Plan to Succeed

As much as I like to talk (…write), this post will be fairly short because the message is very simple. You need to have a plan to get to medical school. Truly, you should have a plan to succeed in life in general, but let’s focus on medical school today. 

If you fail to plan, you plan to fail. -Benjamin Franklin

A goal without a plan is just a wish. -Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Maybe you’ve heard or read one or both of these quotes before. If not, you’re welcome. Having a solid plan helps in many ways. Importantly, it keeps you on track and keeps your goal, and the steps to reaching it, in front of you. If you were planning a post-COVID trip to Ghana (I am!), you wouldn’t just wing it before and during the trip, would you? I hope not! You’d need to plan your travel, know where you’ll stay, decide what you’ll see and do while you’re there, save your coins, etc. Well we’re planning a trip to medical school–and knowing how we’ll get there in advance is just as (read: more) important as knowing how you’d get to Ghana!

Plan your pre-med schedule

Whether you’re a freshman or senior, you should have your pre-med requirements mapped out. This includes classes, service, research, medical exposure, etc. While there are many paths to medical school, there are some requirements that are standard. You need to both know what they are and, generally, when you should be doing them. You can check out the Pre-Med Checklist that I created and put in the Pre-Med Perks section of the website for a sample schedule. Now this plan can change, sure. You may have to re-take some courses or take the MCAT more than once, your research project may get pushed back, you may have to take a semester off, or any number of things could happen. But what’s most important is to be actively working towards your goal. And the only way you can do that is to have a plan in place. 

Make a weekly schedule

It helps me out to have a weekly schedule. On Sunday evenings, I write out what I have to do for the upcoming week and I cross things off the list as I go. I started doing this in high school and it helps so much to keep me on task. I know we all have handy calendars on our smart phones and laptops, but I find that having a hand-written plan for the week helps to ensure that I get things done as I should. And, honestly, I get great satisfaction and a feeling of accomplishment with physically crossing things out with a pen…crazy, I know. You can make one master schedule or make one for every school subject or pre-med activity you’re working on. There’s a template for a Weekly Schedule in the Pre-Med Perks section of the website. If you don’t already have a planner, I dare you to print it out and try it for the next few weeks. See if doing so makes you more effective and keeps you on task.

Have some flexibility

Now, sometimes we (myself included) can take our planning a little too far and become too rigid in that plan and get all bent out of shape when things don’t go as smoothly as we’d hoped. Don’t take you’re planning that far. Your path to medical school may not be a straight line…mine wasn’t. The goal here is not to stay exactly on that line, but to at least have a map showing where the line is. So if you happen to get off of it, you can get yourself right back on it and back on your journey. But if you don’t have a plan, you’ll never know when you’re off course and that, friends, is a setup for failure and wasting time. 

Are you a planner? Does the thought of making a weekly schedule or planning the next few years of college terrify you? If you have comments or questions, feel free to include them below or send me a private email.