Holly: And so you just have to know where you are and know what you bring to the table and have confidence in it. A healthy level of anxiety is okay. We live on anxiety from primal days of, like, we need to be able to protect our young or eat or things like that. Anxiety is not a bad thing. It’s only a bad thing if it keeps you from doing the things you need to do. And so a little bit of nervousness is totally okay. But you just have to be able to rest in yourself, of knowing that, I’ve done the best that I can do and I’m enough.

Pooja: The path to becoming a doctor is a whole range of things: exciting, confusing, anxiety-inducing, and gratifying, probably all at the same time. And the truth is that no matter how isolating it may feel, you’re not in it alone. Welcome to Pursuit of Practice, your go-to space for expert advice, real stories, and the kind of support that shows you what trusting the process actually looks like.

Welcome back to Pursuit of Practice. If you’re at the stage where interviews are on the horizon, this episode is for you. Interviews can feel intimidating, especially if it’s your first time navigating the process. But they’re also a huge opportunity to show programs who you are beyond your application. In this episode, we’re breaking down everything you need to know: how to start preparing, the different types of interviews you might face like MMIs, traditional, or virtual, what to expect, and strategies to feel confident and present your best self. We’ll also talk about mindset, common pitfalls, and even some tips from my own experience preparing for interviews. Finally, we’ll run through a few common interview questions and discuss how to answer them effectively, what to avoid, and how to leave a memorable impression.

Whether you’re a pre-med just starting to think about interviews or a med student heading into the next round, this episode is packed with actionable advice to help you approach interviews with confidence. Holly Proffitt is back for this episode. Holly is one of Blueprint’s admissions advisors. She has been working with medical students to assist them in their path to residency for the last 7 years and she’s been described by her students as their med school mom and not only understands the hustle of balancing schoolwork and play, but is also known for giving advice to students that uplifts and motivates them while maintaining necessary honesty and tough love. It’s great to have you back, Holly.

Holly: Yeah, thanks for having me.

Pooja: Yeah, of course. So first, let’s start with getting started with interview prep. So at this time of the episode’s release, interviews are looming large, whether you’re a pre-med student and you’re getting interviews for medical school or you’re a medical school student and you’re getting interviews for residency. So when students are thinking about how to actually start preparing for interviews, what do you think early prep should look like?

Holly: Yeah, early prep has a couple different features of it. One is knowing where you’re applying because there’s research that needs to be done. And then the other side is knowing yourself. So knowing where you’re applying is I don’t expect everyone to go down their entire application list. That may be a little bit less for medical school, but for residency, there’s people who apply to 20, 30, 40, 50 programs, just depending on who they are. And I don’t expect everybody to know every single thing about each program, but just a general familiarity. So when that interview comes in, that interview invite comes in, you can prepare quickly. So reminding yourself, just maybe in a brief spreadsheet where you did your application, you were starting your application, why did I apply to this program? Like just one thing to kind of jog your memory about that, and then you can do deeper research.

The other side, preparing yourself, is being realistic with how much time you’re going to need to prepare to be successful. So I have the gift of gab. I’ve had it for a very long time, but even I need time to prepare for an interview. So being realistic with yourself of how much time is it going to take for me to get where I need to be with practice, with reflection, with muscle memory, all of those kind of things, and then setting a realistic timeline.

Pooja: Yeah.

Holly: On average, in my experience, people take 3 to 6 sessions to feel really good about what they’re doing. And that’s for a really seasoned person. So knowing what kind of where your level is and where to go from there is the best way to kind of work backwards and figure out how much time you need.

Pooja: Yes. Okay, and I really appreciate you talking about the 3 to 6 sessions. And by sessions, you mean like even practice sessions, right?

Holly: Correct. Correct. I typically recommend when I’m working with folks, I only really practice for like 45 minutes because the mental load of interviewing is so much that I don’t like folks to have to do too much because there really is a point of diminishing returns where you start to get anxious and you start to be too hard on yourself. So 3 to 6, 30 to 45 minute interview sessions with someone who’s going to give you honest feedback.

And so I always start with like the top 3 interview questions that you should know. Tell me about yourself, why this program, why this specialty, or what have you. That why this specialty may not be the case for students applying to medical school, but there’ll be something along those that those lines.

Pooja: Why doctors probably would be the one.

Holly: Why do you want to be a doctor? Yep. A why allopathic medicine or osteopathic medicine, what have you. But those top 3, when people ask me what do I need to prepare coming into a session, start working on those, because those are the ones I’m going to hammer you the most with and we’re going to do them every single time. It’s like a warm up. Like if you’re getting ready to go run, you got to stretch, you got to do your things like be at your max capacity to be able to run and get the most out of it. I’m always going to ask you those 3. And then from there, depending on where you are, and I know we’ll talk about this in a bit, situational interview questions, tell me about a time you, tell me what you think about this, strengths and weaknesses, we’ll work through those.

And so for me, when I’m working with students, that’s my baseline of like, can you answer those 3 and can you answer them well, and can you answer them just like off the top of your head, not looking at notes, talking to a human rather than feeling robotic, and then we’ll work from there. So it really just depends on where you are on those top 3 to how quickly we’ll progress and how much space you need. But I mean, I don’t know. I feel like this is one thing I’m really good at. If you can’t do it in 6, then I’m nervous. That’s never happened. Everybody’s always been good after 6 sessions. So I think that’s a pretty good rule of thumb for me.

Pooja: Yeah, I think 6 sessions sounds also super manageable too. I feel like there’s always a waiting period. And I think in our last episode, we talked about how once you’ve submitted your secondaries, you could chill for a little bit, but there is a little bit like of I think the waiting period can vary from person to person, but after a couple weeks of just relaxing and celebrating the fact that you’ve submitted secondaries, or in the case of residency, submitting your application, that’s when you can start to work a little bit even before interview offers start to roll in, just thinking about how to practice. And I think one of the things that we’ll talk about is tell me about yourself question because I feel like that’s the one question that everybody gets and there are good rules of thumb to follow and bad ones. So we’ll definitely circle back to it. But moving forward, it sounds like the recommendations you have for early prep should just be basics of the school, preparing questions that you think you’ll be asked about, and having sessions with a trusted person who you think will be honest with you. So maybe not necessarily the best friend who’s always saying yes to every idea you have.

Holly: Yes. I’m not practicing with my hype woman or man. I’m practicing with someone who’s going to give me tough love and be honest with me about my body language, about my, about my answer of like, did I go deep enough? Did I talk too much? Did I talk too loud? Did I talk too quickly? You need someone who is going to be honest with you. You know, like all those TikToks right now, it’s like, what I would tell you as an XYZ if I wasn’t afraid to hurt your feelings. That’s the person you need.

Pooja: Absolutely. Absolutely. Someone who isn’t afraid to hurt your feelings is excellent. So what is a mistake that you see students make when they wait too long to prepare? And before we get into that, what exactly is too long to prepare?

Holly: I mean, you shouldn’t be preparing the day before.

Pooja: Makes sense.

Holly: I mean, especially if it’s one of your top programs, because when you get feedback, it’s probably going to rattle you, to be honest with you. Interviewing is very intimate. They’re asking you questions about things that you may not want to talk about super openly. And I don’t say that to scare people, but like, if you have something, if you have to talk about a failure, no one wants to talk about a time that they failed. If they ask you about conflict, no one wants to talk about conflict. And if you’re not ready to kind of sit there and feel uncomfortable and think about those things and work through them, the day before ain’t it. That is not the time to do it because you’re not going to have time to think on your feet, you’re not going to have time to work through it and make mistakes.

A lot of times when I’m working with people, they’ll get a little anxious and be like, oh, that wasn’t good. I’m like, well, but take a deep breath, like step back. It’s okay. Like it’s you got to have that space to be able to think and work through it and talk through it. And that is not the day before an interview because the anxiety is already high going into it. I would say at least a week out from your first one is you need to be doing at least some 1 or 2 feedback sessions just to see where you are. Some folks, I meet with 1 or 2 times and I’m like, you’re good. Like, call me if you need me, if something comes up that scares you. But for the most part, once they figure out the rhythm, they’re fine. But you need at least a week to be able to have that time to feel uncomfortable, to start to work through those things, to get feedback, and to make that feedback actionable.

Pooja: Yeah, absolutely. I completely agree with that. And I think another thing that’s important that you alluded to a little bit too is that the day before should be a time for relaxing and not introducing something that will potentially stress you out, right? So it’s sort of similar to, I think a lot of people get this advice about test days, but they don’t necessarily, they don’t always translate that to an interview. So similar to how you don’t really, you really shouldn’t be procrastinating for exams that are standardized and a big deal and important to you. This is similar, right? It’s not necessarily a test, but it is an opportunity where you are going to be in a little bit of a higher stress. You’re going to have to apply information that you’ve learned. You’re going to have to recall facts that you’ve studied before, either about yourself or about the institution that you’re going to. And you’re going to have to be on your A game that day. There’s a lot of things that happen during the interview day that we’ll be getting into that requires your attention. So staying up super late, procrastinating for it isn’t exactly in your best interest.

Holly: I could not have said it better myself. This is not one of those things that you just like, okay, so y’all know that I run. I’m not going to show up to a half marathon having never run 10 miles before, right? Like this is just, or even, even a 10K, 6 miles. I need to have put in the work to feel good about it. I would be a nervous wreck if I showed up to a starting line of even a 5K if I’d never run 3 miles before. You’re setting yourself up for a failure. And I totally acknowledge. I understand, gab girly right here. I could talk to a brick wall. Even I get nervous in those first little bits because it’s the unexpected. And you are just going to amp up your anxiety for no good reason if you don’t, if you procrastinate this or if the anxiety to practice is too much. That is a recipe for failure.

And so nobody likes constructive feedback. Nobody’s like, oh man, I can’t wait to go get slaughtered in my, in how bad I sound today or listen to the sound of my own voice. Nobody wants that. But I can promise you, if you’re with someone who is going to give you good feedback, who’s going to really help you through, it becomes fun. I love practicing interviews with my clients because that mic drop moment when they know they’ve killed it, I’m like, ooh, I’m like, let’s go. Like you’re going to go in there and you’re going to just like wipe the floor with these people because you’re going to be so good. And so that’s what’s on the other side, which I know is, I acknowledge is totally foreign to people applying to medical school because you have put so much into this application and your secondary and you’re just like, please pick me. I get it, but there’s nothing better than acing an interview. And truly that only happens when you put in the time to prepare accordingly.

Pooja: Yeah, absolutely. And I think a lot of the advice that you are describing is similar to what people have already applied. Like if you’re in the situation where you’re applying to medical school, you have already done a lot of the things that are associated with successful interview prep because you’ve taken difficult exams and done well in them. So I think it’s helpful to think about it in that context as well. Is there other than waiting too long to prepare, are there any mistakes that you see people make?

Holly: Not preparing at all. I mean, some folks think that they can just, I mean, I know that sounds silly and like who would do that? Absolutely. People are like, oh, I know how to do this. But y’all, the stress when you want something is not the good kind of stress. It is the stress that makes you on edge. And then you really start to, you can spiral really quickly if you make a mistake and then trip over your words and this that and the other. So people who don’t prepare at all or people who overprepare and are overcritical of themselves of like, that’s never going to be perfect or it’s never going to be good enough. Well, sure, it’s not, but we’re human. And no one expects perfection. They expect you to be the same thing we’ve said about secondaries and applications. They expect you to be reflective and mature. Can you do those things? Absolutely. Everybody is capable of that.

So not practicing at all and practicing too much to the point where you’re too robotic and you’re too critical of yourself. Because I’ve seen people, I’ve worked with Blueprint for 3 or 4 years now, and I would have clients who would have their whole spiel written out and I could tell they were reading from it. And they sounded so robotic and I would have to get on and be like, stop it. I know what you’re doing. That’s not going to look good. And you’re not always going to be in front of your computer on Zoom. Some interviews are in person these days. And so the over preparing or like getting so into a script or being reliant on a script. Those are huge pitfalls that you will not be able to ad lib appropriately or like if you’re replying on a script and then they ask you a question you’re not prepared for and you totally tank. Those are bad habits. That is do not do that because it will show so quickly.

Pooja: Yeah. No, absolutely. I completely agree. I think the point on overpreparing is helpful too, because I think if we’re thinking about the day before an interview, really just being mindful of the fact that you have to relax at some point and you have to kind of call it quits at a certain point. And I think this is an important point to bring up here because we’re on the topic of overpreparing. But Holly, in your opinion, do you think that interviews are best held as a conversation or do you think they’re best held as like a, I guess, almost questioning of someone to say, can you give me your best version of your answer to this question? And I think the nature of this question is pretty leading, but I would appreciate your insight on that.

Holly: 10 out of 10 conversational. I mean, I always tell my clients, I want to see your personality. I want to see who you are. It’s okay to show who you are. And then like, if you’re kind of nerdy, be a nerd. If you’re kind of silly, be like, be silly, but in an appropriate and professional context. So for example, when we talk about, tell me about yourself, one of the things I do in my tell me about yourself when I talk about college, is I graduated in 2009 from college. And if you know anything about history, that was a terrible time to graduate from college. And so I always say in mine, so I finished my bachelor’s degree in 2009. I graduated with a marketing degree and an English literature degree. And I did what every 22-year-old wants to do and I moved back in with my parents because I couldn’t find a job.

Okay, like, I showed a little bit of personality there. It wasn’t unprofessional. It wasn’t disrespectful. It was like, yeah, I did what every 22-year-old. I put my tail between my legs and went back to my parents’ house. So I mean, you can adlib a little bit of like funniness or, you know, you don’t want to tell inappropriate jokes. You don’t want to, you know, be awkward. But that’s part of the rehearsal of this experience is like, how can I add in things about my personality? How can I show them who I am in the conversation? And ideally, those the it’s like, think of it like a tree. Like you’ve got this straight tree and then these branches branch off for like, well, tell me more about that, Holly. Oh, you said you were in a sorority. Tell me about that. Or tell me about what it was like to be in student government or then, or they ask you a question, they say, Holly, tell me about a time you had conflict. I mentioned I was in a sorority in college and one conflict I had… you get to bring it back to that source, like where you started when you have that conversation.

And so it’s like they’re getting to know you and they’re getting to know your story and back and forth. And ideally, if you’re doing that well, they’re sharing things about themselves too and that takes the pressure off of you, right? Because everybody loves to talk about themselves. So like, you want to get to the point where like, what questions you have for us, you’re like, yes, let me ask you some questions so I can just be engaged and answer and I can take a break. So that’s why the conversation part of it’s important because then it’s an exchange rather than like an interrogation. If it’s an interrogation, then maybe you don’t want to be there anyway, because that’s not the vibe you want. You don’t want to be going into a place that’s like, tell me all the things and scary. No one, I’ve never heard people say interviews were like that and they shouldn’t be.

Pooja: Agreed. Agreed. I think something that’s helpful also about interviews and I think a lot of people hear the advice, oh, it should be like a conversation. But I remember when I was first starting to prepare for interviews, because for full context, when I was applying for medical school, that was the first time I really did an interview before. I had done some interviews for like jobs, but they weren’t as formal as this. And so I was very much in the mindset of like, oh, I’ve never really done this before. How do I go about doing this? And I think something that I thought to be helpful was a rule of thumb that someone taught me, which is that you should never be talking for more than 60 seconds at a time. So when they say tell me about yourself, that should be like a minute max. And when anybody answers a question or asks you a question, your answer should be within a minute. And the reason is because a person’s attention span before they start to glaze off a little bit or think about their own thoughts or their response to your thoughts is usually 60 seconds. Thank TikTok for that, I guess. But I found that to be very true and it allows things to stay conversational even if you’re the one answering questions the entire time.

Holly: Mhm. Yep. Yeah, I would say, you know, I’m older, not gonna say old, older. And so my tell me about yourself may be closer to 90 because I’ve lived a little bit more life.

Pooja: Makes sense.

Holly: But I, yeah, never over 90 seconds to 2 minutes. And so I will even do a stopwatch with my folks and be like, okay, okay, that was a lot. So like, let’s narrow that down. What were you trying to get them to say? What were you trying to get them to hear about what you were saying? And sometimes this is the same advice that I give when we’re talking about personal statements or anything like that is like, just give it all to me and I will take notes and then I’ll help you pair it down. But you’re exactly right. Brevity is usually the thing. We’re we’re either super brief or we’re very robust… verbose. Is that the word I’m trying to find? Yes. Very, very verbose in our explanations. And so we just got to find that sweet spot. And that’s the hard part. And that’s why you need practice, because inherently, I think we either shut down really quickly or we want to give you every single detail that doesn’t matter. And that’s the game. It’s the figuring out what they want you to say or like what question am I actually trying to answer and quality that I’m trying to show them. And then how do I make it brief enough and impactful enough to answer the question fully. So that’s really the game you got to play.

Pooja: Absolutely. And I think before we talk about interview types, where we will get into a little bit more detail about a lot of the things that we’re talking about already, but if someone has never done a formal interview before, like they were in my position where they hadn’t really done interviews for college and so this is like the next really high stakes interview that they’re going to do. What is the first thing you’d tell them to focus on?

Holly: Ooh. Oh, man. I think, I mean there’s, oh, there’s so many things.

Pooja: I know.

Holly: I think just being comfortable.

Pooja: Yeah.

Holly: Right? So like it’s all the things that make you comfortable. Like what are you going to wear that’s going to make you comfortable? What’s the setup that you’re going to have that’s going to make you comfortable? And that goes into so many things. So like different people have different anxieties. So for me, it’s about being on time. So like if I was in an in-person interview, I would make sure the night before that I had walked the path. That I used to do that for my classes in graduate school. Like I would go to campus, I didn’t live on campus. I would go to campus and make sure I knew where I was going. Like even when I was in PhD school, I had, I went and stayed with my sister at the University of Mississippi to go find where my class was going to be on the first day of school, like a week beforehand, because I was so nervous about being late. So like, if you’re nervous about being comfortable to be on time, if you’re nervous about your appearance and what kind of clothes you’re going to wear, because like I wear Lulu Lemon every day, but I have to dress up for an interview. You know, making sure you’re comfortable in your attire, making sure you’re comfortable in the space where you are. If you’re taking an interview from home, like I don’t know if y’all could hear my cat was whining. Like that’s uncomfortable if you’re trying to be on a high, a high stakes interview.

So I think like the biggest thing is just like what do you need to feel confident and comfortable? And that can be in lots of different facets like I said. And that’s different for everybody. So I think that would be my first thing of like having a really, a really true needs assessment of what do you need to be in a good spot for that.

Pooja: Right.

Holly: And that could be the number of practice sessions you need, the advice that you need for what to wear, the how you’re going to get there. It really just depends on the person.

Pooja: Yeah. No, absolutely, absolutely. I think something that I would also add to it in terms of first thing to tell them to focus on is to, I think similar to the advice that we were kind of talking about earlier, but really getting a sense of what a minute feels like, just so you know. Because I feel like you’re not always, like if you’re in an interview, you don’t have a stopwatch next to you to time yourself, right?

Holly: Correct.

Pooja: So I think when you’re practicing or honestly doing anything, just like getting that intrinsic sense of what a minute feels like. And I think even when I was studying for standardized exams, I got a sense of, I tried to have an internal sense of whatever time period my sections of each exam was, I would want to know how long that felt like. So I think that kind of carries over here as well.

Holly: Absolutely. An interview minute, let me say this. An interview minute is similar to a workout minute. It’s going to feel super long or super short depending on what you’re doing. So depending on your anxiety level. I think that’s a really important thing to note is that if you’re a talker, it’s going to go really quick. But if you, if talking is not your natural strong suit, it’s going to feel like you’re holding a plank for a minute. So you got to work through that stress and that anxiety. But it’s totally doable.

Pooja: Yeah, no, absolutely. And we’ll talk a little bit more about strategy and practice in a little bit because I do think it’s important to realize that regardless of how extroverted you may seem, there will be different things that you struggle with. Like if you have the gift of the gab, some things will be easy, but some things will be harder for you compared to someone who is more concise with their words or is a little bit more introverted. So it’s helpful to know what strategies you should think about depending on how you are as a person and interviewing. Okay, so for interview types, there’s a couple that people need to be aware of for residency and for medical school. There’s traditional, which is in person, and there’s virtual, which is becoming increasingly more common. But for medical school, there’s also MMIs. So, oh god, I should, I really should have looked up what this stood for.

Holly: Mini medical interview.

Pooja: Yes. I remembered it was mini, it was medical interview, but I didn’t remember it was mini. Okay. Mini medical interview is MMI. So first, let’s talk about…

Holly: And it’s M-I-N-I, like miniature, not many, like multiple. But it is also multiple if you’re doing an MMI.

Pooja: So it’s mini and multiple and medical. So in a way it could be MMMI, but that would be too much. In terms of the differences, big picture, what are the main differences between the MMI, traditional, and virtual interviews?

Holly: Sure. So an MMI is typically you’re meeting with a minimum of 2 people and they have different experiences or different roles that they play. So sometimes it’ll be a faculty member and then a staff member or a faculty member, a staff member, and a student or a community member or it really just depends on the type of school that you’re applying to, what they have access to as far as faculty goes or things like that. So where I work, we do MMIs and I am a staff member. And so they’ll interview with an MD faculty member and then they’ll interview with someone like me or another, I’m a director or an assistant dean or someone like that. But people who are not in the clinical setting on a regular basis. So some of our faculty who hold administrative positions, they still are in the clinical setting, but it’s like a day a week. They’re not full-time clinicians.

And then for us as staff members, you know, people who, it’s typically people who are at the director level or above who have been doing this work for a minute and we’re used to working with students and looking at different aspects of the student and what their how their success will look in medical school and how they can demonstrate that to us. I’ve seen it where it can be people from the community. If it is an urban environment or a rural environment, sometimes they’ll just bring in community members, people who work at local banks or people who do different things. And because the medical school is really invested in that community, they want to see how are you going to talk to someone who is a lay person, for lack of a better term. It’s not an endocrinologist or someone who, you know, can speak your language as a future pre-med. They want to just see how you’re going to get along with people who are in your community and how you will serve that community.

Sometimes they’ll have medical students, but that’s kind of rare because those are your peers and that can, that can be a little strange, but it can happen. Sometimes there’ll be residents depending on what the residency programs look like in that school or if they have GME. So that’s typically how it goes. And then those scores together will be your overall interview score. And they look at the different parts of that a little bit differently on the admission side. So depending on the criteria and they’ll all ask you different types of questions. And it’s always okay if it’s an MMI to ask when you get your layout for the interview day to say, could you share with me who I’m interviewing with? And then you can do some research on those people. So if it is an endocrinologist, you can see, okay, they’re probably not, PS, they’re not going to ask you endocrinology questions. Like they’re not going to ask you to be like, tell me about how the body metabolizes blah. Not going to happen.

But it’s good to know, are they a junior faculty member? Have they been there for a long time? What roles have they served in the medical school? If you’re interviewing with someone like me, so what am I over and what kind of thoughtful questions can you ask me about the medical school and the environment and things like that? So it’s absolutely okay to ask who you’re going to be interviewing with and what the schedule looks like so you can prepare yourself of like, okay, when am I going to have a break or who am I talking to and getting yourself in that mindset. So that’s an MMI.

A traditional interview is usually just a 1-on-1 or you and 2 other people that are just asking you questions. It tends to be 30 minutes to an hour depending on how long it is. But a traditional interview is just that where it’s going to be your very basic, tell me about yourself, why this program, tell me about a time you XYZ, which are called situational interview questions and I’m sure we’ll get more into that. But it’s you’re not going to be shifting around to lots of different people. It’s just going to be that traditional interview 1-on-1 format. And then a virtual interview can be a combination of either any of those things. It’s just in the virtual environment. So you will be at home or somewhere, hopefully not a coffee shop where there’s a lot going on in the background, but some place that you can focus. I would highly recommend if you do not have a home office space or a space that’s quiet, looking into your local library and if they have study rooms that you can reserve that are free or places like that where you can have a dedicated space with dedicated Wi-Fi. But it’s essentially going to be the same thing. A virtual can be an MMI or a traditional. So it’s good to ask what that schedule is. So if you are renting a space or if you do need to find a space that works for you, you can know what to expect as the time frame and make sure that you have a dedicated space where you feel comfortable.

