make more work for them.
6. It’s hard to get time off. This probably applies to all of medicine–residency too–but it always annoyed me, so here we go. Because you’re constantly jumping from rotation to rotation, it’s hard to find time for basic, time-offy things like, oh, going to the dentist, or anything else you have to schedule far in advance? You never know where on a call schedule you’re going to land that month, or how nice your resident is going to be about time off. Sure, you’re given X number of days off per month, but you generally don’t figure that out until the rotation begins.
7. It strains relationships. During my orientation, I remember a senior student saying that many people view medicine as a very selfless profession, but in her opinion, it’s an incredibly self ish one. That we require an enormous amount of patience and understanding from our families and loved ones in order to deal with our schedules and time limitations. The statistic is tossed around that doctors have a higher rate of divorce–unless they’re married to other doctors–and I believe it. Even during our medical school career, the vast majority of couples that started out together no longer are.

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