The blog post How to Adjust to Life Post-Pandemic: 6 Tips for Medical Students is a guest post written by Emma Grace Brown. Emma Grace Brown is a fellow blogger and you can visit her site here! I’m so excited to have this outside perspective on Melanated and Meducated. If you, too, would like to contribute a guest post, then please click here, or fill out the form below. Happy reading!
For medical students, the COVID-19 pandemic has been an exceptionally trying time. Perhaps the responsibility of educating your friends and family about the virus and necessary precautions fell on you. Maybe your stress caused you to adopt unhealthy lifestyle habits. Or maybe you even began wondering if you should really become a doctor after all.
But conditions are improving and the end of the pandemic in sight. It’s time to start thinking about how you can re-enter the world with your head held high. By reading up on advice for med students on blogs like Melanated and Meducated, you can pick up helpful strategies for making the most of your time in med school. Here are a few things you can do to build up your confidence in med school at this phase of the pandemic.
Save Money now as a med student
Even though you’re a student, you might have spent lots of time stressing over your finances during the pandemic. Some of your friends and relatives ended up being laid off or furloughed. You may feel the pressure to get your finances in order to create a more stable future for yourself. While medicine can be a very lucrative field, you will also leave medical school with a large financial burden in the form of student loans. Consider budgeting and living a frugal lifestyle now so that you can pay down your debt quickly.
There are plenty of small lifestyle changes you can make in order to save more money. You can go grocery shopping and batch cooking meals at home rather than going out to eat. If you’re already a homeowner, you can also look into money-saving strategies that cut costs dramatically. One option is refinancing your home. You’ll be able to reduce the amount of equity in your home. This can lower your monthly mortgage payment or simply free up cash to cover other expenses.
Consider Your Specific Career Path
Before the pandemic, you might have thought you had fully settled on a particular specialty. But perhaps the pandemic caused you to rethink your first choice. You might have developed an interest in an area of medicine that you hadn’t seriously considered before. Or you may have realized that the specialty you originally intended to choose just wasn’t quite right for you.
If you’re thinking about changing your specialty now, you might be worried that you’re jeopardizing your future in medicine. While the process can be complicated, you can definitely make the switch if you know that you would be happier in a different specialty. Med School Tutors recommends using your electives to get some concrete experience in new areas. You can even revise your residency application if necessary. Maybe even consider spending an additional year in school to focus on research projects in different areas of medicine.
Choose Healthier Meals as a medical student
During the pandemic, you might have found it hard to stick to a healthy diet. After all, finding time to cook nutritious meals can be difficult enough when you’re in medical school. But throughout the pandemic, you may have lost your motivation to cook altogether. After long days of studying and trying to deal with the obstacles presented by the pandemic, ordering takeout or heating up a frozen meal was always more tempting than following a recipe.
But it is definitely possible to eat a healthy diet in medical school. You can focus on simple meals. Easy examples are smoothies made from frozen fruits, soups and stews cooked in a crockpot, and snacks like berries, granola, and nuts. Yes, it takes some advance planning. But you do not have to eat takeout or prepackaged foods every night as a med student. When you eat foods that are packed with the nutrients you need, you’ll have more energy to take care of all of your obligations as a student.
Limit Your Media Diet
As a med student, you needed to stay informed about the realities of the pandemic. Even if reading all of the headlines caused your stress levels to rise, you didn’t want to be in the dark, especially when people were coming to you with questions about the virus.
While turning off the news entirely is not a good idea, you do have limited time and attention. And although you should stay updated on new developments related to the pandemic, scrolling through alarming headlines each day is not likely to benefit you much. Instead, it’s time to get control over your “media diet.” Choose a few trusted news sources to check in with on a regular basis, and turn off social media notifications on your phone.
Focus on Fitness
You might feel like you have no time to work out during med school. And while it’s true that you probably don’t have the opportunity to spend hours at the gym, you can definitely live a more active lifestyle, even with your busy schedule! Med School Insiders recommends biking to and from your classes, taking the stairs rather than using the elevator, and doing yoga on your study breaks.
Seek Support
Finally, remember that it’s okay to ask for help if you need it. You might feel like if you’re going into the medical field, you need to be tough and avoid showing any weakness under pressure. But if your mental health has suffered during the pandemic, you may want to consider seeing a therapist. You might be able to access free or heavily discounted counseling services for students on your campus.
Facing the pandemic as a med student brought many challenges. But these difficult circumstances may have also given you the opportunity to reflect on what you truly wanted out of your medical career. Now, you have the chance to get back on track with productive habits, decide what your future career track holds, and find the help you need to manage this transitional phase.
Want to learn more about navigating medical school? Check out the Melanated and Meducated blog! Browse the blog today for tips on making it through med school with confidence.