Pooja: Are there any mindset shifts that you think students should make when they’re moving from? So there’s two transitions that I think can happen, right? There could be someone who has done interviews like pre-COVID or recently and then they transition to Zoom. Or they’ve done Zoom interviews before and then they’re doing, let’s say, like a competitive surgical subspecialty where they’re doing in person. And I think either one, there’s like a shift that I think happens when you go from one interview type that you’re familiar with to a new one. So I was wondering if you had any recommendations about mindset shifts that students can make.

Holly: Yeah, I think you definitely have to prepare yourself if you’re going to be in person because even though it’s exhausting to be on, even if you’re online, there’s something to be said for breaks when you take a break and you’re out of the Zoom room where you can just, and you can use your own bathroom and you can get your own water or you can do whatever. Whereas like, when you’re in person, you feel like you’re being watched the entire time. Like when you go get a drink or if you take a phone call or something like that. So I think you definitely do have to shift your mindset of being on campus or on the surgical floor or what have you.

I know this sounds really basic, but what you wear has to be different too. Like if you’re going to be trooping around on surgical floors or in the hospital during tours, you don’t want to be wearing like, for guys and gals, uncomfortable shoes, you know, or clothes that are not going to be appropriate for being in a certain environment. So I think you have to change the way that you look, the way that you prepare yourself mentally, what you bring. You know, I remember we would when we did on campus interviews, we had students that were kosher or ate halal food and we provided lunch and sometimes we couldn’t meet their dietary needs. And so like preparing yourself if you’re going to be there all day to have appropriate snacks if you have a certain diet or things like that. I think that can really up the level of preparation that you need to have and that can change your mindset. Because we all know like the basic hierarchy of needs is like shelter, safety, food. And I don’t take that for granted because those things matter when you don’t prepare appropriately, especially when you’re in an in-person space.

Pooja: So tell me a little bit about Zoom and how that mindset is different then.

Holly: Yeah, Zoom is, I mean, I live on Zoom now, so it’s like hard to think about actually going back in person versus that. But lighting, for example. We were joking before this that I have to turn on my circle light. And depending on, it’s afternoon here and the sun is on the other side of my house now. So I’ve got a little bit of back light. And if I wasn’t prepared for that and I got on my Zoom and I had like, you know, the Edward Cullen glow because the sun was coming in, that would be, hopefully listeners understood that was from Twilight. We were talking earlier about understanding references. He was a vampire and he shimmered in the sun. You don’t want to shimmer in the sun. You don’t want to have it in your eyes. You want to make sure your lighting’s appropriate. You want to make sure your sound’s appropriate. How many times have we had to talk through our headphones or different things like that?

So Zoom maybe is not as stressful in like being in person and being on, but the technology challenges that can cause anxiety on Zoom or any other virtual format, man, those can shoot you through the roof if you are not prepared accordingly. So I would highly recommend like figuring out what platform they’re going to use, making sure you get on early, making sure your equipment is charged, making sure that you’re in a comfortable space, making sure your lighting is good, making sure it’s not too hot in your room. So you’re not sweating through your suit jacket, if you’re wearing a suit jacket. I mean, a lot of the same considerations go into Zoom or should go into Zoom just like they do in person.

Pooja: And I guess we, you already alluded to this when we talked about comfortable shoes, but for virtual meetings or in person, what do you think applicants should keep in mind when choosing what to wear?

Holly: Yeah, you want to be comfortable but you want to be professionally appropriate. So typically, even in a more casual phase of life that we are post-COVID, interview attire is still pretty rigid. The expectation for your most formal is a blazer with something underneath it, whether for people who identify female, whether that’s a dress or a skirt or a blouse and pants. Technically, a skirt suit is the most formal for women who are dressing traditionally in that way. For men, it’s a suit and tie. So that’s a jacket, pants, and a button down shirt and a tie.

You know, I break those rules. I wear a dress with a jacket. I’m just not a suit wearer. I’ve got petite shoulders. I look like I’m wearing my dad’s jacket when I wear a blazer. So I wear a blazer that tends to be a little bit more petite and fitted with a dress because that’s just my jam. Shoes wise, you know, I wouldn’t wear my Nike running shoes or my more casual shoes, but there’s lots of comfortable options for shoes these days. My husband when he worked as an administrator, wore like the Kenneth Cole shoes that had the Nike technology that kind of looked like sneakers, but they’re still dress shoes. So and they don’t even have to be expensive. I got him a pair of Nautica ones for $10 at Sam’s Club. So you don’t have to break the bank. There’s lots of dupes that you can do.

But definitely knowing what is appropriate and then what you’re comfortable in when it comes to that. We used to also harp on definitely in person, not overdoing cologne or perfume because that can be really off putting to people. For folks who wear makeup, not doing anything that’s really different or glaring in your makeup. So not super heavy eyeliner or lipstick or things like that, depending on what you wear makeup wise. Hair, same thing, you know, keeping it pretty, you know, for me, I used to have long hair and I would kind of mess with it as a, as a safety blanket, but now I have shorter hair and I’ll still, it’s pulled back today, but I would still like kind of mess and things like that. You don’t want to give yourself anything that distracts. So that we got to think about things like that, knowing yourself and knowing what that looks like for you.

So typically in my long hair days with interviewing, I would wear my hair half pulled back so it wasn’t in my face, but it was still, you know, I was still comfortable and that was a hairstyle I was comfortable with. For guys, like just making sure, or anybody, making sure you’re groomed appropriately that, you know, you’re not walking in like you just got out of the shower and looks like you’re unprepared. So it’s just like your level of comfort matched with the professionalism that’s expected. So I’m not saying you have to come in a tuxedo and be completely, you know, rigid and not who you are. It’s okay to show personality. I had a student, he’s now a surgeon, he wore a bow tie to every single interview he went to because that was his jam. And he looked great. And that was part of his personality. So you can still show personality, you can still show who you are. No one expects you to be someone you’re not, but also showing that you understand the professionalism that’s expected in an interview is really important to interviewers.

Pooja: So now let’s talk a little bit about the details, right? The details of structure and like what a good mock interview looks like. So tell me, Holly, with the mock interview sessions you do with your clients, what do they kind of look like?

Holly: Sure. So I always start out with those 3 that I told you about. Tell me about yourself, why this program, why this specialty, or why do you want to be a doctor, and why the school. And there’s certain things I expect with that. I expect for your why, tell me about yourself to be very structured. And we can go into that deeper and to know that you know what’s appropriate to say that you know how to keep the length appropriate and you know how to end it. Because a lot of times when people are in that and they’re like, so that’s it. And you’re like, no, you got to take control over that. And you got to know to tell them it’s over. So that’s what I’m looking for in that one. The why this program or why the school, I want 3 reasons that are unique to you and your career choice and your experience. So it’s not just like, I like the location. Okay, well, what about the location? Because you grew up here, because you like the people? Please don’t let it be about the weather. That can be the last thing that you say. But you know, what’s specifically about this school? And this is really what shows me that you’ve done your research and are really putting two and two together.

And then why do you want to be a doctor or why this specialty, same kind of thing. Give me 3 things that are deep and unique to you. So not cliché of like, well, it’s always all I’ve ever wanted to be. Okay, well, why? Did you just wake up out of the womb and you were like, I’m going to be a doctor one day? No, everybody’s got a story. I need to know that story. And so you got to think about those first 3 questions is kind of storytelling of finding that balance of telling a little bit about your life and how you’ve got to where you are today, but also answering the question that was asked in the appropriate amount of time. So I always do those 3. And then I’ll typically get into some situational interview questions. So tell me about a time and we call these situational because you’re going to talk about a situation. And they want a specific situation. This isn’t like, tell me about a time you had conflict. Well, this one time someone was rude to me, blah, blah, blah. Nah, I want exactly what happened.

So when we say situation, we say STAR. Situation, Task, Action, Result. So I want to know the situation. I want to know what was the task at hand that needed to be solved, that did or didn’t. What was the action? Was it a good one or a bad one? It’s okay if you made a mistake. And what was the result? So how did this end and what did you learn from it? And in that, why is it applicable to what you’re doing now? So as a future resident, I know I’m going to have conflict. I know I’m going to disagree or as a medical student, I know that there’s going to be times that I’m challenged with feedback, but what I learned from this was XYZ. And so that’s kind of that tying it up in a knot. So I’ll ask a few of those. And then I always end with a fun one. I’m like, if you could be any color, what would you be and why? My favorite one and my spouse hates this that I ask this, but it’s like a Holly Proffitt original. Like what kind of tail would you have and why? And people are like, like an animal tail? I’m like, absolutely. Yes, an animal tail. Tell me about that. And so it’s got to catch you off guard. Like it’s got to be something kind of silly where you have to tell me something that you hadn’t really thought about before that tells me about you and that you can laugh at yourself.

Pooja: Sorry, I’m just thinking about which animal tail I would I would have.

Holly: I have two.

Pooja: I’ve been thinking. The thing is, okay, here’s the thing. I am not, this is so funny. This is the second time this has come up today. I’m not very educated on my dog species because growing up I didn’t really have a dog and a lot of my friends didn’t have pets. So I don’t fully know a lot about the different types of dogs. So I’ll just describe what the tail looks like and maybe you can tell me.

Holly: Okay. Yeah, for sure. Big dog girl over here.

Pooja: But there’s some dogs that have a little poof at the end, but then the rest of it is sleek, but it’s still fur. Like it’s not like a naked cat where there’s no fur or anything.

Holly: It’s like a poodle or a doodle.

Pooja: Yeah. I would say a doodle, not a poodle. Not that I really know the difference between them.

Holly: Well, poodles typically have more like a puff whereas like a doodle, they’ll usually or even a golden retriever when they’re shaved, they’ll have like the puff at the top. And then sometimes people shave them. Yeah, it’s cute.

Pooja: Yeah, and then the rest of it, that’s what I would have.

Holly: Yeah. So I think in terms of other, I guess, things to circle back on when we’re thinking about the mock interviews, let’s talk a little bit about the dreaded question. I don’t think it’s a dreaded question because I actually like the question, but when I first started preparing for interviews, I felt like it was a dreaded question, and now I love it. But it’s the why this question. So let’s talk about the anatomy of that.

Holly: Oh, like why the school, why the specialty, what have you.

Pooja: Yeah, because you said that there’s like a structure that you like people to have. So what is that structure?

Holly: Yeah, I like threes. I like threes. I could go with 2, but it needs to be at least more than one. And it needs to be thoughtful to and consistent and expand from what you’ve displayed in your application. So you’re applying to internal medicine. So I would expect that your internal medicine answer would be something about people. Because you’re a people person. A specific population you want to serve or the environment that you want to serve in or an academic interest. I know that you have been teaching for Blueprint and you enjoy mentoring. I would expect for Pooja’s why internal medicine to go with something like that. If it were me of why I would want to be a doctor, mine would be deeply rooted in service and education. I didn’t realize those things until a little bit later in life that I love to serve other people. I just love to be a helper. And I know that people, the cliche answer is, I just want to help people. Well, but why? Why do you want to help people?

Well, my answer to that is because someone helped me. Because I’m a first generation college student and someone helped, someone gave me a shot. Someone gave my dad a shot so that he could play college basketball. It’s a small school. It’s not like NBA star or anything. But gave him a shot so that he could get a college degree and that changed the trajectory of my life that my dad got a college degree as the first person to get a college degree. And that changed the trajectory of my life because then he got a master’s. And I went to college and I got a master’s. And I didn’t know what I was doing. And I want to be a doctor because I know that there’s lots of people out there who are scared of medicine. They’re scared to go to the doctor, they’re scared to ask for help, and I want to be the person who helps. I want to be the person that they know that they can trust when they go to the doctor. And you can make that for any specialty. That could be for OBGYN, that could be for pediatrics, that could be for whatever. So I answered that question in why by telling you about something about myself. It shouldn’t just be like, I like pediatrics because I like kids or I want to be a doctor because I make lots of money and the lifestyle. No. It’s got to be about you. And you got to know why.

And so for you, I would assume, I mean, we spent enough time together now that I know that your answer probably is shaped around those things. And that’s a perfect thing to say because it’s unique to you and how you see the specialty. And it’s unique to me and how I see medicine. And that’s all I care about. There are wrong answers. There’s no right answer in answering this question.

Pooja: That makes a lot of sense. And I think the other thing that it’s advice that I’ve gotten about actually presenting H&Ps or histories and physicals when I’m on rounds, but I think there’s a way to kind of apply it to the interview and I’m curious to see if you agree. The advice I was given for histories and plans is to make it so in your presentation that by the time you get to your assessment of what’s going on with the patient and your plan for that patient, it is obvious because you have selectively included the details that kind of lead to the argument of your conclusion, which is like, I think this patient has this diagnosis and I don’t think it’s these diagnoses. And the way you do that in the history and physical is by including pertinent positives and pertinent negatives and not getting too into the weeds about other things that aren’t relevant to the patient’s presentation and what they’re coming to the hospital for.

And I think the application that you can kind of see for these why questions is you want to make it so that the 3 things that you say or however many number you pick, I also like to do things in three because I find 3 to be a satisfying number. Same. But if you do whatever 3 things you say, you kind of want it to be so that by the time you’re done saying all those things, they’ll then be able to be like, oh yeah, duh, that’s why medicine is a perfect sense thing for you. It makes sense based on what you said. Or like, this is why this specialty makes the most sense for you because all of all the things you said, this is the only thing that really is the combination of all 3 reasons that you said or whatever it may be. And I want to also follow up with when we’re talking about this structure, you said that the conclusion is something that you want people to kind of pay attention to instead of being like, so that is my answer or that is me as a person. What’s a good alternative to that?

Holly: In the why questions, it comes down to storytelling. It really comes down to, you know, if I was talking about why I wanted to be a doctor, I would say, you know, because someone gave me a chance and I want to be that person who does that for other people. I also love to teach. I didn’t come from a family of teachers, but I love education and I love the feeling of what it is to learn. And I want to be able to pass that on because I feel like it allows me, that’s what we do as physicians every single day is we teach others to empower themselves. And lastly, I want to empower people. I want people to take control. There’s nothing of their own health and their own journey. I really enjoy giving advice, but I always want people to take ownership of it. And so I want to be the person who provides that option, but then supports them through all of these things. So all of these things, so here’s how I’m going to tie it together. So all of these things are just things that bring me joy and I know that being a physician is a lifelong commitment and I really want to enjoy my life and my work and I have no doubt that being able to do these 3 things every day will allow me to do that.

Pooja: Right.

Holly: So it’s just short and sweet. It’s just bringing it all together.

Pooja: And see, that’s what you did, is you made it so that by the time you got to your conclusion, the listeners with you. And so by the time you say your conclusion, they’re like, oh my god, yeah, that makes so much sense for you, right?

Holly: I did that off the fly. But if I don’t, I was watching my facial expressions, I don’t know if you could tell I got a little bit of anxiety of like, oh crap, how am I going to wrap this up? So this goes back to the point of you have to practice. You have to practice these things because even I got anxiety just then of like, oh crap, what am I going to do? How am I going to bring this around? So if you are not prepared to do that and cannot do it on the spot, y’all, I’ve been doing this for a long time. That’s how I can do it on the spot is because I’ve been doing this for a long time.

If that is not your skill set, you have to sit down and think. And some people write, some people bullet, some people record. I don’t care how you do it, but you got to think about what your 3 things are and how you’re going to bring them together. And then it’s just muscle memory. It’s just like bringing it all around and tying it up with a nice little bow and that’s that mic drop. When my clients do that, I’m like, you got it. That’s exactly what you should do. And I get so jacked for them because they figured it out. And it’s your story. All you got to do is tell your story, but it’s that phrasing it in a good way to make that happen.

Pooja: Totally, totally. No, I completely agree. And so now, now that we’ve talked about practice, what that practice should look like, I want to talk a little bit about confidence and composure. So when it comes to those classic questions that you discussed, how can people avoid sounding over rehearsed or cliche? What tips do you have?

Holly: That really just comes from knowing yourself and trying it out. So I could tell you my tell me about myself like 10 different ways. Truly. You could get a different version from me today than you did yesterday, depending on how I feel, because I know it so well. But I know the essence of it so well. The best way to do that, and I’m kind of stuttering thinking through it, like, how do I describe this? The best way to do it is just to know yourself and to know, what iterations can I make changes to? So my strengths and weaknesses, I really do have to think about strengths and weaknesses. One of my strengths is that I’m very creative. I really like to think outside the box. I like to research, I like to learn, I like to grow. And that’s really helpful in my ability to solve problems and to work collaboratively with others.

My weakness, I could give you strengths all day because everyone wants to talk about strengths. My weakness, I really have to think about. I really had to think about like what weakness is not super egregious. Like, oh, I don’t want to, I don’t want to work with her. But that I could also tell a story about of how I’m growing. And so if I hadn’t sat down and thought about that, I would not be successful in answering that question. So now if anybody asks me like, tell me something you need to work on. That’s the same as tell me your weakness. Tell me something that you’ve gotten feedback on. That’s the same thing as tell me a weakness. And so it’s like you got to know the core answer of what you’re going to say so you can pivot to use those in different situations. And so it’s not sticking around peg in a square hole. It’s like, okay, I’ve got this foundation that I can answer and I’ll be strong with that I can have the muscle memory to like, oh, they’re asking me something like this. I’ve got that. But that only happens if you’ve sat down and brainstormed. If only can you do that if you’ve prepared in some way or another.

Pooja: Yes. No, I completely agree. And I think on similar lines, is it possible to come across as too confident in an interview?

Holly: Absolutely. I tell my clients all the time.

Pooja: What does that look like?

Holly: Oh man, it’s a very fine line between confidence and arrogance is what I always tell my students. It’s like confidence is knowing yourself but still having a level of humility to say like, okay, so tell me about a time you’ve made a mistake. If I go into like, I’ve never made a mistake, it was someone else’s fault. That is arrogant as heck. I was going to say something that the kids say these days, but that would be inappropriate for a podcast. That’s arrogant. Like not taking ownership, not acknowledging your failures, not doing that kind of stuff, that is arrogance all day long.

Humility and confidence is owning it and saying, you know, here’s a time I made a mistake. I tell people when people ask if I made a mistake, I tell people I don’t make a lot of mistakes and that’s not because I’m perfect, that’s because I’m anxious. That’s because I grew up in a family where preparation was the expectation and I’m the person who used to set out my clothes for school the next day so I didn’t have to be stressed in the morning when I woke up. I’m the person who makes a list to make sure that I don’t forget things. I’m the person who does these kind of things, but I do make mistakes. And these may not sound like big things, but here’s a mistake I made.

Pooja: Yeah, absolutely. And I think it’s interesting about confidence and arrogance because I think obviously there are certain things that everybody’s like, I would never say that because that is way too arrogant for me. I’m a humble person, whatever, right? But I think that there are subtle things that you don’t necessarily realize are overconfident or arrogant until you talk to somebody with experience being on the receiving end or somebody who’s actually been a practicing physician for a long time so you can understand. So one of the examples that comes to my mind is advice that I got recently, which was about how when you kind of enter medical school and you enter residency, you are bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and you have all these exciting things that you want to do in terms of reforming our healthcare system. A lot of people say that they want to do that. And I think it’s it’s obviously wonderful. Like I was someone who wants to do that and has wanted to do that for a really long time. But there is humility that comes with realizing that a lot of people who are in this field want to do that.

So to say that you’re the one who’s going to be doing that or you’re the one who’s going to finally make a difference. Like there’s some humility that comes with being like with realizing that you are one person in a system that is messed up and complicated and there are a lot of people who’ve been spending decades of their lives working on this problem. And so realizing the part that you have in this larger solution is really important. And like for me, I think I remember when I wrote something in one of my residency application drafts and it was something along the lines of like, I want to change blah, blah, blah. And the advice I got was careful there. That’s a bit grandiose because again, like and it’s it’s a point that I knew, but it’s easy how subtle wording can make it sound like you think you were, you know, the person who’s going to change everything when it’s a team effort. So I think that’s the example that comes to my mind as too confident because I’m someone who’s perhaps the opposite.

I’m not a very confident person. I just outwardly appear that way. But even I was like, whoa, I don’t realize that I had this like overconfident part of myself in the way I described my interest. So it can happen to anybody. It’s not just the people who are borderline too confident in their personal lives that can have this issue in interview day. I just wanted to bring that story up because it’s a story that I think a lot of people relate to.

Holly: And I don’t know that you were being arrogant as much as you were being slightly immature. And I don’t mean that to be nasty, but it’s like lack of experience. It’s a lack of experience showing of like, oh and I mean, as someone who’s lived a little bit more life these days, I’m like, oh, that’s cute, little girl that you’re that you think that you’re going to fix this when we’ve been doing this for yeah. So it’s it’s knowing yourself and being able to

Pooja: Or naive also. Yeah. Naive would be the one.

Holly: Yes. Yes, that’s a better word. That’s a better word. Of the like just acknowledgment of and that’s where the humility comes out of when you make a mistake or something that you’ve learned. That’s how you tie it all back around and be like, when someone asks you like, what’s the, this is a common medical school one, tell me about something, a healthcare challenge that we’re experiencing right now and how you would solve it. If you are just like, yep, and I got it licked, that’s way too arrogant.

It’s, you know, here’s something that’s going on, prices for medications are way too high and people are having challenges paying for their medications. One thing that I would really like to do is to be able to help my patients to find out every avenue they could for resources to make them more affordable, for free programs, for things like that. I know that I don’t know a lot about those things right now, but that’s definitely a hallmark of who I want to be as a physician is helping them to do those things. And I know I have a lot to learn about that, but that’s something that I think is really important for us to handle as a group and a public health concern that we have is that folks, we don’t know what our resources are and I want to be able to help that. So I humbly did that rather than being like, well, I’m going to help people do this. Okay, there’s no reason that you can’t pick up a $5 prescription. there’s plenty of reasons you can’t pick up a $5 prescription. So you just got to hone it in.

Pooja: Yep, absolutely. Absolutely. Okay, great. So we, we’ve addressed confidence and cockiness. But I want to talk a little bit about what is a common moment you’ve seen or you’ve heard of during an interview that students can kind of be thrown off by and what does recovery from a moment where you’ve been thrown off look like?

Holly: Yeah, so there’s a couple things that come to mind. It’s like when you don’t fully answer the question that was asked and they revisit it. 

Pooja: And they’re like, hey, you didn’t answer my question.

Holly: Yeah. Like, I didn’t. So that one is tough and it’s totally okay to… and this is why if I’m ever in an interview and I give my clients advice, like have a notebook where you’re just kind of jotting down what the question is so you can look back at it. So one thing that we do where I work when we interview people is if it’s in Zoom, we also put it in chat so you can read it. So I’m way more of a visual person than I am an auditory person and so sometimes I’ll get lost in the listening because my mind is working and so writing it down or asking them if they could also put them in chat if it’s not too much so that you can read it. But yes, coming back from that and then I would say, oh, I’m so sorry. Could you repeat the question then so I can see what I missed. So take a moment and do that.

