When I started medical school, I thought success would come down to how much I could learn and how well I scored on exams.
Memorize the pathways. Learn the anatomy. Understand the physiology. Study harder than everyone else.
If I could do those things, everything else would work itself out.
And don’t get me wrong, those things matter. But somewhere between the exams, the clinical rotations, the school organization meetings, the research projects, the residency applications, and the life that continued happening outside of medicine, I realized that the most important lessons weren’t in any textbook.
First Lesson: The Textbooks Won’t Teach You How to Fail
They teach you how to diagnose failure. They teach you how to identify risk factors for failure. They teach you how organ systems fail.
But they don’t teach you what it feels like when you fail. They don’t teach you what it’s like to work toward something for months or years and not get the outcome you wanted. They don’t teach you what it feels like when a manuscript you’ve poured your heart into gets rejected. When an opportunity goes to someone else. When mentors don’t answer your emails. When you start comparing yourself to everyone around you and convince yourself that somehow you’ve fallen behind.
Medicine attracts people who are used to succeeding. People who have spent most of their lives being told they’re high achievers. Because of that, failure can feel less like an event and more like an identity.
I remember sending 146 emails to orthopaedic surgeons, mentors, alumni, and contacts trying to figure out how to break into a specialty that felt impossible to access.
I got seven responses….Seven.
At the time, it felt devastating. I thought if I just worked hard enough, networked enough, and sent enough emails, something would click.
Instead, most of them went unanswered.
What I didn’t realize then was that those unanswered emails would ultimately push me toward taking a research year. At the time, taking a year away from medical school felt like falling behind. I watched classmates continue forward while I stepped off the traditional path.
But that decision led me to a year of dedicated mentorship with an orthopaedic surgeon in the exact field I came to medical school hoping to pursue. It gave me opportunities, experiences, friendships, and growth that I never would have found otherwise.
Looking back now, one of the things I viewed as a failure became one of the biggest blessings of my medical school journey.
Second Lesson: Resilience Isn’t Something You’re Born With
I used to think resilient people were just built differently. That some people naturally handled stress better than others. Medical school taught me otherwise.
Resilience isn’t something you’re born with. It’s something you build. One difficult day at a time. One setback at a time. One disappointment at a time. There are days when I feel motivated, disciplined, and confident. There are also days when I sit in front of my laptop staring at an endless to-do list wondering how I can possibly keep up with everything. Days where I feel behind. Days where I question whether I’m good enough. Days where I wonder if everyone else has figured something out that I haven’t.
What I’ve realized is that the people I admire most aren’t the people who never struggle.
They’re the people who keep showing up anyway. Not perfectly. Just consistently.
Medical school has taught me that strength often looks much quieter than I expected. Sometimes strength is getting out of bed, asking for help, admitting when youre not okay, and simply deciding to try again tomorrow. That is strength. That is resilience. That never give up mentality.
Third Lesson: The People Matter More Than You Think
Medical school has a funny way of convincing you that your worth is tied to your productivity.
Your score. Your class rank. Your research publications. Your residency interviews. Your match outcome. The list never ends….
But somewhere along the way, I realized that none of those things mean very much if you have nobody to share them with. My family, my partner, my friends, my mentors. The people who answer late-night phone calls. The people who remind me who I am when medicine starts consuming my entire identity. The people who celebrate the wins and sit with me through the losses.
I’ve learned that achievement feels surprisingly empty when there’s nobody waiting to celebrate with you. And I’ve learned that some of the strongest people in my life are the ones carrying me through this journey both inside medicine and completely outside of it.
The Biggest Lesson
Maybe the biggest lesson medical school taught me is that medicine isn’t actually about medicine. It’s about people. It’s about relationships. It’s about showing up for others during some of the hardest moments of their lives. It’s about finding purpose even when you’re exhausted. It’s about learning that your value as a person was never supposed to come from a test score, a publication count, or where you match.
The textbooks taught me how the body works. Medical school taught me how life works.
And honestly, I’m still learning.
Every day.
If you’re in the middle of training right now, feeling overwhelmed, uncertain, or wondering whether you’re doing enough, I hope you know you’re not alone. None of us have this figured out. We’re all just trying our best to grow into the physicians and people we hope to become.
— Aghdas
