After four brutal years of medical school, my colleagues and I finally obtained our medical degrees. As graduation approached, I couldn’t help but reflect on the whole experience, but when I tried discussing the matter with my friends, I discovered that we all had difficulty articulating the precise concoction of emotions we were feeling. Most simply summed up the feeling as “weird.” On graduation eve, however, I found myself in bed with tears rolling in rivulets down my cheeks, and wondering how it could be so hard to explain why.
This difficulty stems from so many different aspects of the medical journey. One part is the arduous nature of the beast: the sleepless nights of study, the sacrificed relationships, the anxiety surrounding the constant exams. After years of what feels like martyrdom, our graduation feels like an admission of the strain under which we were placed, a validation of it, and a big, “Well I’m glad that’s finally over.”
The sighs and tears we release are both joyful and bitter. We constantly question and doubt ourselves. What did I actually do to deserve this? What does a grade of “honors” tell you about me, when I have friends who put their entire being and soul into their work and only scrape by with a “pass”? Am I simply a professional test taker, trained my whole life to be proficient in the science of multiple choice exams? We feel that once we enter residency, we will be found out for the impostors we are, and that the suffixes after our name are nothing more than overpriced letters. The one thing that comforts me about this self-derision is that I believe it shows just how intensely we desire to live up to and surpass the standards of being a physician.
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