And this is a good thing we haven’t talked about yet is like if you don’t have an answer, it’s okay to say, oh wow, that’s a really great question. I’m going to take a minute to think about that. And to look down or look away. You don’t have to look at the person. If you have a notebook, you can kind of take some notes. It’s okay to take a moment. And that moment, we talked about earlier what a minute feels like is going to feel like an eternity because you feel like everybody’s looking at you and you don’t have the information you need and all these things. But it’s totally okay to do that. The other thing is if you just don’t have an answer. A lot of times people freak out because they just don’t know what to say. And so it’s totally okay to say like, you know what, that situation’s never happened to me, but I think that this is what I would do and still walk people through maybe like a similar situation where you would demonstrate the same qualities that they’re looking for in asking that question. But I think that’s where we get most of the like is not answering the question that was asked or not having an answer at all. And you can always have an answer. It just may take you a minute to work through the like, okay, well what’s similar or what else can I bring to the table to be able to answer this.

Pooja: Yeah. No, absolutely. Absolutely. That makes a lot of sense. And I think I’ve definitely, for myself, done the strategy of, oh, let me take a second and think about the answer to your question. Like I remember there was one interview that I had where for my gap year, I was a fellow at the CDC and someone had asked me to evaluate the entire COVID response because I was on the COVID response. And I was like, I did not expect that to be a question asked to me because I was prepared, I was all prepared to talk about the job that I did, what I was learning from it, how excited I was, all that. But I did not expect a question about me evaluating the entire COVID response.

And I know that he didn’t expect me to have the answer that, you know, a master’s in public health would have. I think he just wanted to see what I would come up with. But I was nervous at the time because it was also, if I recall correctly, it was my first interview. And I was like, oh my god. But taking a minute to collect my thoughts, think about a structured answer, and be able to deliver that structured answer, actually, he ended up telling me because I got into that school. He told me that is what got me in because he was like, I knew that I asked you a really hard question and I knew you weren’t going to have the answer, but you took a second, you thought about it, and you ended up coming up with a pretty good answer for the level of training you had. And so I think realizing that too is really helpful. Like if someone asks you a question that is hard, like medically, ethically, socially, whatever, it is hard, know that your interviewer is aware of that and that they’re not expecting you to come up with. Like you said, there isn’t always a right answer. There are wrong answers, but there isn’t always a right answer. So I think that’s a helpful piece of advice as well.

Holly: I get that one a lot with folks who like, tell me about the last book you’ve read. So I got asked that right after my master’s degree and I was like, bro, I haven’t read a book in 2 years. Like I’ve been in graduate school. So you can acknowledge that and say like, instead of being like, I haven’t read a book. I said that. I was like, look, I have not read a book that wasn’t a textbook in 2 years, but when I do like to read, I like to read XYZ and talk about those books.

Pooja: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. I completely agree. So, now that we’ve talked about this, before we move into more like reflective insights from the receiving end of an interview, because I know you’ve been on that end as well, what is your best advice for students who struggle with the nerves or self-doubt before interviews?

Holly: I mean, I got to give a piece of advice my dad always gave me is that or still does, did you do everything you could? If you prepared, if you are literally at the like, I’ve done everything I can to make this good, that’s all you can do. That doesn’t mean to sound apathetic. It just means that I’ve given it all I can and I’ve just got to walk in that confidence and be good with it. But I will say a failure to plan is a plan to fail. And so if you haven’t given all the preparation that you can muster. So different people’s preparation levels are different. Like for someone who’s incredibly introverted, it’s really hard to spend that much time talking to somebody and really bringing those thoughts out. And if all you can muster is this, then that’s the best you can do and that’s okay. And if you’re an over talker like me, sometimes you got to pare it down and that’s hard too.

And so you just have to know where you are and know what you bring to the table and have confidence in it. A healthy level of anxiety is okay, right? Like we live on anxiety from primal days. Like we need to be able to protect our young or eat or things like that. Anxiety is not a bad thing. It’s only a bad thing if it keeps you from doing the things you need to do. And so a little bit of nervousness is totally okay. But you just have to be able to rest in yourself of knowing that, I’ve done the best that I can do and I’m enough. And that’s what I always tell my clients when we’re done. is like, you’ve got this. You are enough. You’re going to do this well. You got to have like, you got to have that in yourself and you got to have someone who’s rooting for you. So that’s the best thing to do is have a good team that’s got your back, but also to trust yourself and know that I’ve done everything I can do to be successful and the cards are going to fly how they are.

Pooja: Right, absolutely. So being as prepared as possible, but then having some form of acceptance in the preparation that you’ve done. Again, similar to exams, I’ll say it. I’ll say it. It’s very similar to when you’re taking a big test. That’s great. That’s great. Thank you for that.

Holly: I’m not a great standardized test taker, so I will take your word that is the same as taking a standardized test.

Pooja: I mean, I think it’s the same. I think it’s, I mean, again, obviously not the same, but I think there are principles that carry over.

Holly: Yeah, the same type of things.

Pooja: Right. So Holly, before we wrap up, I have two last questions for you. So the first of the last two questions, the penultimate question if you will.

Holly: Yes.

Pooja: Is about the do you have any questions for me? Because I think something that people are worried about and things that I’ve heard of before is, let’s say you have 30 minutes and after like 10 minutes, they say, do you have any questions for me? And you’re like, oh my god, I have to fill up 20 minutes with questions that I have. And I think that can be very anxiety inducing for people. And you’ve kind of talked about it already, how people have to talk about themselves and you should ask questions that elicit that. Are there any go-to questions you recommend people have prepared in case they run out of questions that have the things that they’ve researched from their interviewer and from the school.

Holly: Yeah, one thing, like I said before, people love to talk about themselves. So ask them like, what’s your favorite thing about this school. So or residency program or what have you. And that goes for everybody. That goes for students, that goes for faculty, that goes for program directors. I also say if they’re physicians or someone, anybody who’s working or student, anybody, you can also ask, tell me something you wish you would have known about this program or about yourself before you came in that you think would be helpful. If you could give me one piece of advice as I look at this journey, what would it be?

Those are all very broad questions that take the pressure off of you. But what they say will be very interesting. So I was interviewing for with another medical school at one point and I asked that question like, what’s your favorite thing about working here? And they said the building. And I was like, nope, nope, nope. You don’t give a rip about your students. You don’t, your mission, anything. I was like, and I’m out. They said that NASA loved their building. 

Pooja: It’s probably a cool building.

Holly: And I was like, sure, sure, sure, but a building only does so much. It’s not the benefits, it’s not your students, it’s not the intrinsic work you get. And so those questions are good because they take the spotlight off of you, but they also allow you to see like, what do these people value? Do they value their colleagues? Do they value service? Do they value the mission? Are they bought in? And so those questions actually turn the tide for you to see, is this some place I want to be? So any of those questions and what they say can be super helpful for you, but they also take the spotlight off of you, which is really nice.

Pooja: No, that makes a lot of sense because I also feel like for my school, part of what made me want to come here really badly was the two answers that I got were people were saying, you know, I feel like I have so much ability to take on opportunities because there’s so much available. That was one that I loved. I loved that answer because it ultimately helped me pick undergrad as well. I just, that’s a thing that I prioritize. But then also someone said the people. That was the other, that was a more common answer actually. People were saying, I love my classmates, I love my faculty, I love everyone here. And I think that was a big deal for me as well because like I knew that I was entering a field where I knew nothing and knew nobody in it. And so I wanted to make sure that I felt like I could find a community of people that I belong in. And it sounds like that, it is the truth now that I’m here. Something that I was able to find. And so, yeah, I completely, completely agree with that answer. Yep. Okay, last question.

Holly: Yep.

Pooja: If you could leave students with one mindset going into their interview, what would it be?

Holly: Conqueror. I want you to be a conqueror mindset.

Pooja: I love that.

Holly: I want you to go in there and just like know that you owned it. Like know that you’re enough. Know that school will be less because you’re not there. And I don’t mean that in an arrogant way, just like know what you bring to the table. Know yourself and know that you’re going to be a really great doctor or a really great internal medicine physician or pediatrician. Like just know yourself and know that you’re enough and go conquer it because you will end up where you’re supposed to. You will succeed if you go in there doing the right things because you’re awesome and you’re totally capable.

Pooja: I feel like I needed to hear that.

Holly: Well girl, I’m here. I got you. You got my number. You just tell me when you need a pep talk. But I mean it. I tell that to all my students. I’m like, you are enough. You are ready. You are worthy. You are these things. Because you’re in your head, the imposter syndrome is so loud and so real. And you just got to know from somebody that’s done this for a second, you got this. But I won’t tell it to you if you’re not ready. I won’t tell you if you’re not ready. And so that’s how you know it’s legit is like you’ve done enough. You’re ready to go. And here’s the thing, if you something makes you ick when you go, then we come back and we work on it some more. It’s no big deal. But you’re going to conquer it. You’re going to like, you’re going to climb your Everest or whatever mountain we’re doing and you’re going to do it. You’re going to go conquer it.

Pooja: Amazing. Amazing. Well, you know, typically, Holly, sometimes for the ends of these episodes, we like to do a little takeaway, but I kind of want to leave everybody with the Conqueror’s mindset. So I’m just going to go ahead and say, that is a wrap on this week’s episode of Pursuit of Practice, brought to you by Blueprint Test Prep. Holly, thank you so much for joining us.

Holly: My pleasure, truly.

Pooja: All right. Well, have a good week everybody and we will see you next time.

This is a podcast created by physicians and medical educators, but is in no way to be construed as medical advice. All of the opinions shared are those of individual people and are not reflective of their associated institutions or of Blueprint Test Prep.

That’s a wrap on this episode of Pursuit of Practice. Remember, you’re not in this alone. Head to blueprintprep.com for MCAT prep courses, board exam prep, free resources, and more to support every stage of your journey to and through medical school.

Pooja: Okay. So, back to what we were talking about, when we’re talking about like motivation and burnout, and you alluded to it a little bit when you were talking about how interventional radiology is one of the more competitive specialties to match into. It sounds like there was a lot of pressure associated with that.

Camden: Yeah, but as with all things that are pressure, 90% of that pressure is self-imposed pressure. Even if it’s extrinsic pressure, you know, I have colleagues who are like their parents really want them to become a cardiologist or something. I’m lucky. I come from a family with no doctors, so they have no clue even what interventional radiology is.

No one will judge you differently depending on whatever your path takes you. And so I think it’s it’s more of like realizing that it’s you pressuring yourself. But the big thing is that you need to recognize that the pressure to get into a certain specialty is 99% internal.

Pooja: The path to becoming a doctor is a whole range of things: exciting, confusing, anxiety-inducing, and gratifying, probably all at the same time. And the truth is that no matter how isolating it may feel, you’re not in it alone. Welcome to Pursuit of Practice, your go-to space for expert advice, real stories, and the kind of support that shows you what trusting the process actually looks like.

Welcome back to Pursuit of Practice. Whether you’re a pre-med just starting to dip your toes into the world of medicine or a med student already deep in the grind, this episode is for you. We all know that med school is demanding: studying for exams, keeping up with rotations, and trying to maintain some semblance of a personal life. But what if you could navigate it all without feeling constantly overwhelmed? The truth is I don’t really know if that’s possible, but we’re going to talk about that today. Today, we are diving into time management strategies that can help you not only survive but thrive in this fast-paced journey and adapt to whenever you feel overwhelmed. For our pre-med listeners, we’ll cover practical advice for building a solid foundation before medical school, so you’re ready to take on the challenges ahead. And for those already in medical school, we will dig deep into techniques that really balance your academic workload, self-care, and personal relationships without burning out.

Today, I am joined by Camden MacDowell. He is an interventional radiology resident who’s been through it all. Camden grew up in Anchorage, Alaska, and went to Emory University in Georgia for undergrad before completing his PhD and postdoc fellowship in neuroscience at Princeton University. He then earned the title of being a double doctor after getting an MD from Rutgers. While being a resident, because he clearly mastered the time management game, he has been working at Blueprint for over 4 years and has been widely engaged in medical education programming and served as a senior tutor for the USMLE Step exams.

He can be described as someone who is disciplined, clever, compassionate, and on top of everything else he’s doing, he is a dedicated father. He values mentoring learners as they embark on their journey to becoming a doctor and has a wealth of advice to share, from structuring your day to staying mentally healthy during this intense journey. And so whether you’re planning ahead or are knee-deep in the trenches of medical school, stay tuned to hear how you can master time management and set yourself up for success, both academically and personally. Camden, thank you so much for joining us.

Camden: Thank you so much for having me. It’s a pleasure.

Pooja: Amazing. So let’s just dive right into it. So first, I kind of want to talk about personal experiences and challenges. Can you describe, to the best of your ability, what your first few weeks of medical school was like and how you kind of handled that workload?

Camden: Yeah, it’s kind of crazy to think that at this point that was over 10 years ago.

Pooja: Whoa.

Camden: And, yeah. Yeah, the MD PhD does take a while. It was 10 years ago. It was before COVID. It was before a lot of changes happened in the system. But I think I think a lot of the things that I learned right off the bat still ring true for me at least to this day. And, you know, they use the proverb like, you know, you’re drinking from a fire hose when you first started off medical school. It was totally different than college. I had to relearn how I learn basically.

Pooja: Yeah.

Camden: And one of the biggest parts of that was time management and thinking about how to approach this infinite amount of knowledge that I need to know in a way that was efficient, effective, and also preserved my own mental health.

Pooja: Right, right. And I know I’ve heard the proverb, if you will, of drinking from a fire hose. And truthfully, I think it’s accurate, and I feel like the first couple of weeks can be really overwhelming for a lot of people. And I’m curious for you, were there any surprises that you experienced during those first few weeks?

Camden: Yeah, I think the surprise for me was just… I’m going to extend it out for like the first two months, because the first couple weeks are orientation, they’re taking it easy on you a little bit, and then they’re like, “Oh, hey, like, pedal to the metal. Here’s all this information that you’ve not thought about, about the Krebs cycle and all this other stuff since your, you know, second-year biology course in college.” And what sticks out to me in hindsight is it was a really nice taste of medicine is different, and it’s not college anymore. You’ve got to study differently, and you have to figure out the time management skills, frankly. I know that’s the title of the podcast, but frankly, you have to figure out the time management to be able to internalize this knowledge in an effective, efficient way.

Pooja: Yeah. No, absolutely. I feel like it’s a learning curve for sure. And I think something that I think you’re speaking to is that not every day is going to be a day where you’ve mastered it, but it seems like it is a journey to kind of figure out how exactly to do that.

Camden: There’s a quote that you just triggered in my mind by saying that. It’s from Dr. Glaucomflecken, the, you know, TikTok personality.

Pooja: Yeah.

Camden: And he has a skit that is It applies to residents, but I think it applies just as appropriately to first-year med students and those starting clerkships. It’s a little crass, but basically every day is like, “Did I suck today?” And usually the answer is yes. But did I suck less than yesterday? And that’s the key. Every day you want to leave the hospital being like, “I wasn’t the best, but I did better than yesterday.” And I think that’s a good thing to kind of instill in you, particularly as someone who’s pretty early on in residency.

Pooja: Right. Right. No, absolutely. I completely agree with that, and I feel like I don’t know that quote, but I love Dr. Glaucomflecken. If he ever listens to this, please join our show. But yeah, no, I completely I completely agree. I guess for you, because at this point you’ve gone through a ton of school and you’re going through another transition period because you’re in residency now, looking back, what were some of the mistakes that you made early on when trying to balance studies and life? Was there anything that you feel like you wish you had done differently?

Camden: Yes, there was something I learned very early on. When you enter med school, you’re surrounded by these very smart people who have all had very different experiences than you. Maybe they went to, you know, premier institutions or not premier institutions, who knows. They all have their own study habits. But one mistake I made that I think a lot of folks make is you know, comparing yourself to your peers.

Pooja: Right.

Camden: Particularly when it comes to time management. And like, “Oh, they’re studying all day, every day. Jeez. Like, how do I keep up? How do I how do I match that energy?” And particularly speaking to someone who at that point was, you know, already married and was thinking about starting a family, it’s like, how do I compete for lack of a better term, even though it wasn’t a competitive environment.

Pooja: Yeah, yeah.

Camden: What I realized was, and I think one of the best things in the early years of med school is I treated it like a job. I worked from, you know, 7:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., but once I was done, I was done. And creating those very firm delineations was one of the things I learned, I think I learned it about two months into med school, and I think it made a big difference in my productivity throughout, particularly those first couple years.

Pooja: Got it. So I guess to dig a little bit deeper into that point because I feel like I’ve heard some people do that. And the classmates of mine who had families definitely cited that they were doing that. I’m curious, what did work look like during that 7:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. period? And was that work kind of similar over the years, or did it kind of adapt as your like stage in medical school changed?

Camden: Definitely. I’m going to get to the second part of that first actually, because I think this is what makes time management so dang hard for people in the medical field is that our reality changes like 10 times between M1 and the end of residency. And then you start being a physician, like a an actual attending. And the demands on your time are going to vary completely. The ability of you to structure your own time varies wildly. I know you’re at the tail end of clerkships right now, and you can speak to this very well, and I can speak to in residency, it’s like, I don’t know when I’m getting home. I’m getting home sometime today, or maybe not. And so trying to kind of navigate around that can be can be challenging, but at the same time, I think is why it’s important to build skill sets early on when it comes to time management. So day-to-day is for me, I’ve always tried to prioritize the things that I care most about intellectually early in the morning.

Pooja: Okay.

Camden: So I think it’s important like figure out when you work best. For me, I work best early. You know, by the time it hits 5:00, my brain starts fizzling out. Like, you know, I’m not going to be paying that much attention anymore. So I try to always front-load kind of the goal that I had. And typically, these were mid-term goals. What I mean by that was like shelf exam or, you know, an abstract for a conference, not like day-to-day goals, but like my short, kind of mid-term goals.

Pooja: Mhmm.

Camden: Then focus on the day-to-day. This is listening, you know, if you’re an M1, M2, listening to lectures, you know, catching up on your notes, doing flash cards, completing practice questions. That was kind of like the middle chunk of the day. And then the latter part of the day, when I start to kind of deteriorate in my very precise thinking, I focus on my long-term goals. So this is stuff like applying to residency. So this is being part of student interest groups and dealing with all those emails. This is part of kind of, you know, pursuing my related but outside interests, you know, public service, what not. Kind of save that for the end of the day. And so throughout the day, I simultaneously tried to tackle like day-to-day, month-to-month, year-to-year goals.

Pooja: Yes. Yes. No, I appreciate that because I think something about It’s funny, when I think when people see the episode title, “Time Management,” it’s easy to just think it’s about, oh, finishing things on time. But the truth is that it’s it’s not about that, right? And I think what you’re saying kind of really echoes that it’s not just about being able to, you know, have all the material covered before your exam and be able to meet your requirements. It’s about being able to do that but also go above and beyond and accomplish the other things that are required. Because I think something that’s becoming more common in undergrad and in medical school studies is having other things that you have to be doing in addition to school, kind of all the time.

Camden: Yes. Yes. You hit the nail right on the head there. I totally agree. And every year when I look at new applicants, I was on the admissions board for our med school, and every year I looked at new applicants, I’m like, “God, you’re doing so much. Like, oh my goodness.” Like, it’s incredible what folks were doing. I was like, “How did you manage that in college?” But, you know, congrats to them. And I think it comes down to that sort of time management. And even more than time management, the term I like to use is time prioritization.

Pooja: Yeah. Tell me more about that.

Camden: So you have however many minutes in the day. I actually don’t quite know that. You have to like when I make my to-do list, and I always recommend this to those that I’m mentoring as well, when you make your to-do list, try to prioritize it in some way, shape, or form. One way to prioritize it, like I mentioned earlier, is I actually have a Word document that is like short, long, and day-to-day goals. And then on top of that, like life goals, like, you know, home stuff. And on the short, middle, and long term, I try to prioritize it by what, you know, in that quarter, I kind of do this every 3 months. I re-prioritize what are my actual goals during that time.

So to give you an example, you know, a big part of my life has been research and a big part of my, you know, ideas of getting into residency and a lot of that focused on research. And so working on my paper, even when I was in my clerkship years, my day-to-day was all focused on clerkship. My month-to-month was all focused on shelf exams. But my long-term list of priorities was focused on publishing these papers, continuing to work on my research. So that hour and a half I try to kind of like budget every day was focused on that number one. And then only once I finished that could I move to the next one and the next one and the next one.

Pooja: That makes a lot of sense. And I appreciate you kind of explaining even in almost a visual way, although this is a completely auditory form of media. I wonder if you could elaborate a little bit, how often would you revisit this like Word document that you have? Was it a weekly thing, a monthly thing?

Camden: I would revisit it almost every day, actually, because I would add things to the to-do list. Like I had this like long, it’s the Word document, I still have it actually. I can’t pull it up right now, but it extends pages. And it’s really anytime that I have a thought of, “Oh, I want to work on that,” or, “Oh, I need to do that,” even something very simple, I pop it on the to-do list. Then about once a quarter, so every like 3 months or after any big milestone, I recalibrate.

Pooja: Okay.

Camden: I almost treat it like my finances, where like every quarter you’re like coming back to it and you’re like, where’s my money going? What am I doing? Where am I spending money? Well, money is time and time is money. And so that’s kind of how I treat time management as well.

Pooja: Okay. That makes a lot of sense, and I think it’s actually funny. We’re we’re kind of naturally flowing into techniques and strategies. And I have more questions about that, truthfully. But I want to circle back to what we were talking about in terms of like that transition period and times where, you know, maybe the system that you had wasn’t exactly flushed out yet. Were there any points throughout your training where you felt completely overwhelmed?

Camden: Oh, so many.

Pooja: Right, right.

Camden: So many. I can’t even count it on one hand. There was a ton tons of points.

Pooja: Yeah.

Camden: And I think the best thing you can do, and something in hindsight I’m really proud of myself for doing, probably only because of, you know, my wife and her support network for me was making those times of transition short and short-lived. Because if you let them kind of percolate and make things harder and then things start compounding, it gets a lot harder to get back on your feet.

Pooja: I see. So when you say making the transition period short-lived, how exactly did you go about doing that?

Camden: So let’s take the transition I’m try to think. Try to think of a good example. Let’s do the transition to med school.

Pooja: Sure. Yeah.

Camden: That specific transition. So here you come from college. You’re pre-med. You know how to navigate college. Anyone who’s listening to this, they’re going to get into med school. They’re going to do great. They’re pre-med. They know how to study for college courses, how to write, you know, their essays for college courses, etc., and so forth. But then you transition to med school where like we said earlier, drinking from this fire hose, and suddenly, you can’t just outwork the system. You have to work with the system, and you have to work and be comfortable with not knowing like everything. And that was something that was hard for me. It’s like, “Oh crap, I don’t know every like I don’t know that answer.” And then you freeze up. You’re like, wait, do I not know this? Do I not know that? Like, ah, I need to keep studying all the time. And then you can quickly, you can see how that spirals. And I think we’ve all been in that place where that starts to spiral, you know, when you’re on clerkships and the attending is questioning you and you’re like, “I don’t know.” We all hate saying that. And I think the key thing is to catch it. Be like, “Oh, wait, I don’t know. So how can I prioritize what I’m working on right now to then tackle that?”

And so I think having someone that you can talk to, be like, “I really feel like I’m not, you know, up to snuff. I don’t quite know everything.” And having a sounding board is how I got kind of through those things. So to summarize, having a sounding board, personal, virtual, doesn’t matter, a sounding board to kind of convey your hesitations to is a really important part of that those transition periods.

Pooja: Got it. Okay. And now I also see how your wife plays into it too, because it sounds like she was someone who was your sounding board in a lot of ways.

Camden: Yes.

Pooja: Okay. Got it. That makes sense. And I think something that you said that I think will resonate with a lot of people is realizing that being overwhelmed is not a sign that you’re not prepared, and it’s not a sign that you’re not doing enough. It’s just the nature of what you’re going through, and it is a completely normal thing to have happen. I can tell you that I personally felt overwhelmed so many times. I’m a fourth-year med student now. You would think, you would think that I wouldn’t feel overwhelmed at this point. But unfortunately, it happens, right? I think there’s something nice to be said about I guess making cognitive restructuring to feelings of anxiety and overwhelm. You know? And I’m curious to see if you kind of agree where like if you’re feeling overwhelmed by something, in a way it’s good because you’re not apathetic yet. Like you still care about it.

