Session 328 Janet is a nurse who switched to the premed path a few years ago. Listen to how she overcame a 499 on the MCAT and advocated for herself during the application process! Meanwhile, make sure to check out other podcasts on the MedEd Media Network to help you along your journey towards a becoming a great physician! [01:40] Janet's Nursing Path and Why Medicine Having a family member diagnosed with cancer, Janet wanted to help take care of them so she ended up doing a CNA course. See how nurses did with their care she found as something high level and more of critical thinking. This led her to dive into the nursing path to be able to help people more. One night, she had a patient who was very ill but on the monitor showed a perfect rhythm but when she went to his room, he was pulseless. So they had to call code blue and had to resuscitate him. As the nurse there, she had to tell the story and why the patient was there to get the doctors up to speed. She then saw that the role she had in nursing wasn't enough. She was part of the plan but she wasn't really the person inputting as much as she really desired to. "The role that I had in nursing wasn't enough. I wasn't able to be that agent of change in the patient." Janet's mom is a doctor of medicine, specializing in Somatology. She has worked with her in rural Tanzania and moved around a couple of places. So she got to see different things like it's a ward full of a hundred patients with not enough room. They're trying to give everybody the care they can. And she has seen so much of this as a child. She's very fortunate to also have everything explained to her. When it came to nursing, she was getting a picture but it wasn't the overall picture. And this was what she found as the bloc between nursing and medicine. [07:20] A Need to Work and Her Initial Steps Janet initially thought that this was going to be a longer road for her, knowing too, that she had to work through school. She has been working since 15 and so she knew this had to be practical. She also thought she wasn't going to be smart enough to do it, not having the time and the resources to be able to fully immerse herself in taking classes and being able to do her extracurriculars. "This has to work with me also paying bills...no matter how much education I have, if I can't pay my bills, I'm not going to make it in life." Ultimately, she signed up for Chem 101 which she thought was a horrible idea being in a  class where you had to take it before to get in. But with her nursing prereqs, she had taken a similar class. They took the credit for the class, but once she got to the class, she had no idea what was going on. At that point again, she was telling herself she wasn't ready yet. So she took the first exam and got a 25 out of 100. She just didn't know what was going on. So she went to her instructor and explained that she had to take the class before it since her previous class didn't teach her what she needed to learn. Good thing, her instructor was gracious enough to let her switch classes four weeks into school. She took a W for the first class. Then she got to take the class before that and ended up doing well and didn't feel crazy. Janet decided and made a promise to herself to do things one step at a time. "The breadth and the depth of the knowledge are important because everything compounds upon each other." [12:10] Juggling Things at the Same Time Janet was working night shifts. But she strongly advises people to do otherwise. She worked at night and went to class during the day, which she did for a year. Then she did the extracurriculars as well. She did activities for living facilities from 4pm to 7pm. So she couldn't work 12 hours and do that, therefore she had to do it on the day she had school. Eventually, she realized she couldn't do this anymore so she started going to school on MWF and then do the things she needed to do on Tue/Thu/Sat and one day off to recuperate. [14:05] Extracurricula