A Day in the Life of a First Year Medical Student

5:53 a.m. –  Time to wake up! I don’t need any alarm, my body becomes accustomed to the morning sport activity, so usually three times a week, I go for a run to the Petřín’s Tower. Then I have a shower and breakfast. During breakfast I try to squeeze in a few minutes of pharmacology studies – so muscarine, carbachol, atropine and I’m in hurry catching transport to school.
8:00 a.m.– First lecture – Immunology: Development of B and T lymphocytes
9:45 a.m. – Seminar – Immunology: Regulation of the immune System
11:30 a.m.– Practice – Histology: Morphology of lymphatic tissue
01:00 p.m. – Lunch! I have only 30 minutes to warm and eat my home-prepared lunch. I see a long line of students with small boxes in front of the microwave. Ok, I don’t have time for this, therefore lunch is postponed. I’m slightly tired heading to the building of the Faculty Hospital. 
01:30 p.m. – Practise – First Aid. It is time for brain relax, it is essential to stretch a body, warm up and start to train resuscitation. After few minutes a professor reminds me that I don’t have to try to pump out the figure’s stomach. I’m starting to feel a pain in my arms, and after the next 10 minutes I can stop – I don’t have “magic” hands, I really didn’t bring the plastic figure alive.
03:00 p.m. – Late lunch at the school canteen with my classmates. Then one more coffee on the run, and back to my studies..
03:30 p.m. – Library. We all are sitting next to each other, but everyone is there alone with their own earplugs, laptop and books.
05:30 p.m. – Arriving home. Time to catch up on some news online, check my email and also to return calls from my family and friends.
06:00 p.m. – Studying. Reviewing today’s material from the lectures and seminars
07:30 p.m. – Dinner – I am trying to stare at my histology textbook and identify some difference between the small intestine and the colon slides. Vain effort.
08:00 p.m. – Studying, usually till 11 p.m.
00:00- Bedtime!

It is not so bad as it seems. Of course it is impossible to study all the time without having a break. It’s essential to find some kind of relaxation, which makes it manageable. My relaxation were the weekends spent in the highlands with friends, family and also to go out running.

For the last 12 months I’ve been an “experimental rabbit” for the first time– learning students when giving injections.

I left school around midnight and spent Saturdays studying at school in classrooms for the first time.

 I visited a hospital as a medical staff and gave injections for the first time.

I ran a race (cross run, 6 km) and I came on the 3rd place in the women category for the first time.

It was a successful school year. I have only one advice to future first year medical students: Start studying from the very first week. If you see that you are suffering during your studies and can’t tolerate it, then switch to another profession. At a medical school there is no one who doesn’t study all the time. On the other hand if you will get used to live a life of a medical student, you will experience many great moments. And one more thing, every student of medicine has some sort of “student deformity”: each week you will have a new illness. It does not matter if the illness occurs only in Ashkenazi Jews or was described only in two patients so far.  Besides that it is quite normal that if an older medical student will look at your hand and then hold it, you will in consternation look at your hands and ask: “Any anomalies?”.