Camden: I and I don’t think I alluded to this explicitly, but the solution, at least for me personally, to being overwhelmed by information was to flip it and say, “Oh, heck yeah. I have no clue what I’m talking about. Let’s learn it.” And that was like a really big thing. Maybe that’s my inner scientist coming out and whatnot, but like that worked really well during my grad school years, my PhD. It was like, “Oh, I have no clue what’s going on. How about I figure out how to figure out what’s going on? And how about I teach myself to figure out what’s going on?”

Pooja: Yes. Yes. And I will tell you, I mean, listen, I am not I am not a scientist. But I still I still feel like I eventually learned to do that, and I think it ended up making a huge difference for me as well. So it sounds like the two things that really helped you cope with when you were feeling overwhelmed is one, having a sounding board, and two, kind of taking that cognitive restructuring of maybe I don’t know what’s going on, but it is now my personal challenge to figure that out and kind of emerge on the other side victorious, having conquered whatever it is I wasn’t able to do before.

Camden: Yes. What I’ll say about that final point is it’s almost like you gamify the system.

Pooja: Yeah.

Camden: You’re not like I don’t know if anyone in the audience is a video game guy, like, you know, I was back in the day, is like, like, you got to level up. You know, like, and this is your opportunity to pursue some side quests. Maybe your side quest is like, you know, complete this abstract, or your side quest is to join the student group and become, you know, one of the board members for it. Your quest is still the same, getting into residency, become a great physician, become a great doctor, treat, you know, treat humans. But you have all these fun side quests along the way. And I think when you make that mental shift, particularly if you’re able to early on in medical school, it just makes it fun.

Pooja: Yeah. Even in undergrad. Like I feel like there’s so many I feel like even in undergrad, the side quests are definitely more. Like I think there’s so many more extracurriculars that people are doing and are expected to do. So I love that concept of a side quest because I think it’s super important. I wonder kind of transitioning a little bit, did you feel like you had any role models or mentors who helped you understand how to manage your time effectively? Because it sounds like you developed amazing systems for organizing yourself and for coping. I wonder how much of that came from you versus came from people who advised you.

Camden: I’ve had so many amazing mentors over the years. Even though it came after my first few years of med school, one of the best mentors, not one of the best, the best mentor I’ve had in my life academically has been my PhD advisor. And I spent 5 years with him, and it was the a really formative 5 years of my life. And I still work with him to this day. I’m at a completely different institution, hundreds of miles away, and we still communicate on a regular because he was that instrumental to how I think, how I process my time, how I approach problems. And he taught me a lot about time management or at least reinforced a lot of what I thought about time management. And some of the things I articulated earlier kind of get to what he basically instilled in me, which is this idea if you got short, long, medium-term goals, you’ve got 24 hours in the day and you have to prioritize a little bit of each of those.

Pooja: Yes.

Camden: The other mentors I had were actually those above me in med school, the class above me. You start getting, you know, part of student groups, you make friends. I encourage everyone, make friends with those above you because they’re going to say like, “Hey, by the way, this doesn’t really matter. Like the administration really makes you think that this matters for what not or what not like when it comes to the school. Don’t waste your time on that.” Like that helps with the prioritization. So I had a lot of mentors that helped in that regard. The specific techniques, I think, came from self-discovery and from honestly, the internet and podcasts like this, like truly.

Pooja: Yeah. I mean, I think the more resources exist for free, the better, which is why I’m glad that this podcast exists. But yeah, I completely agree with the idea that mentors can come in all shapes and sizes and ages. Like you can have people who are very far their advanced in their career, like your PI was, but you can also have people who are just a year or two above you who very clearly remember what they felt like when they were in your shoes and can kind of anticipate your needs and tell you what you need, what they wish they had heard when they were in that position.

Camden: Oh yeah. And as being early on in residency right now, I am completely relying on those above me to really give me like concrete like, “Is this a really big care or is this less of a care? Like, how much do I need to kind of devote to how much of my time and resources should I devote to different…”

Pooja: Yeah, absolutely. So it sounds like prioritization of time and thinking about how you approach problems are things that you can seek guidance from your mentors and from your role models.

Camden: 100%. And to be open about it. Like ask them directly, like, do I need to care about this? Or like, what would you do in this situation? I think being candid with, once you identify a mentor, you establish a mentorship, be candid with them because that’s going to go a really long way to helping you get the best advice.

Pooja: Yeah. Absolutely. And we are going to be having several episodes in the future that also talk about mentorship as well, but it seems like sometimes mentors are people who are formally assigned to you, but then there are others that you kind of create with time, like someone who you admire who you can just say, “Hey, I would love to meet with you to chat about whatever it is you want to chat about,” and then you kind of continue to seek advice from that person.

Camden: 100%.

Pooja: Absolutely. So, okay. Let’s transition a little bit. We’ve been talking a little bit already about techniques and strategies. And it sounds like from what you described that the Word document that you had was really a technique, a tool, a collection of your thoughts. It was kind of everything almost for helping you during medical school and during your path to medical school, I’m sure, of like balancing everything. Is there anything else that you think helped?

Camden: 100%. So I think in a career like medicine where, like we said earlier, you don’t know what’s going to happen on any given day. You really have one of the most unpredictable schedules. I would argue of pretty much any profession, even when you’re in training. I actually like to take a toolbox approach, which is that you have this toolbox, it’s full of all sorts of different tools, and at different points in your training, you’re going to use different tools to get what you need to get done.

Pooja: Okay.

Camden: So the overall ‘Blueprint’ is oh, to drop the name, but the overall blueprint…

Pooja: Very nice. Very nice. We did not we did not ask you to do that.

Camden: But the overall blueprint, truly, is like, for me, it was like this Word document. Other people it’s their Google calendar, other people, they’re it’s like their mind map, whatever they might use, some app or some resource. That’s your overall blueprint. But then you have this toolbox, which is, okay, I need to get to that point and conquer all those things. And so I need to have little tricks and tips that I can use throughout the process to get there.

Pooja: Yeah.

Camden: I’m happy to talk about some individual ones, or we can save that for later, but kind of let me know your thoughts.

Pooja: No, man. The time is now. Please dig deep. Tell us tell us anything you want us to know.

Camden: Totally. Yeah. I’m going to start off with kind of a silly one, but actually one that is like I’ll call this the hammer in my toolbox because it just gets stuff done quickly. I learned this actually from one of my mentors, actually, in grad school as well. I call it the 5-minute rule. I don’t know if it has a different term, but if I can do something in 5 minutes, do it.

And so what I mean by that is we get peppered with all this information many times a day, emails, texts, all that. I actually I’ve honestly tailored it down to a 3-minute rule, whereas if I get an email that I can just tackle and get done and solve the issue within 3 minutes, I do it right then. I don’t do anything else. I do it right then. If there’s a task around the house, even if it’s laundry or something like that, and I can do it in 3 minutes, you know, all you want to do is go on YouTube and watch YouTube shorts or go on Instagram. No. 3 minutes, do it, and be done. Because then it doesn’t go on the to-do list. Then it’s done, it’s complete, and you can move on, and you have to expend no further mental energy on it.

It’s kind of like all those tech guys, Bill Belichick, if you’re into sports, who wear the same outfit like every single day so they don’t have to think about it. It’s a little bit of that same mindset, which is like limited cognitive capacity. Let me apply it in a very strategic way. I don’t want to be thinking about all my to-do list when I’m trying to focus on my UWorld questions or my lectures. So if I can do it in 5 minutes, get it done. There’s a caveat to that, which is that if you respond to everything within 5 minutes all throughout the day, you never would get anything done out of what you actually needed to get done.

Pooja: Yeah.

Camden: So that’s where you have to the second part of the toolbox is you have a hammer, but you got a little bit of a lock on that hammer where you only use it during set times of the day.

Pooja: Okay.

Camden: Like don’t have your email open all day. Like instead, on your phone, I set it so that every hour that I get, you know, refresh my emails, it’s not constant. Because it’s it allows you then, I’ve got a dedicated hour of thinking, of working, with no distractions.

Pooja: That’s really cool. Wait, how do you how do you do that? How do you set your email so that it’s only at every hour it’ll refresh it for you?

Camden: I just did something when I first got my phone. Maybe it’s just because I have a really old phone. You just set it so that it doesn’t refresh constantly. It only refreshes every hour or so. And if that doesn’t work and you’ve got a new phone that refreshes constantly, I just put it away for an hour and then get my work done and then I give myself 5 minutes to tackle everything that came in and then move on.

Pooja: Got it. Okay. Yeah, that makes sense.

Camden: Exactly. And then you have your… Again, I hope this doesn’t fall flat on anyone who doesn’t really work a lot with their, you know, woodworking and what not.

Pooja: No, yeah. I feel like I feel like you can tell that I don’t because I’m really struggling with my hammer, but I’m I’m with you. I’m with you.

Camden: Then you have your saw. Your saw is your prioritization. You got to cut out things. You have to focus on what really matters. You know, don’t focus on the scrap wood, focus on the main wood. I think I’m taking this analogy probably a little too far.

Pooja: No, I love it. Please keep going.

Camden: But no, that’s a big part of it is like you have to start to prioritize because we all have too much to do on every given day. And so prioritization, which I’ve said probably 10 times at this point, is one of the keys to successful time management.

Pooja: Okay.

Camden: The third tool is your tape measure. And that is the hardest one because it’s all about trying to identify how long you think something will take.

Pooja: Mmm.

Camden: And that’s very, very hard to do. At least I find it very hard to do.

Pooja: Me as well.

Camden: And always overestimate by 20%. That’s just like a rule of thumb I’ve discovered. Like just overestimate by 20% and typically you’re actually going to be about right at that point.

Pooja: Okay.

Camden: And it does two things. One, if you overestimate by 20%, you know that you gave yourself more than enough time and so you better complete it by that timeline. So it puts a timeline on you. And then second, it doesn’t make you feel bad when you don’t quite finish it as soon as you thought.

Pooja: Yeah. I really like that. Okay, so far we’ve talked about the hammer, which is the 5-minute rule, the lock on that hammer, so having the 5-minute rule, but probably don’t spend the entire day doing 5-minute tasks. The saw, cutting things out, and then the tape measure, which is estimating how long, but overestimating by 20%. Is there anything else that you have in this toolbox?

Camden: I don’t have a good tool actually for this one, but it’s truly is and I think this gets to the heart of everything, and if you’re listening, you already have this tool because you are a pre-med or a med student. You have it. It’s just cultivating it. And that’s discipline.

Pooja: Mmm.

Camden: You have to keep to these things. And that is where things where you fall off, is like sometimes discipline fades. I’ve gone through that. We talked about hardships earlier, like hundreds of times. I’m like, “I did not stick at all to what I planned to do today.” Like crap. The key is that it’s discipline, but it’s discipline with grace. Meaning that if you don’t if you fall off the wagon, if you will, when it comes to your time management, the enemy of good is perfect.

Pooja: Mmm.

Camden: I believe that’s the phrase.

Pooja: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, perfect’s the enemy of good. You got it.

Camden: Yeah. And so you’re you’re striking just to be good at time management. If you’re perfect, then you’re probably a robot. So I can’t compete with that.

Pooja: Right. Right, right. It’s not us versus AI yet.

Camden: Soon. I’m in radiology. I can say that. 

Pooja: Okay, maybe I’ll follow up with that with you about that because I have I do have questions about that. Okay, so I’m trying to think. Honestly, I’m trying to stall because I’m trying to think about a tool in your toolbox that would go with discipline with grace because I do think it’s important. The first thing that came to mind was like a chain, but chains don’t exist in toolboxes, do they? That doesn’t make sense.

Camden: Oh. No, I’ve got one. A clamp.

Pooja: Okay.

Camden: Yeah. A clamp.

Pooja: Tell us more. Tell us more.

Camden: A clamp holds or a level, I’ve got it right here. A clamp is something that restricts two things together in the pursuit of a goal, which is a specific cut or specific measurement or a specific, you know, glue them together. So actually, a clamp, I think, is a good parallel because it is literally the structure that holds together all the pieces and parts of your project.

Pooja: Okay. I like that. I really like that. So we have, I’ve been typing this out to keep track for myself, the hammer, the 5-minute rule, the lock, to make sure you’re not doing it all the time, so you’re not just like responding to emails all day. There is the saw to cut things out and prioritize. The tape measure to estimate how long and overestimate by like roughly 20% so that if it does takes you that long, you’re not feeling bad, but you’re also holding yourself accountable. And then, which I think honestly, I’m going to steal that one. I still I’m going to steal all of these, but I feel like that one is the one that I needed to take like yesterday because in my fourth year, I feel like it’s a lot of I’m in like a virtual elective right now, and it’s wonderful because I’m having time to pursue all these other academic interests that I’ve been pushing aside and working on my research, but I am so bad at estimating how long it takes to do things.

And I feel like I really love this idea of 20%. And then the discipline with grace, which is the clamp, the structure that kind of holds everything together. And I think, you know, the clamp might be my favorite tool, not only because we came up with it together, but also because it’s a medical tool too. So I feel like people who don’t necessarily know what’s in a toolbox, like me, will still know. Like I feel like a lot of people in medicine know what a clamp is. So, I love it.

Camden: Pass me the Kelly clamp in surgery.

Pooja: Yeah, yeah. Sure. I love it. Okay. So, with all of this in mind, we talked a lot about prioritizing. So not to hit the hammer on the nail again, but I guess how do you go about prioritizing? Let’s say like if everything felt urgent or important, because I feel like when I was in the beginning of med school, and I’m I think you felt this way too, because we kind of talked about that idea of drinking from a water hose. It kind of feels like everything feels important. How did you go about figuring out what is actually important and what is I know we talked about mentors, but was there anything else that you used to figure that out?

Camden: Yeah, that’s a really, really good question. And it’s not an easy thing to do, and you’re not going to get it right perfectly the first time or the second time, but you’re going to get better each time. And I think and I still I’ve not perfected it. Like I said, the goal of time management should never be perfection, it should be good. I think the thing to do is to take a step this is where you take a step back. And I’m going to use the toolbox analogy here again. You’ve got your blueprints. You’re going to look at your blueprints and you’re going to say, “Okay, this is the building I’m trying to construct. This is the project I’m working on.” What is my end goal?

Well, first of all, foremost, our end goal is to be the best, you know, gosh darn doctors that we can be. But in the interim, there are set criteria we need to hit along the way, check boxes if you will, to get there. Everyone has a circuitous route. There’s no set way of doing that. It’s a very personalized thing here. But what you have to do is you have to not focus on that next exam or the next exam. Like, your first-year med student, I remember I had like back then they had a very traditional schedule. It was like biochem, all the physiology first year, all the pathology second year. What you had to do is step back and be like, “Okay, I have a cardio test in two weeks.” Like that cardio test is just one little part of my end goal, which is getting into residency, which I think is a valid like goal at this point.

Pooja: Yeah.

Camden: And you have to say, “Well, what do I need for residency?” Dealer’s choice. For me, speaking from my own personal experience, I knew that basically my shtick, if you will, for residency and because I’m also interested in it, is research.

Pooja: Yeah.

Camden: So I was like, okay, I need to like that should always be a priority. You know, it’s more important to me than student interest groups. It’s more important to me than, you know, volunteering and all of that. Yeah. Personally, to me, it means more. Like I just I love research. And so that’s what I focused on from the beginning. So you have to take a step back and say, what am I interested in? What is going to be sort of the way that I get to my end goal? And most importantly, what is it I want to do? Because as a pre-med, you basically are told you need to check off boxes. You got to have your community service. You have to have your volunteer. You have to have your, you know, good grades. You have to have your research. Residency is totally different. They want someone who’s going to be a good colleague who cares deeply about what they’re doing. If you care deeply about community service, awesome. Embrace it from day one and make it a priority. You know, like if you care deeply about research, embrace it from day one, make it a priority.

Pooja: Yeah.

Camden: So it’s I think a big problem, I’m speaking a lot here, I know, but a big problem I see in not problem, a big roadblock I see in a lot of the students I mentor is thinking that they need to do it all. No.

Pooja: Yeah.

Camden: You don’t need to do it all. Do what you truly like, truly do what you love because that’s what they’re looking for in residency.

Pooja: Absolutely. Absolutely. And I appreciate that you’ve kind of delineated the difference between the expectations and the goals for pre-meds versus I know there’s no acronym, but I’ll we’ll call them “meds” to make sure and hopefully people who are listening at this point will understand that “meds” does not mean medications. We mean medical students. But regardless, I appreciate that you kind of delineated it because I think something that’s worth kind of talking about a little bit is that when you’re a pre-med and you’re trying to say like, “Oh, I want to be a doctor,” you’re trying to figure out what that means.

So you do a little bit of everything, not to check off a box, but just to explore what it is you like and what your own superpowers are and what your strengths are. And then when you get to medical school, from what you’ve described, you were someone who like probably did a little bit of everything in undergrad and figured out, “I really like research.” And so you decided to take that from a strength to a super strength, right? A superpower almost. And so you made that a big priority as something that you kind of continued. And so I think it helps people understand that the way you’re prioritizing, from what you’re describing, is a little bit of everything to explore, but the purpose of exploration. And then when you get to medical school, still exploration because you’re not going to know exactly what you want to do.

Camden: Oh, of course.

Pooja: But there are things that you know about yourself that you should hold on to when you’re in medical school, and you should continue to develop those strengths as you continue on. Does that sound right to you? Does that sound like an encapsulation of what you’ve kind of talked about?

Camden: That was an awesome summary. And I’m going to summarize it one more time in like one line, which is basically like med school, it’s about capitalizing like finding your superpower. Med school is about finding your superpower. And it’s okay if that takes you a little while, but like just find it because that’s what’s going to prevent you from getting burnt out. It’s like, “Find what you care about.” That’s what med school is about. And then let that carry you forward because then you have to prioritize. The prioritization is, “What am I going to have the most fun doing today?” And then your list is easy.

Pooja: Yeah. No, I am so glad you talked about the superpower thing because I actually said that to a group of I was like helping one of my advisory deans. He had a panel for younger students, and I literally said that exact word that like part of the clerk I was talking about the clerkship years specifically, but I think it applies to med school broadly is about finding your superpower. And I think for pre-meds, it’s exploring what that could possibly look like and kind of going to medical schools during interviews and stuff and being like, “I have a couple things that I really like. We’ll see what happens.”

Camden: And it changes.

Pooja: And then

Camden: It changes all the time.

Pooja: Yeah.

Camden: It changes all the time. I came in and I was like, “I’m going to do neurosurgery. I’m like I’ve done all this neuroscience research. I’m doing neurosurgery.” And then I got to like my neurology and neurosurgery rotations. I was like, “Nah. Like, no, I’m not doing that.

Pooja: I was a little curious about because I remember when I was reading about you in your bio, like, oh, it was neurology to interventional radiology. So I was curious what made that shift, and it sounds like not to deviate too much from the subject here, but it sounds like clerkships are kind of what did that for you.

Camden: No one should make any decision about what they want to go into until they’ve started their clerkships.

Pooja: 100%. Okay. Amazing. So, let’s talk a little bit about mindset. So you talked about how finding your superpower is important to prevent burnout. Is that something that you felt like happened for you? Like that was like research is something that fueled you a little bit as you kind of progressed through medical school?

Camden: Yeah, 100%. So like you will feel burnt out during medical school. Everyone will. It’s a very natural process, and I think it doesn’t just apply to medicine, it applies to any career, any educational thing. Like it’s it’s part of life. One thing I always like to think about is that med school just like everything else is sinusoidal. You’ve got low periods, you’ve got high periods. You got low periods. Those low periods are usually times with burnout, and then you have to have some way of getting back to the high periods and then kind of come back down. Research and family, personally, was what sort of was like the line through that like if I’ve got my sinusoidal graph, it’s like the line straight through. You know, it’s the x-axis that kind of moves you and keeps you moving forward along your trajectory even when other things are like, “Oh, that didn’t go as planned.” So I think so you need to find your superpower, but you also need to find, you know, even Superman had a kryptonite. You need to find someone that’s going to help treat that kryptonite or something.

Pooja: Lois Lane or whatever. Yeah, you know, Superman has a dog, too. I don’t know. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, I feel like I think the new Superman has Superman with the dog, so or maybe, I don’t know. I don’t remember. But some support network, it seems, is important, or support thing or even for some people, like an art form, you know? Like a hobby.

Camden: Yeah. Some thing that gets you outside, you know, gets you being creative or something that, you know, they always make the joke, even though it’s been debunked of, you know, you’ve got your right brain and your left brain. You have your logical brain, and then you have your artistic brain. That’s been debunked, but in general, find something that is in many ways antithetical to your studying all day brain. You know, and that’s usually creativity. And research for me was that creativity.

Pooja: I think research is really creative, and I think people kind of undersell that. Like research does seem technical in a lot of ways, but like to be able to come up with a whole protocol for something based on a question that you have, that involves a lot of creativity.

Camden: Yeah, it’s like making your own Lego set.

Pooja: I love that. I love that. I guess one thing I want to ask you about because you already kind of alluded to the fact that you’ve been burnt out before. How did you navigate that? And during that period of burnout, I guess tell us again as much detail as you feel comfortable with, but how did you kind of keep going when you were burnt out and stay productive and continuing along your training?

Camden: Yeah, so as I kind of was that first of all, it’s a really great question, and I think it’s a very intimate question for anyone listening. Everyone experiences things in different ways. So what I’m saying is purely just my own kind of thinking about this from a very conceptual standpoint in retrospect in many ways is that we have that sinusoidal curve of life, if you will, studies, particularly during medical school, where it’s like, I did great on an exam. Oh, I did terrible on an exam. Oh, now I’m kind of like I feel terrible. I’m kind of burnt out.

Pooja: Yeah.

Camden: And like, I just don’t have the motivation. All I want to do, I actually learned this from a med student today, citing my age here, but someone said something about like couch rot, like where you like sit on your phone and you like just watch your phone all day. And like they’re like, “That’s all I want to do.” I’m like, maybe that’s going to like and it’s like, yeah, that’s a little bit of a sign of burnout that you’re kind of like seeking other dopamine hits if you will. But I think the best thing to do is remember that perfect is the enemy of good, and time management is the goal is good.

So if you just get one task done, okay. It’s a little bit of the one foot in front of the other, which is not meant at all to take away from the burden that kind of these situations can put people in. But for me personally, it was just be like, the last thing I want to do is this one thing, but it’s number one on my priority list for my daily to-do list. Let’s pull up the Word document. I’m going to do that. Okay. Let’s do another one. Okay, another one. You know, you’re like kind of digging yourself a little bit out of a out of a ditch. And I think it goes a really long way towards eventually getting you back to where you need to be.

Pooja: Yeah. No, I completely agree with that, and I think it makes a lot of sense. I think the one foot in front of the other is an excellent way to approach it because I feel like in terms of burnout, from what I’ve experienced and from what I’ve heard, I think the only way out is really through and being able to kind of figure out ways to recover. So I guess building on that idea, did you do anything specific that helped you recover?

Camden: Yeah, I’m glad you brought that up because we actually haven’t talked about the third part of my time prioritization or the fourth part actually, which is life outside of medicine.

Pooja: Yes, yes.

Camden: And I’ll take earlier on in my medical career, um, you know, before my wife and kids and all of that is for me, it’s finding that outlet that you mentioned earlier is, you know what, part of your to-do list is to for me, was get outside. Like literally written on my Word document, like go outside.

