Night Walk in Tokyo Shibuya 東京散歩

Hey everybody, welcome to a little Q&A and catch-up video that I wanted to do for the longest time, ever since I stopped filming for a little while. When we suddenly reached 100k on this channel, I started noticing a lot of new people here and I just wanted to catch up, talk a little bit about what I study, what I'm currently going through, some of my thoughts and experiences, and let's just get into it. For everybody who's new here, I'm 22 and I study in Lisbon. I'm a medical student in my fifth year. I'm two days away from starting the new semester, which is kind of brutal, as I just feel like I've just finished finals and stuff. Where is Ollie? Ollie wanted to get in. There he goes. I'm going to be categorizing all the questions. It's going to be like 30 minutes. Grab your mug and let's just have a cozy time together. First question is, how did your exams go and what are you doing in your break? My exams went okay. It wasn't the best I've ever done. It also wasn't the worst. My exams were difficult to deal with. There were a lot of material. I studied oncology, dermatology, hematology, gastroenterology, endocrinology, ophthalmology, pretty sure I said everything, and then rational prescription of medicine, which is basically like a few lectures about what medication to give to certain patients. The biggest exam was the one I did the worst in. I feel like I didn't have enough time to get to the material. I think I was just so preoccupied with going, studying thoroughly everything that I just forgot to do exam questions. At least in my college, the biggest, like the most important thing you can do is do past papers. That's something I forget to do because in my mind it's kind of like cheating. Even if I'm meaning to do them at first, I'm always like, wait, I really wanted to study this first and I really wanted to read this first. One of the biggest mistakes that I did for that exam was just like a blur. I didn't think too much. I was just in autopilot mode. I just went through the exams, I studied, and at the end I was just like pretty empty inside. What are you doing in your break? So this break, I decided to really focus on my health and really focus on myself. I feel like the biggest, most important thing for me, like at my age, is learning how to better take care of myself because that's something that, until pretty recently, I didn't know how to do properly. So this break, I've been trying to get back into my healthy routines, doctor's appointments, but this time I'm the patient. Going to the gym, I've been going very, very nicely. I also have been reading and going out more, catching some sun. Any book recommendations? Where I live, it's about to be spring. The springtime is really great to read classics because everything feels so poetic and so flourished, and so I just really like to read classics during the springtime, so I would really recommend anything by Jane Austen. Also, if you want, you can read Shakespeare. The summer is the greatest time to read Shakespeare, in my opinion, but also the spring is great if you're wanting non-fiction. Recently, I've read The Anthropocene Review by John Green. I think I would pretty much recommend it if you're looking for a pretty soft healing book where you kind of look at a reality and kind of take some philosophical aspects of it. How are you doing? I don't know how I'm doing, actually. I really don't know how what is happening in my life right now. I feel like I'm going through a kind of transitional period where people are starting to look at me differently than when I was a second, third, fourth year. Now that I'm finishing fifth year, everything is kind of changing. I'm starting to look at my life and kind of just picture things differently, where I'm gonna live or what specialties am I interested in. These types of questions where I don't even know the answer. It's been kind of blurry and numb as all of these big changes are starting to approach, but it's okay and I'm okay and things will be okay. What specialties are you studying this next semester? Good question, because I haven't actually gone to the curricular information, the syllabus, the syllabi. I'm taking Pediatrics, Psychiatry, Molecular Mechanisms of Disease, Family Medicine, and then my elective, which is Cardio-Echo-Echo-Cardio- Echocardio-Cardiography. Last semester, I took three subjects. This semester, I'm taking five. We're just going to have to survive through it and that's going to be my last semester before sixth year. God, please no. God, no. How do you stay motivated to study for long hours when you don't get the grade you were expecting in exams? Tips for studying without motivation. How to manage when feeling low and circumstances not helping to study. Personally, I really benefit from going into a routine. If you have study dedicated time, which hopefully you do, I think it's really important to get into a routine of doing the same things every single day. You wake up at the same time, you have lunch at the same time, you have dinner at the same time, so you have these blocks of times where you're just sitting in your preferred study space, 15 minutes of work, 10 minutes break, 15 minutes of work, 10 minutes break, 40 or 30 minutes or whatever you are doing at the time. A kind of a mindset where you're just like, I'm doing this. I don't want to do this, but I have to do this. Even if I'm not 100% productive, nobody can be 100% productive all the time. Today I'm like a 50%. I'm distracted, but I'm still showing up. I'm still doing something. Also, you can motivate yourself through rest days, which is really important for me. Like, I'm working really hard today because next Friday I'm taking the whole day off to go to the movies, do something fun, or I'm really working hard today because