Resilience is Key

Having finished my second year of undergrad as a premed, I have been able to reflect a lot on what I have learned from my experience and what I seek to change for the future. I am proud of all that I have accomplished, but more importantly, I am grateful for the stops along the way where I have failed and grown as a result. I’ve learned there are two parts to overcoming failure. The first part involves acknowledging and taking ownership of your failure. The second part entails learning from that failure and learning to be resilient to continue enhancing yourself.

As I was taking on a challenging premed course load at college, I began to associate the word “failure” with grades.  I was afraid that one poor grade was the start of a slippery slope impacting my entire future career of becoming a doctor. As a premed student, I thought it was normal to push myself to work to my extreme limit in order to get ahead and to try to achieve perfection at all costs. For example, after not doing as well as I wanted to in a biology class, I was devastated and felt like I failed. My first thoughts were that maybe I would be “weeded-out” as a premed student, that I could never get into medical school, and that I was not as smart as everyone else. But, after taking a while to reflect, I realized that my mindset wasn’t healthy and I was not interpreting the situation with the right attitude. This class that I had struggled in was actually the most interesting and informational class I had taken in my life, but I needed to work more on my studying strategies. So, while at first I interpreted this grade as some catastrophic reflection of myself, I realized that this was not the correct failure to address in the situation. Instead of blaming my intelligence so harshly, I needed to realize where I needed improvement in understanding of concepts and reinforcing them during studying. I’ve shifted my focus. Instead, if I don’t achieve the grade I want, I take time to figure out where I made mistakes and plan how to change that in the future. My goal is not perfection, but improvement.

For example, after that biology class I made sure to study for a reasonable amount of time every day, making sure I included both reading and assessment into my studying equally. I typed my handwritten notes to organize them into a comprehensible study guide, printed them out, highlighted sections and made additional notes. For me, it was helpful to have a process of filtering my notes so that I could retain what I felt was the most pertinent. In addition, when I needed to, I reached out to a student tutor to help me with specific homework or test questions I had missed. I learned to embrace the confusion, mistakes, and misunderstandings and to use it to push me to find the right answers.

One of the best practices I have put in place is to set small, achievable goals for myself that reaffirm my sense of self-efficacy. For example, I make a goal for myself to study a certain amount of time or certain number of concepts a day. This was helpful for me in the long run as I was better able to pay attention to smaller concepts over time and then connect them with my greater overall understanding. It seems simple, but for me, establishing the routine of my studying helped me a lot. Additionally, I would put myself in an environment where I needed to study: the quiet part of the library. By deliberately choosing what spaces I needed to study in advance, I put myself in a mindset of productivity. Lastly, if I was really struggling with a topic, I made sure to meet with the professor to ask for clarification. This has the extra benefit of helping me to build better relationships with my professors.

In addition to setting goals, I’ve also learned to be more patient with myself. For example, in my first year of college when I had to write one of my first chemistry post labs, I did not understand any of the questions, became easily frustrated, and wanted to renounce chemistry completely. It was the first week of general chemistry and I didn’t understand what percent yield and other equations meant. My high school chemistry classes were rudimentary and didn’t have labs. Although I could solve some of the equations, my main frustration arose from not understanding the reasoning behind the equations. I thought I had failed. After taking the time to get more practice in writing post labs and working with my TAs, I realized that none of my earlier frustration was necessary. All I needed to do was take a moment to catch my breath and plan out my goals to perform better. Once I did that, I began to understand the material more thoroughly. Eventually, I ended up doing well on my post labs and enjoying their content. It is hard to believe that now those equations are like second nature to me. The small steps I took helped me move on from that sense of failure I had felt initially.

Learning from my failures has contributed to my overall resilience and grit. One famous quote that comes to mind whenever I think of resilience is from Winston Churchill: “success is the ability to move from one failure to another without loss of enthusiasm.” Or, maybe I think of the less intellectual song by Kelly Clarkson, “What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Stronger.” Of course, it’s easier said than done to learn how to manage and cope with failure in our lives. I sometimes still think I am failing and don’t listen to my own advice or that of others. But then I ground myself and remind myself that I am capable of many successes – small and large. And if I can overcome one failure, I can overcome a hundred more. I will do my best to carry this fact with me through the remainder of my path to becoming a doctor. I know it will be difficult at times, maybe even beyond what I have experienced already, but I know that through continued resilience, I can overcome anything.