So I’d be like, okay, I don’t want to study. Like, I will go outside. And then you go outside and you’re like, “Oh, hey, look at this. I found a new like hiking trail. Cool. Okay. Let’s go explore that.” And the next thing you know, you’ve totally used the rest of your day exploring that. But in that in that time, you’ve kind of rejuvenated a little bit.

Pooja: Yeah.

Camden: You’ve gotten out of the place that you’re studying all day. I think something I tell all of my students, when you’re navigating burnout, change environment.

Pooja: Mmm.

Camden: Get out of your apartment. Get out of the school library. Do something that moves you to a new location and prioritize something completely different on your to-do list for time prioritization. Prioritize something outside of medicine, outside of work.

Pooja: Mmm. I like that. So there’s there’s sort of two it’s like a two-part recipe almost. So getting one foot in front of the other, doing one task at a time, maybe starting with the low hanging fruit first, sending the email you don’t want to send, whatever it might be, but also having this recovery kind of mindset and doing things that fill your cup outside of medicine.

Camden: Yeah. Again, if you haven’t discovered it by now, I’m a person who loves analogies, and my analogy for this

Pooja: I love it. I’m obsessed with it. I really am. This is so iconic.

Camden: We’re athletes. We’re just really stationary athletes in medicine.

Pooja: Don’t tell any orthopedic surgeons you said that.

Camden: You don’t train for a marathon every single day. You got to have like, you got to take rest days. And here, you don’t study every single day. All this time prioritization and time management, no. Like, you need to prioritize your recovery days. They’re just as important as your exertion days. And so you have to prioritize that. And I think it’s really easy to fall in the trap where those get left to the side, which also actually, scientifically has been shown that also happens to athletes.

Pooja: It’s good to know. I didn’t know that happened to athletes. But it makes sense. Like I feel like medical school and athletic training, sort of similar to the analogy that you said, they’re intense periods of time where you’re kind of just building like muscles or for us, it’s skill sets and just using them over and over and over again. And I feel like when you’re like I really am good about to expose how little I know about sports, but when you are throwing a ball in whatever sport, there’s like a skill set that’s kind of associated with that with your aim, with how hard you’re going to throw it, all of that. And the best way to get good at it is to get your reps in.

And I think a big thing of medicine is just getting your reps in, whether it’s practice problems, whether it’s flash cards, whether it’s actual patients, and when you when you start seeing patients. And so I think there’s a lot of parallels there that I don’t think I don’t think it could be said enough.

Camden: 100%. I totally agree.

Pooja: Yeah. So, I guess for you, and we talked about like one foot at a time and it sounds like that required a lot of motivation from you. Where did that motivation kind of come from?

Camden: For me, it wasn’t motivation. Like when you’re in kind of the depths of burnout, it’s not motivation. It’s just, “Okay, I’ve like maybe it’s motivation in some way, shape, or form, but it’s it’s more like a duty,” is, you know, you don’t know at that point necessarily what your end goal is. And you have some idealistic, you know, vision of where you want to be. For me, it was like, “I’m going to get into residency in one of the hardest specialties.” Sure. Okay, fine. Like, I’m completely burnt out. Last thing I want to do is study. I, you know, don’t feel like I’m doing well. And then you take a step back and you’re like, okay, well, let’s compartmentalize. And let’s just say I can’t do anything about that right now. But what I can do something about is, you know, sending that email.

Pooja: Yeah.

Camden: Doing the laundry, maybe cleaning the kitchen. Like it’s, you know, find that one thing that you’re like, this is the thing that I am most willing to do out of all the things I don’t want to do. And then you kind of claw your way back out of that. And eventually, and again, you know, if you need help as well, you know, seek that through resources. But like in a very conceptual sense, that kind of gets you up every rung of the ladder all the way back to the roof where you were working before.

Pooja: Yeah. No, I completely agree with that, and I think it makes a lot of sense. I think the one foot in front of the other is an excellent way to approach it because I feel like in terms of motivation, what you’ve described. And the reason for that is because I think that at any moment, and I think something this is something that med students forget all the time and undergrad students forget all the time. But people can drop out whenever they want, but you choose not to. And that is a factor of motivation. And you for you, it sounds like it’s this sense of duty and it’s this sense of I want to be a doctor, I want to accomplish my goal. That in itself is a motivation. And for you, it sounds like it’s so intrinsically a part of you that like you don’t even see it that way, you know?

Camden: Touche. Touche. Yeah, no. You can convince me. Yeah. Yeah.

Pooja: Yeah. So I feel like for people who are listening to this, like even if you feel like you’re burnt out right now, the fact that you’ve made it to this point in this podcast means that you are a highly, highly motivated person. And just because you’re not able to do as much as what you imagine a highly motivated person is doing doesn’t mean that your motivation is gone because burnout and motivation, I think, are different. They’re different concepts.

Camden: Totally. And for anyone who’s listening again, as with everything in life, apply the 120% rule that I mentioned earlier, is whatever you think that other people are doing, like they’re not. It doesn’t quite apply there. But like basically like whatever you think you’re able to do, say that’s 120% and then knock yourself down to 100%. So it’s almost like an 80% or it’s like the inverse of the 120% rule, which is like estimate what you’re able to do and then say, “Okay, I’m not going to actually be able to do all that.” That is another really important part of the this will be the chisel in the toolbox.

Pooja: Okay. I’m writing another tool to the toolbox. Love it.

Camden: Yeah, which is basically like whatever you think you’re going to do during the day, I still fall into this all the time. I fall into this probably once a week, which is, “Oh, I want to do all these things this weekend on my weekend off. Am I actually going to get all these things done?” No. There’s not a way.

Pooja: I think that all the time. Yeah.

Camden: Yeah, exactly. So cut it down 80% or even cut it down 70%. That is what you’re going to get done, and then when you reach that 70%, you’re like, “Oh, I did everything I planned.” And that helps motivation and that helps prevent burnout.

Pooja: So just to clarify, are you cutting it down to 80% or 70% or are you cutting 80%?

Camden: Cutting it down. So like if I say

Pooja: I can even use this own weekend for example is we’re expecting a new baby any day now and…

Pooja: Oh, congratulations. That’s so exciting.

Camden: And I’m like, “I need to do so much before then.” Like maybe I’m nesting. I’m not quite sure. But like there’s so many projects around the house and, you know, earlier today actually, before this meeting, I sat myself down during lunch and I was like, here’s my to-do list. Let’s cut out I had 20 things and I cut out 5 things. I said, those are not on the to-do list because this is what I’m going to get done. Aspirational versus reality. Right?

Pooja: Right. No, that makes sense. There was there was a quote a fourth-year student had said when I was in an interview applying for a position, and he had said, “My eyes are bigger than my stomach.” And I think that applies to a lot of us because a lot of us, like I said, highly motivated, wanting to do a lot of things. Sometimes you kind of bite off more than you could chew when you make your to-do list. And so I appreciate the addition. I think the chisel to the toolbox, it’s a due edition. I like it.

Camden: Yeah.

Pooja: Okay. So, back to what we were talking about when we’re talking about like motivation and burnout, the last thing that I kind of wanted to touch in there is you and you alluded to it a little bit when you were talking about how interventional radiology is one of the more competitive specialties to match into. But you did it. Congrats. But it sounds like there was a lot of pressure associated with that.

Camden: Yeah, but as with all things that are pressure, 90% of that pressure is self-imposed pressure.

Pooja: Yeah.

Camden: Even if it’s extrinsic pressure, you know, I have colleagues who are like their parents really want them to become a cardiologist or something. I’m lucky. I come from a family with no doctors, so they have no clue even what interventional radiology is.

Pooja: Me as well. Yeah.

Camden: But, even if it’s external pressure, it’s still internal pressure that is the guiding force here. And so it’s recognizing that it’s internal pressure and that no one will judge you differently depending on whatever your path takes you. And so I think it’s it’s more of like realizing that it’s you pressuring yourself to like try to get into be a neurosurgeon. Like you have to ask yourself why? Why do I want to do that? Do I want to do it for the prestige? Okay, if that’s your thing, fine. Do I want to do it? Like, I may be argue against that, but if that’s your thing, sure. If you want to do it because you find it awesome, heck yeah. And then if you want to do it because you think it’s a good lifestyle, okay, if that’s, you know, floats your fancy, great. Do that too. But the big thing is that like you need to recognize that the pressure to get into a certain specialty is 99% internal.

Pooja: Mmm. Okay. That makes a lot of sense.

Camden: Does that make sense?

Pooja: It does. It does make sense. Like I think by realizing that the pressure that you’re experiencing is pressure that’s internal, it in a way releases it a little bit because it kind of helps you understand like sort of when you were talking about whether or not something is important, 90% of that pressure, the fact that it’s self-imposed means you can remove it or at least parts of it anytime you like.

Camden: Yep. The only person judging yourself is you.

Pooja: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. No, that is a real that’s real. That’s real. I guess in that same vein, let’s take that remaining 10% or even let’s take that 90% and people say like, okay, fine, I get it, 90% of it is self-imposed. I still want to have there’s still some things that they care about. Like let’s say for example, if there’s choosing residency and they either care about like the specialty or they care about the prestige of the institution that they go to or whatever it is that is important to them, if you felt any of that, how did you handle that while maintaining like personal time and maintaining the things that are not within your goal? Like for example, because we kind of talked about how you were interested, like your primary goal for a long time was residency and then outside of that was research, but you also had your family and like your budding family for some time. How did you balance both of those things?

Camden: Yeah, that’s again, totally individual and personal question. But for me, what I frankly, the biggest determinator of where I did my away rotations and where I and my ranking list was not medicine-related. That played a role.

Pooja: Okay.

Camden: But and even in my letter to the program director when I said, “Hey, I want to go here,” one of the primary reasons was family. It was part of like residency’s hard. I knew it. I knew it was going to be here for a long time. I wanted to be somewhat close to my support network as close as, you know, we could be. And the priority really became my family at that point, my kind of budding family.

Pooja: Yeah. No, that makes a lot of sense. And I appreciate you being honest about that.

Camden: I remember I won’t say any names or anything, but I remember I was interviewing at a program. I was like one of my questions during interviews was like, “Hey, anyone have kids?” At this point I had two kids and I knew, you know, knew I had another one on the way and they were like, “Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, one of our attending has a kid.” And I was like, okay, you’re not the program for me. So you have to again, it all comes back to prioritization. Figure out what it is that you want and go for it. That said, my decision to kind of rank programs the way I did also had an aspect of prestige, had research. Prestige was actually lower than I initially thought it would be. It really was research like family, research, clinical training, like, am I going to be a good clinician coming out of here? And then so on and so forth.

Pooja: Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. No, absolutely. I think I appreciate your honesty about that. 

Camden: Don’t tell my program. I’m kidding. 

Pooja: No. I mean, it’s okay. No, but it’s helpful to know like whatever your priorities are, that’s what you should hold on to and be mindful of that. We already started talking about like making time for the things that are outside of medical school. Did you while you were again, you were wearing so many hats throughout all of your training, I’m sure. But did you make time for like the hobbies you had? I know you mentioned that you went on hikes and stuff. Did you still like continue to do that throughout medical school?

Camden: Yeah, 100%. This probably only makes context once I say and remind that I grew up in, you know, in Alaska. So outdoors is very important to me. So I actually would go fishing probably twice to 3 times a week after work in the evenings. I luckily lived right near kind of to a body of water that I could fish in. So I prioritized that. That was my, you know, mental health break at the end of the day.

Pooja: Whoa, that’s cool.

Camden: It’s also where I studied for Step 1. I just sat outside in the middle of the woods with First Aid.

Pooja: Are you serious? That is so sick. That is so sick. Wow. Okay.

Camden: Yeah, I got tendonitis from tennis elbow from holding that big old book the entire time.

Pooja: Oh my god.

Camden: But yeah, no, so I did. short answer is yeah, 100%.

Pooja: Yeah.

Camden: It doesn’t need to be a lot. Once kids came along, that was my new hobby.

Pooja: You made yourself hobbies. Yeah. And I The reason I bring up the family part and kids so much for anyone who’s listening is…

Pooja: Please do. Please do. 

Camden: The reason I bring it up is I think there’s actually a lot of folks out there, particularly they’re in national medical schools and maybe someone who took more circuitous routes uh in the medical education that do have kids. And I personally had no role models when it came to having kids in med school and beyond and then in residency. And so like it’s it’s hard, but like it’s really important that you know that other folks do it and you can do it. That’s my little schtick on that.

Pooja: No, I mean, I think something else is that there are probably a lot of people, and I’ll confess even myself who come across that question a lot. Like when you’re in medical school, a lot of times you’re like even if you go through the straight most straightforward path, which is like one of those 7-year combined programs, no gap year, and then you go straight to residency, you still are in your 20s and late 20s a lot of times where your peers are getting married, having children, or like people you grew up with are doing those things. And so that question comes up. And so I personally appreciate that you’re bringing it up because I feel like it’s helpful for people who are on the fence about it to hear that, okay, you can have it all almost, which is go to a competitive residency, be able to balance research, and still have a family.

Camden: The best piece of advice I got on that, I don’t want to get us too off topic, but it was from my advisor, my mentor for my PI in grad school. When I told him, I was like, “Man, I’m so overwhelmed, but I also want to start a family.” And he I remember him telling me, “There’s no good time to have kids. There’s no good time to get married. Just do it. Wing it. See what happens.”

Pooja: That’s what I’ve been told too, truthfully. That’s kind of the advice that I’ve gotten as well. Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. Couldn’t agree more. I think another thing that I want to ask you, and again, this is probably going to be another I told I told you before we recorded that this is going to be a personal episode, so I’m living up to the promise. Is there anything that you wish you had prioritized more outside of academics looking back?

Camden: That’s a very good question. Give me give me a second just to think on it. Yeah. And I say yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I feel this honestly every day is I wish I’d prioritized more life outside of medicine, not in like partying it up and go out and all that, but like I still like during M3, like I didn’t get to see my new daughter a lot because basically I stayed at the hospital from sundown till sunup so that I could study and do well on shelves and what not and work… that’s what you sign up for though.

So that’s why I don’t necessarily say I would do it differently because it got to me got me to where I am. But I think it’s also like it’s it’s really hard to balance those two. Like I wish I’d, you know, parents get older, grandparents get older. You know, I wish I’d prioritized, you know, spending more time with a lot of those folks. But at the same time, I think it’s just a I think something that a lot of folks in their mid-20s, early 30s that as I say, I’m sounding an old man here, but back in my day. No, but like, you realize like these are the times that you’re supposed to be exhausted and feel like you’re not going to be able to do it all. Like that’s that’s generational. That’s always how it is.

Pooja: Yeah.

Camden: And it’s okay that you missed, you know, your cousin’s wedding or, you know, you didn’t get to see your, you know, grandparents for that particular time or your parents. So like I regret it, but at the same time, I wouldn’t do it differently because I know what I did got me to where I am. So it’s like a balance between, you know, you this gets back to time management, prioritization. The biggest and the most important thing is that long-term goal. And that’s why it’s the first thing I do every morning. And so even though you do have to make sacrifices to get there, you don’t want to sacrifice everything. And I probably wouldn’t do it any differently, but there are times where I’m like, man, you know, I wish I had spent more time, you know, when my daughter was two at home, you know, getting to see her, you know, grow up. But that’s kind of how it is.

Pooja: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. No, I think everyone would say that too. I Yeah, I think so. I think everybody has some shape or form of spending more time with certain people in my life. And I do think that thinking back and thinking on your response, I do think, this is kind of me thinking out loud at this point, but I think we should probably have another episode about like parenthood and navigating parenthood at various stages in residency because it goes hand-in-hand with time management in a lot of ways, but there are different things about it because also like, not to say the elephant in the room, but like you have a family that is taking care of your children while you’re in the hospital and like other people may not have that circumstance. And like you weren’t pregnant when you were raising your children. And so I think, you know, we this is something to flesh out more and if anybody who’s listening has interest in hearing more about it, like let us know and we’ll we’ll find someone to talk about it, to talk about every aspect of it.

Camden: I think 100% and I think the most important thing would be, you know, a mom and a dad because I see my colleagues, you know, who are very pregnant on the wards. We’re lucky to be an institution that provides really generous maternity leave and paternity leave, but still it’s like I could not have done what I did without the help of my in-laws and, you know, my wife who also works, you know, full time. But, yeah, so again, it gives back to support network is everything.

Pooja: Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. Okay. So, let’s transition to our final segment now, which is about advice for current and future students, which is so funny as a segment because I’m kind of like, that’s what this entire episode is

Camden: But well no, this entire episode’s more just like a, you know, a whole bunch of thoughts in a row.

Pooja: Right, right. A word vomit about the toolbox that is time management. Although I will we’ll be doing a takeaway soon and I will hash out every single tool because I do love that. And if there’s a way, I know we can’t really patent a conversation, but like I would patent that because I think it’s I think it’s brilliant. That’s amazing. But I guess if you were to take one piece of advice that you want to give, I know you’ve had extensive experience mentoring students, so definitely share if there’s one piece of advice that you constantly give people. But to someone who is struggling to balance studies and personal life, if they are new, and I think my initial question was about to a new med student, but I think it kind of can apply to anybody who’s new at something, whether it’s new to undergrad, new to like pre-clinical, clinical, or residency or whatever. But anyone who’s new that’s struggling that adjustment of balancing what they’re doing with their personal life.

Camden: Yeah. Yeah. Let me sit on that real quick because there’s there’s so many options.

Pooja: I know. I also asked you like a super long question.

Camden: So it hits on a couple of things we talked about. And I think the biggest thing is take what you want to do, whatever time on it is. If it’s today, if it’s in the next week, if it’s in the next month, if it’s in the next year, if it’s the next 10 years. Whatever you want to do, write it out. And then cross out 20% of it because you’re only going to get 80% of it done. And I mean that truly, and it relaxes you. You’re like, “Oh, I don’t have to do it all.”

Pooja: Right.

Camden: So if you’ve got 10 things you want to do today, okay, write one through 10, knock them out. Oh, you get to eight, kind of knackered, just tired, stop. You feel good, keep going. Like you can always add more to it. But I really, yeah, actually after talking it out loud with you for a little bit, like I said, you need a sounding board to figure this stuff out. And right now, I like this podcast because you’ve kind of been a sounding board for me to think retrospectively about a lot of this stuff is like, yeah, cut out 20% of what you think you’re capable of doing because we’re all capable of anything, but you can’t be capable of everything every day.

And so cut out 20% and just knock out the rest of it. And then the rest of the time is now kind of for family and friends. And then to piggyback off that, the other thing is for me, and if you’re an early med student, try this out is treat med school like a job, a really low-paying, arguably negatively paying job, negatively, I was going to say, yeah, like, and just you could study 24 hours a day for 10 years, you still won’t know it all. Instead, treat it like a job, and when that job is done, you’re done. Go home, you know, have a tall glass of water and, you know, get your exercise in and call it a day.

Pooja: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You clock in, you clock out in a way.

Camden: Yeah. Which is antithetical to like 99% of us who are in med school. But you have to shift that mentality that it is a job, very first low-paying job, but you clock in, you clock out, and when you clock out, you’re done, as much as you’re able to.

Pooja: Right. Right. It’s interesting because like I’ve heard so much, and I’m curious to see if you feel the same way is that residency feels a lot better than medical school. And a lot of people have kind of said that residency feels a lot better because they feel like they’re just doing their job and they’re focusing on being good at their job, but they’re not kind of focusing on everything else that’s associated with like climbing the ladder, trying to impress people, getting letters of rec, all of that stuff. And I think, obviously, you know, everyone in residency is a different, you know, circumstance. If you’re trying to go for fellowship or whatever, like it isn’t always there, but it’s definitely less in residency than it was in medical school. I’m curious now that you’re talking about it because you in a way are also my sounding board. I’m wondering if it’s because you literally clock in and clock out of residency versus in medical school that structure isn’t there for you. Does that sound like right to you?

Camden: Like 50% right. Yeah, because you do clock in and clock out.

Pooja: What am I missing?

Camden: The biggest thing honestly for residency for me is like, particularly as someone, I don’t have a fellowship. I’ve already I’m in an integrated track. There is no more fellowship.

Pooja: Got it.

Camden: Like it’s a straight through and then I’m an attending. Like you never stop wanting to impress someone, but in med school, there’s that undercurrent of like, crap, I have to impress people. I need that letter of rec. I need this. Like and that sometimes gets in the way of learning, I’ve seen in a lot of my students. They’re so focused on performing that they get rid of learning. And something that I’ve already enjoyed about residency is that I’ve been able to flip that and I’m here to learn to be the best dang doctor I possibly can be. And of course, I’m going to do a good job, but I’m not there to try to impress someone. I’m there to learn and I’m there to be good and to do good. And if I impress them along the way, great.

But like the long-term goal that I mentioned throughout this entire podcast, that now shifts really to I don’t want to just get in somewhere. It shifts to I want to be the best doctor I could possibly be. And that’s a cool shift, and I think that’s why residency is so much more pleasant because frankly, it’s way the heck more pleasant than med school. Maybe it’s just the specialty I’m in, but like it’s really, really pleasant because you’re A, doing something that you know you like. B, no longer feel that innate desire of I am so low on the totem pole that like the big thing I did today was get a fax from the outpatient hospital and like get that information to add to rounds. Like, yeah, like that was always like a med student thing um at the hospital I was at because it was like a more rural community hospital. Instead, it’s focusing on just learning.

Pooja: Yeah. Thank you for clarifying.

Camden: Does that make sense?

Pooja: It does. And I appreciate you correcting me because I feel like I’m only saying what I have heard from the grapevine. I’ve never experienced residency myself.

Camden: It’s awesome.

Pooja: I mean, hopefully I will, you know, hopefully in a year from now I’ll be like in it. But I appreciate you clarifying that because I think it provides some more insight. So, again, final questions, I promise. If a student could only adopt one time management habit that would make the biggest impact, what should it be? And I think I have a feeling of what you’re going to say, but I’m curious about what would be the one thing you think people should do?

Camden: It sounds silly, but it makes the world of difference is the 5-minute rule.

Pooja: Love it.

Camden: It’s huge. Like I cannot tell you how much of a difference and I think there’s actually a book written on it because the person who taught me it mentioned a book about like the 5-minute rule for getting tasks done. But it gets rid of all of the noise so that when you’re working on what you want to work on, that’s all you’re working on. So dedicated time to do stuff, but if you see something you can knock out quick, just do it.

Pooja: I’m looking it up. There is a book. The one that I’m seeing on Google is written by Rory J. Aplanalp.

Camden: Yeah, open I don’t know yeah. Yeah. But yeah. The 5-Minute Rule to Greatness. No, this is exactly the book. The 5-Minute Rule Technique. Tell yourself you’ll only work on a task for a brief 5-minute period, set a time, well, they’re a little bit more vigorous about it than I am. Set a timer for 5 minutes, do it, and then when it goes off, then you’re done.

Pooja: Sure. Okay. There you have it. I also looked up something earlier. There are 1,440 minutes in a day, if I did it if I remember that correctly. So it sounds like for you, if there are five of those 1,440 that people can take, then to do a task and just get it out of the way, that should be it. And that’s a good takeaway. Okay, good to know. Are there any misconceptions about medical workload and personal life balance that you would like to take this forum here and now uh to clear up?

Camden: Yes. I’m going to again come at it from the perspective of a dad and family. I know I’ve harped on that, but it’s a very big part of my persona right now.

Pooja: No, as it should be.

Camden: Is that you can do all of that. I know like male, female, no matter what, you can do it. One of my colleagues in med school was a single mom of two kids at that point and crushed it. And she did it through really good time management.

Pooja: Yeah.

