Summary: Episode 58: Today, I’m talking about the top 10 stressors experienced by freshmen college students. Biggest Stressors PreMeds Face Every Day Of course, these same stressors do persist throughout all of your education, not just college but medical school and beyond as well. However, I think it’s important as I do more and more research, to go earlier and earlier in the process to get a better understanding of just who wants to be a doctor anyway? This topic today was inspired by 2 purposes. One, I recently gave that publication that I practiced with you guys in our previous podcast in which I outlined the stress of exams and the evidence-based behind different interventions for stress on the Medical School Podcast. I presented that to a group of second year medical students and it’s right now, February of 2014, and this is a period where they really ramped up in preparation for the first major licensing exam. It comes up in the summer in about June every year where second year medical students take an exam to get … it’s the first of 4 … to get their license to practice medicine. That content covers the first entire 2 years of medical school is by far the largest volume of information covered on a single exam and just about you have ever covered in your life up until that point. The MCAT stress in many ways is a little worse just because they are intentionally testing how you think, not what you know. At least, for the licensing exams, you’ve taken the class before. For the MCAT, you kind of can’t take the class. Yes, you take your prerequisites, but they’re going throw you in the scenarios and test how you think. They’re very, very good at it. This study … the other thing that … I should say that the other thing that inspired this podcast episode was a recent publication in the psychiatric annals in December of 2013. It’s about these top stressors and resilience in college students. In this study, there was a sample size of 644 freshmen in college from 7 different universities in United States in the east. It’s a pretty good sample size, right? They administered a couple of instruments to them that could measure stress and asked them about what the different stressors were. Then they also had some questions designed to look at resilience and what the students felt were their strengths. I’m going to go ahead and read what they said their top 10 stressors were. I’m going to focus more on other data presented in the study, specifically about different categories of behavioral, social, and health changes that are experienced. I summed up the human experience of these particular stressors and gave you a clearer picture of the impact these type of stressors, and perhaps, the way you navigate them. Whether you’re going to do good or not with each of these top 10 stressors, how that impacts your life. The top 10 stressors beginning with the top 1 was completing homework. Number 2, making good grades. Number 3, studying. Number 4, meeting my own academic standards. Five, procrastination. Six, a heavy workload. Seven, writing assignments. Eight, too many responsibilities. Nine, meeting deadlines. Ten, not enough time to relax. Doesn’t that sound like our life? You see how these stressors are pervasive, that they don’t really go away? This is a pretty sophisticated study that had a lot more granular detail besides these things, but it’s so interesting to me that if we stopped the podcast right there on the top 10, you’d already have enough information to paint a perfect picture for pre-med. Probably at the top of the list, for number 1 for the pre-medical student, you had put fear of not getting in a medical school or maybe other subservient goals such as a low MCAT score or a low GPA. Those things that, at least, you believe are closely tied to MCAT and GPA, not necessarily true if you’ve been masterminded appropriately and h[...]