Camden: And so like, if you’re able to prioritize, then you can, but I’m always against slowing down life for like medicine to an aggressive degree. Like it’s okay to like it delays it a little bit, of course. Our careers are here to allow us to give back to humanity, but at the same time, we cannot let it take the humanity from us. And so like, you know, there’s never a good time to, you know, start that startup, to, you know, have the family or to, you know, hike Mount Kilimanjaro, whatever it is. Like whatever your passion is, that should go on that to-do list. That should go on that Word document, and that should not be at the bottom of it. It should be near the top. And having that goal there then says, “I am going to work towards that.” For me, residency, family. Like those were the two things at the top of my to-do list, for my long-term goals throughout all of med school. And I encourage those that are listening to find your own goals to put at the top of that to-do list because that’s what motivates you every day.

Pooja: Yeah. Absolutely. Like almost like a reason to get up every day.

Camden: Yeah.

Pooja: Yeah. Amazing. Looking back, it sounds like I think I… you know what, I’m not even going to bother asking you because I know the answer because you’ve already described it, but it’s just and correct me if I’m wrong, the strategies or habits that you still use today that you developed. And to me it sounds like the Word document is something you use all the time, the tools in that toolbox that we talked about, and this is a really great way to do the recap, but the hammer, which is our 5-minute rule, which we now found out is in a book by Mr. Aplanalp, if I’m remembering correctly, and the lock to make sure you’re doing it enough.

So like not doing the 5-minute rule every single minute of the day. So out of that 1,440 minutes in a day, you’re not spending all of them or a significant number of them and using this 5-minute rule. But the saw to help cut things out, the tape measure to estimate how long something’s going to take but overestimate by 20% and kind of operate and schedule based on that overestimated number, the clamp that kind of allows you to hold things together but also allows you to loosen up the grip a little bit when as and when you need to. And then our final addition, which was the chisel, which is the way to kind of if you’re looking at a to-do list for the day, cutting it down to 70% to 80% and being proud of what that 70% to 80% was so that you can take the rest of your time and just like be with your family, be with your loved ones, do the things that fill your cup outside of medicine. Is there anything else, Camden, that you feel like was a takeaway for you from this episode?

Camden: You just summarize things wonderfully.

Pooja: Thank you.

Camden: No, like truly, that was that was really great. The only other takeaway, it’s like I said earlier, it’s really fun having a sounding board. It’s been a long time since I’ve thought about, you apply them every day, but actually thinking like conceptually about some of these things that you use is, the other takeaway I have is having a sounding board, and that sounding board can be, you know, a hiking trail, it can be water, it can be whatever, it can be, you know, a loved one or a friend or a sibling, whatever it is.

Pooja: Like your podcast co-host, who knows?

Camden: Yeah, exactly. Having a sounding board, I think is really helpful because everything we talked about today is very malleable and it will change day to day. Try not to let it change minute to minute, but, you know, but it’s a dynamic process and so you want to be able to adapt and pull out the different tools when you need it.

Pooja: Absolutely. Absolutely. Okay. Thank you. Thank you for that. Thank you so much for joining us. And to our listeners, thank you for listening. We have several episodes planned out. Including episodes about interviews, including episodes about the mental and emotional side of pursuing a career in medicine. I think what I want to get, what I want all of my listeners and for all of you to kind of take away is that we’re all in this together, and the feelings that you feel, whether it be burnout, whether it be overwhelm, whether it be anxiety of what’s to come ahead, it is something that we’ve all experienced, and having a network, having people, and having resources like this to lean on is kind of what it’s all about. So thank you all for listening to Pursuit of Practice brought to you by Blueprint, and thank you again, Camden, for being an amazing, amazing guest today.

Camden: Oh, it’s my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.

Pooja: All right. See you guys next time.

This is a podcast created by physicians and medical educators, but is in no way to be construed as medical advice. All of the opinions shared are those of individual people and are not reflective of their associated institutions or of Blueprint Test Prep.

That’s a wrap on this episode of Pursuit of Practice. Remember, you’re not in this alone. Head to blueprintprep.com for MCAT prep courses, board exam prep, free resources, and more to support every stage of your journey to and through medical school.

Pooja: I remember at the time I was very rigid on what I thought I wanted to do, and then I took some time away from the world of research that I was in, in undergrad, and I realized, yeah, I do want to do other things. And I think that time was essential for me because it allowed me to kind of enter medical school with a way more open mind.

Casey: Absolutely like the emotional maturity that sometimes just comes with time and more experience. And so if you are taking a gap year for that reason, I think it doesn’t even need to be more shadowing or volunteering or clinical things, it can be something traveling abroad or something like that. It doesn’t even have to be medicine related. It’s just more of, let me get more life experience and street smarts. That can be really helpful and just also help make you more adaptable.

Pooja: The path to becoming a doctor is a whole range of things: exciting, confusing, anxiety-inducing, and gratifying, probably all at the same time. And the truth is that no matter how isolating it may feel, you’re not in it alone. Welcome to Pursuit of Practice, your go-to space for expert advice, real stories, and the kind of support that shows you what trusting the process actually looks like.

Hi everyone and welcome back to Pursuit of Practice. Today we’re talking to you about gap years, the decision to take one, and the potential for moments that challenge you, teach you, and shape your path in medicine. Today I’m joined by Casey, who has taken gap years both before and during medical school. She’ll share the choices she made, the surprises she encountered, the lessons she learned, and her advice for everyone listening. Whether you’re thinking about a gap year before med school, considering one during your training, or just curious about how a pause can fuel personal and professional growth, today’s conversation is packed with insights drawn from real experiences.

Now, without further ado, let me introduce our co-host this week, Casey Kuka. Casey has worked as a peer tutor in science, math, and Spanish for over a decade. She has also been a tutor and instructor with Blueprint since 2020, and her favorite part about tutoring is the opportunity it allows her to get to know her students as individuals and strategize ways to best help turn their weaknesses into strengths. She recently completed her third year of medical school at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland and has spent the last year in Philly as a Benjamin Fox Orthopedic Research Fellow before her fourth year of medical school. Her friends would describe her as adventurous, disciplined, and whimsical, and in her spare time, she can be found rock climbing, trail running, or planning her next travel adventure. Casey, thank you so much for joining us.

Casey: Thanks for having me. I’m super excited to be here.

Pooja: Yeah, we’re excited to have you. So today we’re going to start by looking at what people ask on Reddit about gap years. All right? So this is our a feature. We’re trying to come up with the name for it, to be honest, but right now I’m kind of going for debunk Reddit or something. We’ll come up with a creative name. Maybe one of our listeners will come up with a better name and tell us. But first up, before we talk about the actual Reddit post, I want to talk a little bit about what is considered a gap year. So let me just go ahead and read this post.

So it’s from Behind Champion, I think is the username, but it says, what is a gap year? And the user asks, I keep hearing different definitions from different people. Would a gap year be applying May of your senior year of college and going through the cycle while not enrolled in undergrad? So for 2025 college grad, apply May 2025, matriculate fall of 2026. Or, this user also asks, is a gap year graduating and working for a year and then applying that following May and going through that cycle? So for a 2025 college grad, apply May 2026 and matriculate fall 2027. So Casey, what do you think?

Casey: Yeah, so I mean, those would both be considered gap years. To me, a gap year is any time you’re taking off between college and medical school. And I think what I did was the latter, right? I graduated and then I spent a year studying for the MCAT and then the following year is when I applied. So if you want to not take any gap years, you would be applying in your junior year of college, because that means you would graduate and then just immediately start medical school. So both of those would count as gap years. I think it’s anytime in between, just taking a break from your formal education.

Pooja: Got it. Okay, so that makes sense. So the formal definition is a gap in formal education, but it seems like the difference between the two options that this person kind of included is that there would be one-year gap if they applied the same year that they graduated. So graduate fall sorry, 2025, they graduate, then apply that same, I guess, summer, and then they matriculate the next year. But then if they were to apply a year after they graduate, they would inherently be taking two gap years. Is that correct?

Casey: Exactly, because for many reasons, the med school application process is an onerous one. It’s a long one. It takes a year to apply, which is crazy. So if you are waiting to apply your senior spring, you have to go through that whole year-long process before you actually matriculate.

Pooja: Got it. Okay, that makes sense. So we have another Reddit post that we’re going to talk about in a little bit, but for now, I want to talk about a couple of questions about you and your experience, Casey. So from what I know and from what you described, you’ve taken gap years both before and during medical school. So I kind of want to talk about both of those experiences. So let’s start with before medical school. What motivated that decision?

Casey: Yes, I was always interested in medicine. I took the pre-med classes during undergrad, but I was never fully sold on the idea of it, and I had never pursued the typical pre-med activities where you’re exploring clinical experiences and doing a lot of shadowing and maybe volunteering at a hospital. So I didn’t really have a strong reason for why I was interested in medicine. And by my senior spring, I decided, I think I am interested and I want to take this more seriously. So I completed the pre-reqs, but I still need to take the MCAT and kind of beef up my resume, because maybe we’ll talk about this, but I think it’s important to do things that interest you and not necessarily do things to try to get into medical school, but to some extent you do need those clinical experiences to say to kind of ground your answer of why medicine in something clinically related.

So essentially my senior spring, I was like, well, I do want to do this. I don’t want to spend my senior spring studying for the MCAT. So at that point, I kind of had to mentally accept that I was going to take two gap years because like we talked about, I would have had to apply then and I couldn’t because I didn’t have an MCAT score yet. So I committed to doing spending that first year studying for the MCAT, working in a clinical job. I ended up getting a job as a medical scribe, which I’m happy to yap about endlessly because it was awesome and I highly recommend it. I tried to get research jobs. I tried to get lots of different things, but the scribing is just what worked out.

And then I also worked as a rock wall manager, and then the year I was applying, that was COVID 2020. So I ended up also picking up a lot of other odd jobs just because as a scribe, I was non-essential personnel and they ended up keeping me there at the hospital, but I took on jobs at like, I worked at a whole foods, I worked at an Amazon warehouse. I was doing all sorts of things during COVID. And yeah, it was just quite the experience. So once I’d taken the MCAT, I had a lot more flexibility in my schedule too. So it was kind of fun to dabble in different areas. Now I’m going down rabbit holes now, but so that’s how I ended up taking the two gap years because I essentially, I needed to study for the MCAT and then I needed to build up my resume a little bit. And then it was kind of nice to have that second year to say, all right, I did the MCAT, I applied, and now I can also kind of enjoy life a little bit. Not that med school, you can still enjoy your life in med school, I will maintain that, but having an unstructured schedule, it’s kind of fun to enjoy that a little bit.

Pooja: Yeah, no, absolutely. So it sounds like you kind of made a lot of those two years that you took before medical school. And it kind of sounds like the motivating factor was one, the fact that you had taken a little bit of time to make the decision of finalizing like, yes, I want to go to medical school, and you wanted to set up the best application you could with clinical experiences and with your MCAT score. And it sounds like it ended up being worth it because you got a lot more than you kind of asked for with all the unstructured time that you were able to have.

Casey: Yeah, I would absolutely say so. I would say a lot of people now are taking gap years for various reasons. And I’ve never met anyone who regretted taking a gap year. I think there’s always the thought of like, oh, I’m losing a year of salary, right, down the line. But y’all, you got the rest of your life to work. Explore things now. I feel like it also helps to give a little bit of perspective going into medical school and not I think I was also definitely a little burnt out by the end of undergrad and it was nice to have that time off because by the time I did matriculate and start medical school, I was really excited and hungry to study again, which I cannot say would have been true if I had started right after I graduated. And I kind of saw that in some of my classmates who did go right through. Like kudos to them, like super impressive to apply during your junior year of college and get all that together in time and just go straight through. But they’re also a little burnt out and I think it helps to kind of go into med school with some resilience in that respect of like, okay, I’m fresh, I’m ready to like really learn this information and buckle down again and be a student again.

Pooja: Right.

Casey: So that’s another reason having that break is really nice.

Pooja: Yeah, I completely agree. And I also feel like we could talk about this a little bit later too, but I constantly hear the argument of, oh, you lose a year of salary. And I’m like, in the grand scheme of things, out of the number of years you’ll be working, it is a very small percentage. So yeah, I completely agree that is not enough of a reason to do it. Also just because your well-being is more important.

Casey: Exactly, your well-being and your personal growth and development. I think it’s huge to have. I don’t think you can put us a salary, a number on that of just like the experiences you can have outside of medical training, which is its own, you will have your own personal professional development in medical school and like things that will change you, but I think outside of that as well, it’s important to explore other areas and just learn how to relate to many different kinds of people. I think it really helps to be a well-rounded medical provider.

Pooja: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. So I want to switch gears a little bit and talk about the motivations for your gap year during medical school because to my understanding, you took like a little bit of a research year. So tell me a little bit about that and what motivated that decision.

Casey: Yeah, so this one I was very certain I wanted to do orthopedic surgery. I just didn’t really decide again, I’m slow when it comes to making a decision about what I want to do because I like to figure out exactly what I want and then I go and chase it really, really hard. And so I didn’t fully decide orthopedics until maybe the end of my second year, early third year because I was trying to be open, trying to explore lots of different things because orthopedics is awesome, but orthopedics is hard. It’s a long journey to go through residency. So I wanted to be really sure that’s what I wanted to do. So I didn’t really make that decision until kind of late in the game and so what I should have been doing was kind of pursuing more mentorship opportunities and sponsorship opportunities and this is a whole other thing, but there’s a difference between mentors and sponsors. But I think I wanted more of that mentorship and I need I wanted to make sure going into residency, I was coming in swinging and like ready with a really strong application. I felt like I needed more research to do that.

I’m also interested in a career in academics and I wanted more research experience. I wanted to be able to see a project through from start to finish. I didn’t really feel like I had those skills. So I wanted that dedicated year for doing that. I wanted that. And then we had in my profile that I can be a whimsical person. That’s one word my friends would use to describe me. So part of it was also just like being ready for a new adventure after three years of med school. I’ve had such a great time. I think every year of med school gets more and more fun. But the part of me that was looking at research year opportunities, I was kind of like, ooh, I can go anywhere in the country. I can apply to all these places, experience a different academic medical center, meet with new mentors from different places. So to me it was kind of the adventure opportunity. I think that also played into it. So I just applied to a ton of random things that were like listed on OrthoGate, which is just a website that has orthopedic opportunities. And you know, I just googling orthopedic research year opportunities, sent out my resume out into the ether, had a couple of interviews and then the one that I ended up with, like I just felt like the mentorship was going to be really valuable. They were I wasn’t being seen as a research monkey. I was being seen as someone they wanted to turn into like a really good future orthopedic surgeon. Like they were really invested in me and not just me getting their work done for them. So that was really important to me that it would also be not just a productive year, but a year where I felt like I had mentorship and I was being kind of guided on a path towards, you know, becoming the best orthopedic surgeon I could be. So all that to say, I did the research to like enhance my application and also to explore and kind of step away from the grind of medical school and grind in a different way for sure. Just essentially getting ready for orthopedic residency applications.

Pooja: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So it sounds like between the two years, like there was some differences, right? Like your years before medical school, you were getting ready to kind of create an application that would be good for applying to medical school, but it sounds like the gap you’re during was to prepare for the next step that’s kind of coming ahead. Like you knew you were going to be choosing a potentially competitive path and you wanted to make sure you had everything. But also like not even like put competitiveness aside. It sounds like you had a skill set that you wanted to develop before pursuing surgery as a residency.

Casey: Absolutely.

Pooja: Which I think makes a ton of sense.

Casey: Yeah, that was a that was a perfect summary of my ramblings. I think, yeah, the undergrad one.

Pooja: Oh my God, no.

Casey: The undergrad one was the motive was definitely, I don’t have a good application at this point. I need to get it up to stuff. The medical school one was, I know exactly what I want to do now and I think I’m competitive. Let’s make it even better, but I also have this skill set that I want to develop for my future career. So it was probably a little more maybe pointed. I don’t know if that’s the right word. It was it was definitely… I think the gap years before medical school was just I was just like, I just want to get into medical school. And this one was I want to like I have a career path now and I’m trying to enhance, you know, what I’m getting out of that path along the way.

Pooja: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Like putting in the time now will hopefully allow you to be a productive researcher while you’re a resident as opposed to having to figure out how to do that while also pursuing residency, which sounds literally like the hardest thing you could possibly do.

Casey: Yeah, that’s the other thing is like I want to learn how to operate in residency. I don’t want to be figuring out research stuff like that. To me, that’s silly. And like that is a part of residency for sure, and it’s an important part. Like we have to be contributing to the literature, but if I have extra time, I don’t want to be figuring out how to run statistical tests. I want to go and you know, see another scrub another case of a distal radius fracture, something going on, you know. Yeah, so that was kind of a motivating factor as well.

Pooja: That makes a ton of sense. Okay, so thinking about your pre-med gap years, you had a lot of experiences and I think it was really cool to hear about the differences in like your structured versus your unstructured time. Out of all of them, what would you say were the most valuable for you?

Casey: Oh, that’s such a good question.

Pooja: Thank you…

Casey: In terms of preparing for medical school and just like future career path, the scribing was immensely valuable. I was working at the Children’s or no, the Women’s Hospital in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and I was on the OBGYN service, like so it was labor and delivery and inpatient gynecology oncology. And those were two specialties I wasn’t really interested in, but it worked with my schedule because the shifts were 5:00 a.m. to noon. And then I could in the afternoon work my rock wall job or study for the MCAT, you know, whatever was fitting in that day because I will say even that first year was it was shift work, so it was a lot of flexibility in my schedule, which I don’t know if we’ll go back to this, but if you’re planning a gap year, if you can have a flexible job that lets you work and study for the MCAT at the same time, perfect. But anyways, I think the scribing was extremely valuable because I was learning how to use the electronic medical record. I was learning a lot of medical terminology. By the end of that, I was like writing notes, writing H&Ps, like all things you’re going to be doing eventually as a third-year medical student. And I had a really broad knowledge base of things that like my a lot of my classmates who had not had that experience didn’t have, you know, going into medical school and I think it kind of helped give me a leg up. And not in terms of like competitive against my other classmates, but just not having to spend as much time figuring some of that information out. Like when I started clerkships, I was like ready to go, jumped in, started doing notes. I was like this is all familiar to me.

And so it really facilitated a lot of the clinical side of things once I got to that part in medical school and just having some of that knowledge base as well, just like some of the pathophysiology of like pregnancy and labor and delivery. Like we were learning it during my clerk my pre-clerkship stuff and I was like, oh, I already know a lot of like this. This is great. Like this is a week where I don’t have to study as much. Like wonderful, love that. So I think it was really valuable in that sense of and also just like I was working with the resident so closely, you could see what life was like for a resident. And it wasn’t necessarily the specialty that I wanted to do, but residency is hard no matter what specialty you’re doing. And I think just being able to see what their work life balance or lack thereof was like and then also see the attendings, just having that perspective of the day-to-day workflow of here’s what your life will be like for three to five to seven years depending on how long your residency is. It was good to have that and it was helped confirm my decision like, yes, this is hard, but there’s also there’s a lot of camaraderie.

It’s a lot of hard work. There’s some bad days, but there’s also really good days. And I think like to me, I was like this is the path I do want to take because I felt like coming into my job every day as a scribe, I was like on the outside looking in at like the you know, the team because that’s just, I feel like medicine can be hierarchical and you know, if you’re not in the club, you’re not in the club, but just like me watching them work every day and interact with each other and like getting to sort of be a part of that team, it really confirmed to me, I was like, this is absolutely what I want to do. Like it’s going to be hard and it’s going to be long, but it’s absolutely worth it to me. And I think that was really important to have going into applying and like going through interviews is having that fire in my belly, I guess of like, I really want this, because I think it’s it’s hard to make it through medical school if you don’t have that like sureness in yourself, like this is absolutely what I want to do.

And I think my enthusiasm, I think also came across in interviews of like I was really excited to be trying to go into medicine. So I think it helped to have that perspective, I guess, just have more of those experiences that I hadn’t had before and maybe a lot of people do if they’re doing more volunteering or clinical things during undergrad. But for me, having that extended time because I was, you know, that was like my full-time job essentially, like having that the reps of just like going in every day and seeing what the grind was like every single day was really helpful. It was really revealing and it was really helpful for me confirming my decision to be like, this isn’t even a specialty I like and this looks awesome. Like, I absolutely want to do this. So it just gave me a lot of confidence going into applying because it’s also an expensive process. So it just it really helped me like fully commit, like full send it. Let’s do medical school.

Pooja: Yeah, no, absolutely. I feel like half of the argument that you were making for scribing in particular, because I know you talked about how you had a lot of experiences and you were pursuing a lot of things, but scribing is ultimately what fit your schedule. I feel like part of what, and again, I am not saying this as someone who pretends to know about anything involving the admissions process, but I’ve just talked to some people about our admissions episodes, which you guys can listen to if you’re interested. But I’ve also talked to people at like my school in the admissions committee and it seems like half of the reason why they want you to do clinical experiences is for exactly what you just said.

Like it is helpful and informative to know, this I do want this. I’m seeing other people do it and it looks hard, but I want it. Exactly what you said, like it is worth it. I think that is so important. So for people who are thinking about if they’re taking a gap year, what are you considering doing, I guess now as I feel like a strong argument for doing something clinical if you can fit something in your schedule.

Casey: Absolutely, I would totally agree. I’m very biased, but I would absolutely say, like you got to get on the front lines and see like, do I really like doing this? And I think a lot of it is also being honest with yourself too, because I think it can be hard to let go of that desire, right? Because I know I know people who have like been you know, full pre-med and then they actually got into it more and they were like, ooh, I don’t actually like this. Right. And like being honest with yourself because medical school is it’s hard. It’s hard even if you love it and it’s not going to be fun if you don’t like it. Yeah. So I think it’s important to like also kind of know yourself and be open to different experiences that you have and just reflect on how you feel in those experiences and like, is this something I actually like or am I gaslighting myself because it’s something I feel like I should like, if that makes sense.

Pooja: Right, no, that totally makes sense. That 100% makes sense. I completely agree with that.

Casey: And like not waiting until, you know, you’re doing your sub-I because I actually, I know someone, one of my friends from my school, he did a research year in Ortho. He was full Ortho bro. Did a research year in Ortho, started doing his sub-Is in Ortho, got through his sub-Is and said, you know what? Don’t actually like Ortho. Don’t actually like being in the OR. Kind of like chasing the maybe it was the perceived prestige of like having a surgical career. Realized he didn’t like it. Went and did a dermatology research year and is now applying dermatology and like doing a dermatology sub-I. So, wow. It’s never too late to change. I guess. But I think it would be helpful to have done that reflection at some self searching earlier.

Because again, it’s extra year of income lost and is that’s probably trivial in the long term, especially if you’re doing dermatology or orthopedic surgery, like whatever. But I think he’s now done like two or three gap years, which is like kind of crazy. But yeah, no, he’s awesome. He’s killing it. But I think having being able to do that soul searching early on can just help direct your path a little a little more. And you know, it’s not a bad thing to do that exploration. I think he has a lot had a lot of great experiences from his Ortho research and his sub-Is that he’s probably applying to dermatology now. So I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that exploration. Just to save others time, I think it would be nice if you had if you had done that reflection earlier, had that realization sooner.

Pooja: Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. So I think speaking of Gapier and medical school, I want to switch gears now a little bit to the gap year that you spent in medical school. I think right now you’ve returned into your fourth year, correct?

Casey: Correct. So I’m on doing sub-Is in Ortho now.

Pooja: Okay, exciting. So in terms of the gap year that you spent, I know that you did a research fellowship. Is there anything specifically about it that you think contributed most to your personal and professional growth?

Casey: Oh, absolutely. I think it’s called a fellowship, but now there’s so many. It’s just like a year-long research opportunity essentially where, yeah, I needed something to pay me to stay somewhere that wasn’t my med school. And so it’s it’s a fellowship for that reason because they paid me a stipend to live in Philadelphia for a year and do research. I think in terms of like personal development. So of course, professionally it was amazing because everyone was just coming at me with projects all the time and I was just be like, yes, yes, yes, I will do it. I will do it. Like I’m here to grind. But personally, I think it was also really valuable in terms of my future career because we got to also spend a day in clinic every week and we were also scribing and like we got to talk to patients, you know, get the history and we’d go and present them to the attending and then we would go and scribe and then we would write the note. So that was also super helpful.

I think personally though, it was nice to have the year of kind of it was a flexible schedule. Like we didn’t have to come into the office if we didn’t want to. It was very much like it was almost like my undergrad gap year in that sense where like I was working, but it was on my schedule, which was kind of nice to have because you don’t really have that in medicine. Your schedule is not your own until you’re an attending. So it was nice to have that year of just like picking when I was working and then getting to work at CHOP, at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia where I was just incredible because I called it orthopedic wonderland because everyone was so enthusiastic about what they were doing. It was really refreshing coming off of my third year clerkships where there’s a lot of jaded and burnt out people in medicine for valid reasons.

And so it was really refreshing to come and work somewhere where everyone was so excited about what they were doing, huge ortho nerds and just like really excited to help patients get better. And being around that was really refreshing. And the people I worked with, everyone was like on their A game, wanted to do their absolute best. And it’s really rare to find that kind of environment where everyone cares so much. And it just really pushed me to also always be trying to put my best foot forward, right? Like always trying to do exactly the right thing, being as detail oriented as possible. So it really challenged me to not just like learn how to do research, but learn how to do it well. And I feel like now I’m saying all this is more like professional development things. But I think…

Pooja: No, I think there’s an attitude that you developed, right? Like it became, it sounds like it was almost infectious. Like everybody was bringing their A game and so you were like, I am going to do the same. And I’m sure that now that you’re going into your sub-Is, you’re bringing that same attitude in. And I’m not saying that, you know, you may not have done it before, but now you have like an increased impetus to do so is what it sounds like to me.

Casey: Absolutely. Yeah. And then there’s also just like the relationships I formed with people there. Yeah. It was it’s really fun when your co-workers are not just your co-workers, but they’re your friends. They’re people you want to hang out with outside of the office. And Philadelphia is a super fun place to explore. I’m not a city person. I never thought I would be, but Philly was an amazing place to be for a year. The food is great. There’s great cycling and things to do all the time. So I just feel really fortunate that I had that opportunity. And now it gave me an idea of what I want in a residency program, right? Because I realized I was like, this is peak like work environment. Like this is what I want. Like when I’m on my sub-I, this is what I’m looking for is like, are they enthusiastic? Are they excited to teach? Does everyone want to hang out with each other? And there’s certainly places where I’ve been where I like was staying late on my sub-I because I’m like, I just want to hang out with these people. Like they’re really fun to be here on call with. Like I could go home, but also like kind of vibing right now. So I feel like it gave me that sense of like, this is what your work environment could be, which I mean, I’m going to be happy to get residency wherever, whoever wants to hire me, I’ll take it. But like having that sense of like this is what it could be was kind of eye opening in a way.

Pooja: It sounds like it kind of set the standard for you for what residency can look like.

Casey: Absolutely. Yeah.

Pooja: That’s amazing. I feel like that’s the encapsulation of what anyone what anyone would want during their gap year because it sounds like you grew in so many different ways and learned so much about both your clinical and your research goals and so, yeah, I’m that’s amazing. I’m so glad. I hope people who are listening hear that and see that can happen for them too. I want to circle back now to this actually, because I know you talked about how it’s like technically considered a fellowship because they paid you. Can you clarify for our listeners the difference between a sponsorship and a mentorship? Because you would alluded to that earlier. So can you just elaborate on that a little bit?

Casey: Yeah, I think, okay, so I think with what I what I was saying with the fellowship is it’s like a it’s a structured year program that they do every year. There’s three fellows that they award a stipend to. And there’s a couple different programs around the country that do that. I think there’s also research years where it’s more of an informal thing where you’re just working with an attending, maybe one attending one-on-one because I was working with multiple attendings at CHOP. There were like tons of different projects going in. So you might not necessarily be paid. It’s just like a research year opportunity. So I’m not I’m actually not sure if it’s formally a fellowship if they give you a stipend or if it’s just like they’ve formalized it as this is like a thing we do every year because the one I did has been going on for years. But with the mentorship versus the sponsorship, and this was something actually a mentor told me, and it’s also what kind of led me to do the research year was because I’m hoping to match at like specific places for residency. And it’s hard to do that in general. It’s especially hard to do that for Ortho. Like I’ll be grateful if I match anywhere for Ortho, but it would be great if I could match at like some specific places that I’m interested in. And I think with mentors, mentors are people who are guiding you and giving you advice and helping you like grow personally and professionally. I think sponsors could also be mentors, but they’re people who have ties and can help get you where you want to go. And I did not have sponsors and you need those, I think in orthopedics, unfortunately.

I’m sure any competitive surgical sub specialty, it helps to have people with connections that are in your corner. And I think that’s another reason I was doing the research year was because I had amazing mentors at my school, but they weren’t necessarily like well-connected people. And that’s what one of my mentors told me. He was like, I am not someone who could like, like people don’t know who I am because he was a fairly new attending. An amazing mentor, but he was like, I do not have the connections that would I you know, I could call a program director and be like, you should take her. She’s awesome. So that was a part of the impetus to do the research year as well was to get people who had those kind of ties in my corner and maybe give me another leg up, you know, outside of my application of having someone who knows everyone in the small world of Ortho and could say, she’s a really hard worker. She’s awesome. Like definitely consider her for your program sort of thing.

So that’s kind of what I was thinking of when I was mentioning like mentors versus sponsors because it’s something I wish I had known earlier in medical school. And I’m very happy with how things worked out. I’m so glad I did the research year. Again, like it’s probably one of the best decisions I ever made in medical school. But I think if you are not hoping to do a research year, like I don’t think it’s absolutely necessary to take a gap year in medical school. It’s a lot of fun. I would recommend it. But if you have that, if you’ve set things up earlier in your medical career of like doing research in the specialty you’re interested in, finding mentors and sponsors, like people who have some connections and can help get you where you want to go, you might not necessarily have to be taking that time off or feel like you have to take more time for your training. Not everyone has the luxury of just like going and gallivanting off for a year to do research. You know, like people have other, you know, things going on in their lives potentially or their families, they have reasons they want to just get through their training. So just like having that knowledge and starting earlier in terms of getting people in your corner, I think would be really helpful.

Pooja: Yeah, absolutely. And I’m so glad that you mentioned that too, because one of the questions that I had for you is looking back is there anything that you would have done differently? And it sounds like you would have tried to figure out, like not necessarily that would have changed your decision on taking the gap year for you specifically, but that you would have wanted to know that there is a difference, especially for surgical subspecialties. And I honestly think that this is kind of, it applies to everywhere. Like I’m applying internal medicine and I’ve kind of been told like similar things that it is always helpful to have somebody who knows people in your corner.

Casey: Absolutely.

Pooja: I think that’s true for literally any specialty regardless of how competitive it may be.

Casey: Absolutely. And it’s a little unfortunate because you know, there’s so many well-qualified people. It’s just hard to stand out now. Like everyone is amazing at what they’re doing. Like and I’ve met so many incredible people on my sub-Is. I’m like, wow, I’m so glad we’re going to be future colleagues or like, wow, I hope they end up here. Like, you know, like it’s just so many amazing people. So it you have to have something else, I feel like, to really help get your foot in the door at a program you’re interested in.

Pooja: Absolutely, absolutely. I couldn’t agree more. And again, it’s like we you said, unfortunate part of the system, but everybody’s amazing. And so you kind of have to learn a little bit about the game. And that’s honestly, truthfully, Casey, like this is kind of why we have the podcast in the first place because this is the kind of thing that like it’s the thing that no one tells you when you start medical school. And so I’m glad that you’re bringing that insight that you can only get by going through that experience. So thank you for sharing that.

Casey: Absolutely. That’s why I like to do these things because I’m like, I feel like I’ve been it’s like, you know, flying by the seat of my pants throughout this whole process. So if I can help give someone some insight earlier.

Pooja: I mean, listen, hopefully someone will start thinking about sponsorship a year earlier than we did and then it’ll our mission will be accomplished.

Casey: Mission accomplished, perfect.

Pooja: So I want to transition a little bit into because you talked about insights, I want to know during any of your gap years, so this is including the pre-med ones, including the med one, is there anything that you found to be like an unexpected challenge that you didn’t foresee coming?

Casey: Ooh, uh, I think, I mean, COVID, definitely.

Pooja: True, true, true, true, true, true.

Casey: But other than that, I think it was anything unexpected challenges.

Pooja: I mean, if you didn’t, that’s very slay.

Casey: Yeah. I’m trying to think because I’m sure there were. I think honestly, I think COVID kind of overshadowed anything else because there was just a lot of uncertainty of like I was doing the scribing job and then I thought I was going to get fired because like I’m not essential. like, you know, I’m I’m nice to have for sure. I can make your life faster and easier if you’re writing notes, but not essential to the operation. So that’s when I was like scrambling and looking for other weird jobs. So like I worked at an Amazon warehouse. That was horrible. So I switched to like a Whole Foods, which was more fun and I learned a lot about like cheese samples because I’d befriended the cheese guy and he would give me samples. Anyways, I think that was the big one because also my goal for the gap years was to have some fun. I think it’s important to make time for fun. You know, going back to the whimsical side of things. Like even during my research year, our mentors and sponsors, they were like, take vacation. You must take vacation. It’s like I went to Iceland for 10 days in the middle of my research year. 

Pooja: That’s amazing. 

Casey: Yeah, it was awesome. I went to Costa Rica later in the year. I got to do a lot of fun stuff. But during undergrad, my plan for my two pre-med gap years were first year grind, MCAT apply, second year, switch to maybe a more cush job. I really liked the scribing, but it was it got it got to be a lot with like, you know, the hours and everything.

Pooja: Yeah, 5:00 a.m. to noon is intense.

Casey: It’s pretty intense. Nothing compared to an actual resident’s hours, but at that time I was like this is a lot. And there’s also a point where you kind of as a scribe, you kind of reach a ceiling and I was like, this isn’t really challenging anymore and it’s it’s stopped being fun. Yeah. So that’s when I switched to doing I was I kind of transitioned to doing more of the blueprint tutoring. So I was very fortunate to like get to work with blueprint and do a lot of content stuff. But my plan for that second gap year while I was, you know, waiting for application stuff and interviews and everything was like, I’m going to travel. COVID was like, no, you’re not. So, um, I think I got to do some road tripping and stuff, but I guess that goes back to like the personal growth as well is just getting to explore my enjoy my hobbies, spend a lot of time with friends that I might not have necessarily done, formed a lot of really lasting relationships. That’s what I got to do during my research gap year as well. Like I was able to make time for that.

And I think that also helped me form a foundation of like good habits for going into medical school because I think it’s helpful to be able to prioritize your time very well and have some discipline and because I think in medical school, it’s easy to study all the time because if it’s pass fail, I mean it depends on your curriculum. For my school it was pass fail and I felt like I could keep going or I could I know enough. I could say I could stop. I feel like I’ve studied enough. Let me go and rock climb or like catch up with a friend. Like I don’t need to sit here and study all day. So I think being able to have built those foundations during my gap years of like finding that balance of how much do I actually need to work? You know, and then let me still make time for fun because I absolutely think in medical school, through residency, through all of it. Like even on sub-Is, I still make time to like work out or do one fun thing a day even if it’s for like 20 minutes. But I think having built those habits early on during my gap years was super, super valuable because going into medical school and like the more intense parts of it, I already had those healthy habits to fall back on.

Pooja: Yes.

Casey: So I think having had that time to develop those has been really, really valuable in terms of just like my mental and physical well-being and maintaining it during some of the more challenging and intense parts of medical training.

Pooja: Yeah, no, absolutely. I’m really glad that you mentioned that too, because I kind of wonder, I’m curious. Is there anything that you started doing during your gap years, either the med one or the pre-med one, that you started doing it and you were like, whoa, I wish I had started doing this from the very beginning of my gap year?

Casey: A really disciplined sleep schedule.

Pooja: Yeah, fair.

Casey: I will say that’s like I call that the secret to my success because if I can if I can maintain my sleep schedule, which isn’t always possible on like sub-Is and certainly not during residency, but if I’m super protective of that, I’m just a lot more productive if I just have enough energy in the day to be focused and get done what I need to get done. I think prioritizing that and it’s something I feel like a lot of people don’t prioritize. They’re like, oh, you know, I’ll just stay up super late and finish all this stuff. And it’s hard. It’s hard to build that habit. Like it takes a long time to get into a routine of like, I’m going to bed at this hour every single night. It’s really it’s challenging. But I think having that has helped me have the energy I need to like get what I need to get done during the day and not feel like I have to, you know, grind super late into the night because honestly, I don’t function well with not that much sleep. I’m getting better at it thanks to our over 24-hour call shift, but ideally if I don’t need to be staying up for 24 hours, that’s great. If I can get at least six to seven hours of sleep every night, we’re killing it. So that would probably be one thing is just being disciplined in terms of taking care of yourself because I think at the end of the day, as much you know, I love orthopedics, so excited to be going into it, love medicine. It’s still a job and you still have to take care of yourself to take care of patients.

And I actually someone, a scrub tech said that to me the other day on one of my rotations, he was like, like because I think the fellow was like, have you eaten today? And I was like, no, we’ve been in cases like for 12 hours. I haven’t had time to go and eat. And the scrub tech was like, get out. Go eat. You can’t take care of patients if you haven’t taken care of yourself. And I was like, wow. That’s super profound. You’re so right. I didn’t even think about that. Like, oh yeah, I can’t really take care of someone if I’m like vazoling because I haven’t eaten since 5:00 a.m. Right, right. 

Pooja: Yeah, it seems counterintuitive. But no, that makes that makes a lot of sense. That’s that’s awesome. I guess now that we’ve kind of talked about lessons that you kind of learned during your gap year, things that you want people to kind of protect and maintain, you know, obviously, chiefly their personal well-being and their ability to protect their own, like, I guess, not safety, but their own mental and well-being hygiene, if that makes sense. Like their mental and sleep hygiene. How would you compare the benefits and the drawbacks of taking a gap year? Because we kind of talked about like one of the biggest misconceptions, which is that it’s a year taking away from your income or whatever. But what do you think are the drawbacks of taking a gap year before, let’s start with before med school. What are the drawbacks of taking a gap year before medical school?

Casey: Hmm. I mean, I feel like that is a that is a valid concern, right? It is taking away a year of your future salary. I just think in the grand scheme of things for me personally, I don’t think it’s that significant. I think the drawback is you have to find I had to find something that I could, you know, work and make money and find somewhere to live and sometimes it’s nice to have the structure of school. Just like here’s what you’re doing every day. Someone’s telling you what to do. With a gap year, you kind of have to you have to you have to set your own schedule and be proactive about finding those opportunities, which I think can be challenging. Because it did take me some time to find a position because like I said, I applied for research stuff, I applied for, I think other clinical thing, medical assistant stuff, but coming out of undergrad with a biology degree, I have no skills. I didn’t do that much research either. So ultimately I ended up with the scribing, which I’m super grateful for, but I think it’s it’s hard to set up things sometimes, especially because again in undergrad, certainly didn’t have any mentors or sponsors. So if you had connections that could help you get some sort of position for that gap year, I think that would be great because I think what could be a drawback is you could spend the initial part of the year kind of floundering and trying to find something to do and like fill your time.

So, I don’t know if that’s so much a drawback necessarily, because that’s part of the exploration process maybe. But I think that would be one thing is like if you’re like someone who’s used to having such a structured schedule in undergrad and then having to go and kind of find those opportunities to fill your year and fill out your resume and also make time to maybe study for the MCAT if that’s what you’re doing. That can be challenging for sure. And I don’t know if that’s necessarily a drawback, but it’s it’s certainly something to consider is you definitely have to be kind of take the initiative to find those opportunities and that can be a challenging and frustrating process for sure.

Pooja: Right. Right. Yeah. No, that makes that makes a lot of sense. And I also think that one of the things I also want to address is, you know, in terms of the whole discussion about gap years and not, I think there are some people who have extenuating circumstances, right? So like if you’re on student loans and you can’t afford to start paying back your loans, so you have to kind of continue being a student. That is an extenuating circumstance in which, you know, that is a very important factor to consider. And I just I wanted to mention that as well because I do I do know some people who were debating taking a year and decided against it because of their student loans and because of the fact that they couldn’t afford to like start, they couldn’t afford to start paying them off until they had like doctor money, which is so real. It’s so fair. But yeah, I think that’s an important factor to consider as well. So I want to ask you a little bit about now the benefits and drawbacks of a gap year during medical school. So like what are the drawbacks of that one? Because I think that one is more contested, I found.

Casey: Totally. It’s also becoming a more popular option just as, you know, as residency gets more and more insanely competitive, just people looking for a way to kind of stand out. But I think honestly, one of the big drawbacks for me was I didn’t get to graduate with my original med school class. And for me that was kind of a bummer. Like some of my best friends now are from that medical school class and I was really so excited to like open my match day envelope with them, like graduate with them. Yeah, I’m going to get emotional talking about it, but I was like, we’ve been through the gauntlet with these people and I’m so excited to like, you know, see us all go off on our own ways together. But we’re still in touch. They’re all in their intern year now and we still make time to chat with each other. But I think that was one drawback is, you know, the people that you’ve been you’ve spent the last three years with in like such intense circumstances and situations, you don’t get to graduate with them.

Luckily, I have friends in my new class and a lot of people actually from my old class took gap years as well, but that was a drawback for me. 

Pooja: An important one too. 

Casey: Yeah, absolutely. And I think again, the argument could be made you’re again, losing another year of salary and you do have to still pay tuition. At least at my school, we still have to pay a very small portion of our yearly tuition, but you still have to pay tuition. So like that kind of offset some of the stipend I was getting. So that is something else to consider is like you are still, at least I was still technically a student at my medical school.

Pooja: Okay.

Casey: And for that to take place, I still had to pay like a percentage of the tuition. So that’s another thing to think about is like if you’re already, I know, I’m already super in debt, hurray, you’re going to be a little more in debt even though it’s offset by the stipend, but it was still kind of like, oh man, this is cutting into my Philadelphia money. But so that’s that’s something else to consider. I don’t think every school is the same in that respect, but for me that was another thing to consider.

And then the fact that I had to move, you know, I was moving to a completely different part of the country after I had been in Ohio for the past three years. So moving is annoying. So that’s just something else to for me it was worth it. I’m like, hurray, like yay, exploring, whimsical we. Again, something else to think about because that’s a lot of more, you know, more planning. I had to I had to so back to back too because I finished clerkships, took step two, was moving to Philadelphia, you know, you had to pack during all of this. So just a hectic time. So just things to like, you know, have be planning for and consider as well of like how that’s going to affect you and like how feasible that’s going to be for you because I was also looking at opportunities that were like across the country. So like if I ended up on the West Coast, that would have been way more challenging because I could just drive from Cleveland to Philadelphia and you know, U-haul all my stuff over there. But if it had been out somewhere in like California or something, that would have been a lot more challenging, like still doable, but just things to consider of like, you know, the costs you might have you might incur like in terms of money and time of like getting that all set up. For me it was absolutely worth it. Like again, would do it again in a heartbeat. Best decision ever. But those are certainly things to consider.

Pooja: Yeah. Yeah. No, absolutely. So it sounds like a lot of the factors that are drawbacks for during medical school is personal. So like related to your own financial situation, related to your own family situation, if you if you have children, if you have a significant other that is drawn to a specific location, like can you actually move? Or if you’re in a specific school, like can you actually take that year? So it sounds like although there are a ton of benefits, the drawbacks seem to be more personal than professional.

Casey: Yeah, at least for me they were. I think there’s really no professional drawback that I can think of. If you’re taking a gap here unless you do it and you’re you don’t do anything productive, that’s bad. But like you got to crank some stuff out for sure. You want to be careful about the opportunity you’re choosing. You want to make sure whoever you’re working with, you’re going to definitely be productive. I know that can happen too is sometimes you get something set up and really not being as productive as you need to be because if a school sees you took a year off to do research, they want to see that you did some research. So being really careful about, you know, if you’re interviewing for positions or looking for positions, seeing if there’s any prior folks who have done either that fellowship or worked with that attending before, looking at that attending’s productivity and making sure that, you know, you’re going to get a couple papers out of this year at least.

Pooja: Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. And I appreciate giving an objective metric too, because I think the whole definition of what exactly is productive in a research world can be can be can be confusing.

Casey: It could be. No, yeah.

Pooja: Yeah, because like what exactly does like more papers mean, more presentations or whatever. So I appreciate you giving a number. Just like a couple, like two or three, it sounds like, right? Or good?

Casey: Yeah, I mean, that’s also that’s going to get me onto a rant of like quality versus quantity because there’s this push to like turn out a bunch of stuff. So I think if you if you publish like 50 papers, people are going to raise their eyebrows because that’s impossible first of all. And second of all, like what’s the quality of that research and how involved were you? Like is your name just on a bunch of stuff? Because I think the goal also is you’ve done the work for the research and you can talk about it and you can talk about it with a lot of knowledge and in depth and you know, you can talk about the technical parts of it and hopefully with some enthusiasm because hopefully it was a project you really like. So I think I’m a proponent of quality over quantity. If you get like three or four papers out, you know, some abstracts, some posters hopefully, I think that’s great and it’s all stuff you can speak to. And if you get more than that, that’s just icing on the cake. I think the key is that you’re able to talk about it and that you were significantly involved in it. Because there’s certainly projects that I think I someone just needed my name on something to be able to like present it. I don’t know what happened, but they put me up they put my name on a project that I had no involvement in. And that did not that is not on my CV. I that did not go in my residency applications. I was like, if someone asked me about this, I have no idea what this project was. Like I’m not just adding it as like a number on my CV.

So I think as long as you’re producing things that you know, you were significantly involved in, if it’s only, I should say only it’s hard to get two or three papers published in a year. The publication process takes a long time. So as long as you got stuff like in the works, like I think by the end of my year, I had I’d written a lot of papers and but you know, it takes attendings time to review things too. So as long as you have stuff in the pipeline, you’re going to look super productive throughout residency too. That’s the other bonus. Research is the gift that keeps on giving. There’s all these databases that people are using that now they’re going to have my name on them, you know, whatever projects come out of them. But yeah, I think as long as you’re getting three or four quality papers out, some abstracts and it’s stuff you can talk about, I think I would count that as a productive year because it’s also like what did you get out of it? It’s not just what did you produce, but what did you learn from the experience? What are you taking away from it? And what are you going to apply in your future career?

Pooja: Yeah, and I’m glad you mentioned that too because I think that, you know, there are alternative things that you can do as like a gap year during medical school that aren’t just research. So like you can get another degree like an MBA or anything like that or I guess you can also do like a volunteer fellowship. You can do like an abroad program where you like do clinical work in a different country. There’s the world is your oyster, I think similar to when you’re applying to medical school, there’s a lot that you can do, but I think the emphasis on you have to do something that shows that you are goal oriented can accomplish that goal is really important. And that’s kind of what it sounds like you set out to do during your research year and that you were successful at doing so.

Casey: Absolutely. And I think that kind of makes me think of I think going into medical school, I thought my life was over. I was like, okay, just going to be grinding all the time, no time for anything else. And really what I’m learning is like medical training and a career in medicine in general, it’s what you make of it. I mean, there’s certainly there’s a lot of structure and there’s certainly things you have to do and your days are going to be busy and some weeks are going to be worse than others. But I think in terms of like the big picture trajectory of your career, once you’re an attending, you can kind of shape your practice how you want. You can work 90, 100 hours a week if you want to operate all the time. You can work 40 hours a week if you want to be in private practice and just do a couple cases every day and have clinic once or twice a week.

You can do a lot of picking your own adventure in medicine. There’s lots of like you were saying, there’s so many gap year opportunities or even it doesn’t even have to be a full year. It can just be like clerkship electives or you know, things you’re filling your breaks with during medical school and then in your actual career as an attending. Like there’s certainly you’re your practice, you can shape it as you want. You can do a lot of mission trips and you can do more like outreach or like policy things or research. It’s kind of like you can shape it as what you want it to be. And I think that’s something I didn’t realize going into medical school is like I was kind of like there’s this standardized like, you know, grind, you work, this is how much you’re going to work. It’s really up to you. And I think that’s just what makes it such an exciting career. So many opportunities.

Pooja: I agree. I agree. And I think there will be several episodes in the future where we talk about like the options of how you can kind of hybridize your clinical career with I like to call it like the MD plus options of things that you can do. Right? It’s not mine. This is like a slack channel that exists. It’s called MD plus. And it’s like people who are interested in like doing business stuff while also being doctors. So I’m stealing it from them, but I like it for kind of the catch all for anything else. Like you could do education, you could do policy, advocacy, research. The world is your oyster like you said. And I think it sounds like the research year or the gap year can be an opportunity for you to explore those things. And so for you, you were interested in academic medicine and so you wanted to explore that specific opportunity that you know is available for you when you become a physician yourself.

Casey: Absolutely. Yeah.

Pooja: Amazing. So, okay, I want to head back to Reddit because it’s my favorite place to be just kidding. But sometimes it is fun.

Casey: We all, we all lurk on Reddit.

Pooja: Yeah, we all lurk on it. We shouldn’t, but we should I think it’s everyone’s guilty pleasure, I think.

Casey: No, 100%.

Pooja: But I want to talk about this next question and I want to hear your advice for the student about the advice that they’ve received and specifically about, I think this post is about someone who’s saying like the gap here is a necessity. So I’m just going to read the post out loud and then we’ll talk about it. So it’s from CleeYour. I don’t know. That’s the username. But the topic is, has the gap here become more of a necessity than a choice? Specifically they say, med school applications are so competitive. I was told that I need an extra year to bolster my resume even with a 3.89 GPA, 100 hours of volunteering, 60 hours of shadowing, 100 clinical hours, and 70 hours of research. I also had a leadership role in my club and I tutor as well. I haven’t taken the MCAT, but I have been advised to take a gap year to do more shadowing, clinical hours, and get some quote unquote real research. In parentheses they’ve include my current research hours are psychological research. There’s no end parentheses. That’s a typo on their end. I’m just calling it out loud because I’m the worst. I know a lot of pre-meds who say they need the gap year to bolster their resume and I understand some people want the gap year to take a break from medical school, but is it now a need?

Casey: Wow, okay, I have so many thoughts about this. First, CleeYour, you’re killing it. So many hours. I don’t think I had that many volunteer hours or any like I’m like super impressed. Second, real research, psych research is still real research. That’s awesome. Yeah. And I actually think it makes you stand out a little more because it’s not so cookie cutter, like basic science research or, you know, clinical research. I think that’s cool. I think what and again, I don’t know anything about med school admissions, but I think what they do want to see is that you are genuinely excited to be pursuing a career in medicine. So I think if the hours that you have accumulated thus far have given you some experiences that you can talk about with enthusiasm and say, you know, here’s what I saw, here’s what I learned, here’s how I grew from this, because I think that’s what goes further is like the quality of those experiences and what did you get out of them?

I don’t think it’s so much acquiring more numbers. Like if you were sitting at a desk for volunteering and you’re like, you know, sitting at a computer and not doing anything, but you have 200 hours of that, is that useful versus if you have like 10 hours where you were volunteering with patients and you were talking to patients and seeing them and you know, you’re hearing a lot of stories and you’re seeing things that really touched you and made you think about things, you know, made you feel things, that is way more valuable in my opinion. Like I think being able to talk about it’s how you’re able to talk about your experiences and what you learn from them.

I don’t think the gap here is necessary unless you feel like you need more experiences to kind of flush out your idea of why am I doing this and what are the qualities that are going to make me a really good doctor that I took from these experiences. So for me it’s a lot more about the quality than the quantity of the numbers. And again, I don’t think it matters what kind of research you’re doing. I think doing research is showing that you’re like intellectually curious, which is a nice way to say you’re a nerd because if you’re going to med school, you’re a nerd. I’m a nerd. Yeah, we love it. We love the studying. But I think it doesn’t matter exactly what you’re doing is how you can talk about it.

Like honestly, I had the scribing experience and that was super important, I think for showing that I was, you know, committed to furthering my understanding of what clinical medicine was and that I was interested in it. But most of my med school application was about rock climbing. It was in my personal statement. I worked as a rock wall manager. like all my activities are rock climbing. I had some volunteering stuff. So like, but it was the skills I had taken from that I said, here’s what’s going to make me a good physician. Here’s what’s going to help me care for patients and be a good team player and a good leader. And I think it was more about, you know, those experiences I had and the richness of those experiences. I didn’t have that many shadowing experiences. I think I had maybe like 20 hours total, but they were they were really like intense. Like I was super busy during those shadowing experiences, but they got to talk a lot to the attendings. I saw a lot of things. And I feel like they were they were they were high quality. It was super high value time. I wasn’t just twiddling my thumbs like sitting in clinic waiting for things to happen. So I think all that to say it’s more about the quality of your experiences and if those hours have given you experiences that you feel you can talk about and show that you’re going to be an amazing doctor, I don’t think you need to feel like you need to take a research year just to get more hours because I do think there’s a point of diminishing returns where you’re like, well, why are we getting more hours? I know I want to be a doctor. I know why I want to be a doctor. Like we don’t need to keep shadowing. Let’s let’s get in and let’s start doing it ourselves.

Pooja: Yeah, no, absolutely. And I also will say that although I am not an admissions representative myself and I am by no means an expert in that, we do have some episodes with Holly Proffitt who is one of Blueprint’s admissions med school admissions advisors and she served on admissions committees and been involved with that before. She’s done our episodes one, episode four, which is our last episode, and then we’re recording another episode with her in a little bit, but she talks a lot about a similar thing that you’re describing, Casey, which is that quality over quantity is important and what’s more important than how much you did was about your ability to speak on it. So I think you’re absolutely right.

Casey: Wow, I feel super validated because that’s just me making things up. So I’m glad an expert…

Pooja: Yes. Yes. No, that’s I this isn’t this is a transitive property. So I’m not an expert, you’re not an expert, but Holly is and Holly told me, so I’m telling you.

Casey: I wish I had these episodes when I was like going through all this.

Pooja: Yeah.

Casey: That would be so helpful.

Pooja: I mean, listen, we’re doing residency applications soon, so maybe a lot of a lot of it translates, I think. A lot of the topics that pre-meds are worried about are the same things that med students are worried about. And I think you’d be worried about it again for residency and to fellowship. So it’s kind of just the same thing over and over again.

Casey: It never ends. You’re going to be always worried about standardized exams, applying for things, people evaluating you. It just it is what it is.

Pooja: Yeah, you just get better at being used to it, I think.

Casey: Yes, yes, with all the reps, you just you kind of habituate to it. It’s all about the reps.

Pooja: Absolutely. Is there anything else about that Reddit post, Casey that you think we should address before we move on to our final set of questions?

Casey: Oh, I think I think I ranted on all the things I was thinking about. The quality. The not dissing any other kind of research. It’s all valid research. Be enthusiastic, as long as you’re enjoying what you’re doing. And I think that’s why I’m such a big proponent of like, like there’s certainly a certain level to where you need to again, like do clinical activities and show your interest and get those experiences. But I think the bulk of your activities can be things you enjoy and as long as you’re getting something out of it, it’s just more fun to talk to someone who’s enthusiastic about what they’ve done. So even if it’s not, you know, exactly medicine related, if you’re passionate about it, it’s going to come across and like people interviewing you are going to really it’s going to be more fun to talk to you because, you know, you’ve just had a fun experience that you want to share.

Pooja: Yeah, no, absolutely. And I also will say, I think this may not be, I can’t, you know, read the mind of the advisor who was advising CleeYour about their application. But I do think that there is something to be said about the emotional maturity that a person has before they go into medical school. And I think that you know, there are a lot of things that contribute to a person’s emotional maturity, their life experiences, time, right? And I think sometimes, if you haven’t had the life experiences that kind of give you the emotional bandwidth that allows you to succeed in medical school, time can also do that. And so there are people who I’ve met and even I was kind of advised to take a gap year. And I don’t think it was funny. My advisor didn’t want to tell me this specifically, but I could tell that she was kind of getting at the, you should like grow up a smidge more before you go to medical school.

And I think it was totally fair. It was totally fair and sound advice. I did take a singular year and I did think that year made a difference. Like I remember at the time I was very rigid on what I thought I wanted to do. And then I took some time away from the world of research that I was in undergrad and I realized like, “Yeah, I do want to do other things.” And I think that time was essential for me because it allowed me to kind of enter medical school with a way more open mind than I would have if I had just gone straight through. So I think if there are situations like that, um, that may be underlying what you’re talking about, or what that admissions person was kind of talking about, but again, I can’t say for sure. But I do think it’s an important factor for people as well. Like are they emotionally ready to do medical school? Cuz it’s challenging in a lot of ways, honestly.

Casey: Yeah, I’m so glad you brought that up because that is something that I was also thinking about is like the emotional maturity and perhaps lack thereof I’ve seen in people who like went straight through. And I think it’s just having more time or more life experiences outside of the structured environment of school that you’ve been in for so many years. Right. It helped give me a little bit more of a better perspective too because like I feel like even the hardest days in med school, I was like, “This is still, you know, this is still an awesome job that I will get to do.” And I feel like some of my classmates are like, “Ah, I should have gone into like construction or something, you know, worked a desk job.” And I was like, “No, no, no, no. I you, you do, I promise, having done some of those jobs, you do not want to do that. This, you are sitting here getting to study in the air conditioning. I promise this is much better than some of the other jobs you’re talking about.” Which, that’s just like one small part of it. I absolutely like the emotional maturity that sometimes just comes with time and more experience. And so if you are taking a gap year for that reason, I think it doesn’t even need to be more shadowing or volunteering or clinical things. It can be something, you know, like people have done like Peace Corps or, you know, traveling abroad or, you know, something like that. Like it doesn’t even have to be medicine related. It’s just more of like, let me get more life experience and street smarts. I think that can be really helpful and just also help make you more adaptable because a lot of getting through medical school or I should say thriving in medical school is learning how to be adaptable because I also, I would say I was a very rigid person and you know, I’m very controlling. I want things a certain way and like learning to be more flexible and just kind of go with the flow and roll with things that are happening is and not lose your brain, like lose your mind when that happens, just being like, “All right, this isn’t, this isn’t perfect, but it’s fine. We’re going to make it through.” I think just developing that does take time and it takes some experience outside of, you know, a structured classroom environment.

Pooja: Right. I also want to transition a little bit now into the questions that we kind of have for you and I think you’ve kind of answered one of them already, but it’s about like activities, hobbies, or jobs that you think are especially valuable to pursue during a gap year. It sounds like from what you’ve said that anything that requires you to be adaptable and kind of like pushes you outside of the comfort zone that you’re normally in are valuable to pursue. Is there anything else?

Casey: Yeah, I think that, which isn’t like super tangible. I think customer service jobs, great. Because a lot of medicine is customer service. We had a, one of our lectures, I don’t remember what, he was talking about, but he was like, “Your patients are much less likely to see you if they like you.” So like honestly just being able to talk to people and relate to people, which is not easy to do if you haven’t talked to a lot of people because college is kind of a bubble. You know, you’re around a lot of peers who are probably more similar to you than you think. Certainly some, you know, you’ll certainly have unique classmates, but you’re not talking to a variety of people of different ages and different backgrounds and ethnicities. And I think working customer service jobs that are kind of putting you at the forefront of humanity sometimes, just being able to interact with people when they’re not at their best. I think is a really valuable skill to have going into medicine and being able to, I don’t know if I want to say like take control, but like be able to navigate a conversation with a patient and their family member. And I’m certainly not an expert at this. I have a long way to go, but I think having had experiences, it sounds silly, but like in a whole foods, just interacting with customers or at the rock wall, interacting with people coming in at the desk and helping train people and like teaching classes. I think just having those interactions with people are super important for kind of building those skills and kind of that emotional intelligence as well of like just working with other people and I guess more sensitivity too.

Pooja: Yeah, no, absolutely. Absolutely. Now, in terms of the gap year itself, how can people, I guess ensure that their gap year supports their long-term goals? Because I know you talked about how you had some goals for all three of the gap years that you’ve taken, but how can people kind of ensure that’s going to happen to them? Because I know one of the things that people worry about is kind of losing momentum. Like they have structured time, sort of like you said, they have structured time, then they’re unstructured and they’re worried about losing the momentum that they had when they had more structure in their time.

Casey: Totally. Yeah, I think it’s super important to have a plan. It starts with those goals. So for me, I mean it just started with like, I need, I need to take the MCAT. I need to do something clinical and I need to, I did some volunteering as well of just like little random things and then I need to also make money because the scribing, scribing pays like peanuts. So that’s why I was also working the rock wall manager job, because I was like, “I have to pay my rent.” So I think your goals and your needs, you need to like set up what your goals are. Like, “Okay, I’m going to take MCAT, I need to apply to med school.” And then I think trying to stay disciplined and rigid with those goals. So I just talked about being adaptable, but I think some things like you pick an MCAT date and you say, “This is the date, this is when I’m taking it.” Because I will say just doing a lot of tutoring, I see a lot of people let things get in the way and they’ll push it back and push it back and like it messes up your timeline. And I think it’s really important to try to be strict with yourself and say, “This is when I’m taking it. I am going to stick to this date as best as I can.” And of course, like sometimes life circumstances just come up and happen. But I think, to the best of your abilities, being strict with your goals and your timeline of like, you know, I know I need to apply to med school at this time, so I need my MCAT back at this time. And then you have to factor in what other considerations do I have? Do I need to work to support myself like I did? So I had to like find a job that would be flexible. So like with the scribing and the manager job, there were other people working in those positions where I could say if I needed, you know, if I needed a couple days where I was like, “I need to like really hunker down and study,” I could switch shifts with people. Like it was very flexible. So I was very lucky to be able to find jobs that would let me factor in some flexibility and say, “Okay, these are MCAT study days.” And I use that time as precious. I was like, “Okay, I’m not working today. I’m, you know, not making money today. I have to study for the MCAT today.” Like I don’t have a choice. Like that’s the reason. I don’t get to go gallivant and like have fun. Like this is the day to study. So kind of like building that self-discipline I think. And that was something else that was valuable with the gap years is saying, like this is what I know I need to get done in this time.

Pooja: Yeah.

Casey: And that was also helpful going into medical school too is saying, “Well, if I want to see my friend tonight and climb, I need to do this work right now even though it’s the last thing I want to do,” right? So I think developing that self-discipline is something that can come from the gap here and is also important to work on, and kind of be strict with your goals and say, “I know this is what I want, so I’m going to try to work as hard as I can to make things happen so that I can achieve those goals.” And again, like I feel like I’m coming from a very privileged place because I got, was very lucky. I got, you know, jobs that let me do that and I was able to stick to my study timeline. It doesn’t always happen, but I think doing the best you can to try to make that happen is really helpful. And having like a long-term goal in mind, like for me, even on the days when I didn’t want to study because of course, really where, where you can… it’s studying when you’re not motivated. That’s where the real, that’s where the real stuff happens. So anyone can study when they’re motivated. But if you’re sitting down and being consistent every day, no matter how you feel, that’s how you’re going to get where you want to go. And I think having a long-term goal in mind, like I’m a visual person, so I would, I would picture my white coat ceremony, like my first day of med school, I was like envisioning myself wearing that coat and that got me through every single day where I was like, “I don’t want to do 40 more UWorld questions and like get a 0% on them today. But I really, I’m excited for that white coat ceremony. I can’t wait to take a picture in my white coat.” And for some reason that got me through like every single day of studying when I was like, “This kind of sucks, but also look at what I can eventually be doing.” And I think having that long-term goal in mind, at least for me was really helpful in saying like, “Right now this kind of sucks, but it’s temporary and it’s for something bigger and better down the line.”

Pooja: Yeah.

Casey: It really helps to have that, some long-term thing to motivate you on the days when you’re not motivated.

Pooja: Yeah, it sounds like there’s sort of a duality to ensuring that you support your goals. There’s this like rigidity about having a goal and sticking to it and being able to be disciplined with yourself along the way. But then also an adaptability of being able to roll with the punches, being able to make changes if there’s some life event that gets in the way or there’s a new opportunity that is in line with your goals but you didn’t see coming and being able to take that on and adapt your routine in the way that you kind of balance your time to accommodate that new opportunity. So it sounds like there’s a little bit of a balance there that people should think about as they’re kind of navigating the gap year.

Casey: Totally. Just trying to prioritize consistency and like building the habit of like, “This is when I study, this is when I’m working,” and trying to stick with that.

Pooja: Yeah. Okay, amazing. So I have I have two more questions. I promise. I know you have been so, so informative and thank you so, so much for your insight. I wonder.

Casey: No, I love I love just someone letting me blab. It’s great.

Pooja: No, it’s listen, I’m here all week. So I wonder if there’s any like specific moment during any of your gap years that you think has made a lasting impact. Because I know I know not everybody has like a come to Jesus moment where they’re like, “Oh my God, like this is it. It’s going to change my life forever.” Um, but I wonder if you had anything that kind of feels close to that?

Casey: Oh, man. I think yeah, that was the thing too with like applying to medical school, there was never one moment where I was like, “Whoa, medicine, hooray.” Like it was just like an accumulation of all of my experiences. And I think it was similar with my research year. It was more of like, “This is all confirming that so far I’m making the right choices and like these are all things that I want to absolutely do.” I think there was one day in clinic that really made me be like, “Oh, this is why I want to do this.” It was like we had a patient come in. So I was working with a physician who does a lot of congenital hand surgery. That’s something I’m super interested in. I think it’s so cool. But that’s what he specializes in. He was seeing a patient who… it was like a prenatal visit because she’d had prior pregnancy losses for like fetal birth defects and everything. It was really sad. And they had found a hand anomaly on her ultrasound and um, so they were coming in because they were concerned like, “Are we going to have to terminate this one? Is this going to be something else that like we’re going to lose another pregnancy?” And just the way the doctor was counseling them, like just based on his expertise and knowledge. He’s like, “I think your child’s going to be, like this isn’t associated with other problems. Like they’re going to have a great quality of life whether or not surgery is pursued for the hand.” And the family like started crying. It was really emotional. And I was just like, “This is incredible, the impact that you can have like without surgery.” Like, of course, I want to operate. That’s why I want to do orthopedics. But like just the comfort you can provide to someone of saying like, based on what I know, like you’re going to have a healthy kid and they’re going to have a great life. And it was just really touching. And I’m still figuring out, I’m trying to still like figure out why. I think it was just the ability to like provide that comfort to someone and like that like a hope that they’re like, that’s why I want to do Ortho is like you can give someone a better quality of life. And the fact that he was able to reassure them that like not only is your pregnancy likely going to be viable, but also even with this hand anomaly, like they’re going to be okay. They’re going to have a great life like based on other kids who have these hand differences. It was just really touching. And it just, it was funny too because it was my very last day of clinic and I was like, “This kind of summed up the whole year of like, I absolutely can’t see myself doing anything else than this. Like this is awesome.”

Pooja: Yeah, yeah.

Casey: I don’t know if I answered exactly what you were asking, but like that was one moment…

Pooja: No, I think it is. What strikes me about that story is that it’s a moment where a physician was able to kind of meet someone where they were at and I guess really encapsulate how personal medicine is. Like I think that when a lot of us pursue medicine without having personal experiences of either us or someone we know being sick, it’s easy to kind of forget that the moment that you’re with a patient, although it’s just another day in the job for you is like a really meaningful part of their life and their life story. Like you’re kind of entering their world in a very important moment for them and you become like a main part of their life. And I think that’s a really beautiful thing. And we sometimes get numb to that because we kind of do it every day, multiple times a day.

Casey: Exactly. Yeah, it’s remembering that like it’s always new for the patient, even if it’s your 30th femoral neck fracture on call, but it’s new for that patient.

Pooja: Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Casey: It’s important.

Pooja: Agreed, agreed. Well, thank you for sharing that. Um, I guess final question is, what would you say to students who are unsure or nervous about taking a gap year? And if you have a different answer for the pre-med year versus the med school year, definitely share that as well.

Casey: Totally. I think, I mean in both cases, I would say try to talk to people who have done them. That was something I did at least for not for the gap year. The gap year’s pre-med for me were necessary. I hadn’t taken the MCAT. But for the med school one, I talked to a lot of peers who had taken a research year just to like hear their thoughts like would they do it again? Did they think it was worth it? Like did they find it helpful? Like just like picking their brain on what their experience was like. So I think if you have people you know or if you can find a network through maybe like your advising at your college or something, people to talk to who have done it, would be really helpful. I’m also happy to answer questions if you have them. Yeah. But um, yeah, I think that’s the big thing is like talk to people who have had the experience.

Pooja: Yes.

Casey: And if you have mentors, talk to them and have them, you know, see like, “Do you think this would be beneficial for me?” I think that would be my biggest advice is try to speak with people who have done this before.

Pooja: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Okay, thank you, Casey. I want to run down just a couple of takeaways from today’s conversation, in case anybody’s zoned out. No, I’m kidding. For, for me, I feel like. Yeah, I mean, listen, listen. I don’t know what people do when they listen to podcasts. I feel like I’m like generally either like walking or running somewhere.

Casey: Oh, I’m never just sitting and listening. I’m always like, you know, I’m either, yeah, driving or doing chores, something half-distracted.

Pooja: Yeah. So I feel like the big takeaway from this for me is that there’s, you can do a number of things in a gap year, whether you’re doing, and also depending on when you’re doing it, you could be doing it before med school, you could be doing it during med school. I’ve even heard of some people doing it after med school, it all depends. But the gap year is only as good as what you kind of do with it. And even though it can look different from any person, like for you it was very research oriented because that was in line with what your goal was, but it seems like the core of it is that it should be in line with a goal that you set out for yourself. And that during that year, you kind of grow by working towards said goal and accomplishing it. And by being able to do that, you grow both professionally and personally because you kind of figure out how to balance a bunch of things at the same time and grow to kind of develop the seed of a career that you would want to have when you, you know, are a resident and beyond residency. Is there anything that you, Casey think is like the biggest takeaway from all of this?

Casey: Being open to new experiences and exploring. I think that’s a big part of the gap year is like you certainly have goals and things you want to accomplish, but be open and reflect on all of your experiences and really take the time to check in with yourself and say, “Is this, this is helping me reach my goal? Am I enjoying this? Like how do I feel when I’m doing this?” Because I think it’s really important to be checking in every once in a while with yourself and reflect on, is this accomplishing what I want and am I getting something out of this?

Pooja: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Well, thank you, Casey. We have got a ton of episodes coming up about specializing, time management, interviewing, and so much more. So please make sure to like and subscribe on YouTube or wherever you follow us, wherever you get your podcasts, whether it be Spotify, Apple Music, or whatever else I don’t really know. But thank you guys all so much for listening to Pursuit of Practice brought to brought to you by Blueprint. And we will see you next time. 

This is a podcast created by physicians and medical educators, but is in no way to be construed as medical advice. All of the opinions shared are those of individual people and are not reflective of their associated institutions or of Blueprint Test Prep.

That’s a wrap on this episode of Pursuit of Practice. Remember, you’re not in this alone. Head to blueprintprep.com for MCAT prep courses, board exam prep, free resources, and more to support every stage of your journey to and through medical school.