I'm gonna go early to go home, and I really hate this right now, but I'm going home today and I'm doing something fun. The night before I started my another day, I kind of wrote down little tasks that I wanted to complete the next day. I think just that momentum of going the night before through your planner, it's okay. You can't let yourself be paralyzed by the fear or not really knowing what to do with everything that you have to do. Going day by day and telling yourself, tomorrow I have these tasks I want to wake up, I want to get to, and this is all going into an exam. This is all going to be okay, especially if you're studying for a very long time, like a month or more. The real marathon, you have to take things slow, take things easy, kind of taking rests. You can study so much if you feel really focused. More motivation tips is to set up this kind of ritual around you, so you have like a clean space, you can light up candles, you can get your tea, kind of just romanticizing it a little bit. It's okay to romanticize studying, you know, it's okay to not feel bored every time you show up to your desk and do something different, like study at a coffee shop, study at a library, you're doing something that's really beneficial and beautiful even, so it's okay to romanticize that part of your life. Put some lo-fi, you can put some piano music, I really love those too. You can put like ASMR. There's this channel that makes study sessions with study ambience, so you have the Hogwarts library and the houses, so I really like this type of thing. When you're having circumstances in your life that are taking a mental toll on you, it's going to be a disadvantage. You feel mentally exhausted, you have other things in your mind, you're going to feel like you need to take bigger breaks, burnout can come quicker. Overall, it's a worse situation if you didn't have to go through these things. Letting yourself recognize that you're not in a great space right now, and school is not everything, and there are things that I need to also have space for in my life, and I need to take some time off right now so I can actually study and be productive tomorrow, or even next week if you have that time. Sometimes I need to distance myself, I'll study outside of my home, so it's just doing these little things that can help you get in the mood of studying. Maybe I'll talk to my friends, they're also taking the exam, I'll attend classes if there are classes going on, it can help me get my mind off of things. Trying to find a better place mentally and physically. A lot of people tend to say like coffee shops, they're so noisy, they're so busy, like how can you focus in a coffee shop? I feel like sometimes like that white noise in my brain is what I need to focus. Sometimes pure silence doesn't help, because my brain starts going all sorts of directions. So finding a place that's right for you at the time. Sometimes you need to sleep a few more hours, but mostly just taking some time off to reflect on things. Whatever you're going through, take better care of yourself, because that's what's going to allow you to study well. This is always a disadvantage from other people that are completely focused and completely in the game, so don't feel bad about yourself if you don't see the same results when you're in a bad period of your life, and just remember you're not alone. There's so many people with the exact same problem as you, so yeah, hope that helped tiny bit. What's the best and worst about studying medicine? The best thing about medicine, and I think it's the coolest thing that we get to do, is to be able to talk to people, and hearing their problems, and getting them an immediate or a long-term solution, and just seeing that work out for them. It's so cool to be able to heal people. If you're in the fantasy world, you are the healer. It's so cool that we get to experience that growth that we have with patients along the way. Patient interaction feels so daunting at first, and then it gets a little bit better, and a little bit better, and then some things just come naturally to you, because you've seen it so much. That just comes with experience, so it's really nice, and that growth is just the best thing ever. And if you love medicine, and if you really want medicine, it's going to be amazing for you because of that. There are a couple of bad things about medicine, and that's why I don't wish medicine on anyone if they don't like it. It's very, very tiring. It's a lot to deal with for a long, long years. Maybe the worst thing is always feeling like you don't belong. For me, I always feel like I don't belong here. I don't know what I'm doing. I'm never gonna, like you start thinking, I'm never gonna know what I'm doing. So many doubts if you're ever good enough. I think there's so much pressure. You have to be perfect, and you have to know everything. There's no room for mistake. I think we can counteract that by having a better environment. You're not afraid to ask for help. The best environments that I've ever been in in the hospital have been where doctors were not afraid to ask for help, and not afraid to say, look, I don't know what this is, and so I'm gonna go ask my seniors. I think there's like this stigma of that happening. It drives a lot of us to feel even more insecure, and especially if you're an insecure, introverted person, this can be even worse for you, and you really just have to adapt, and you have to do what's best for your patients at all time. I think another thing is, I guess this is a very competitive field, and there's questions about that in the next few questions, and this is a place where people want to make money. Some people just come here to make money. They're just like, yeah, this is the exact place where I'm gonna make the most money ever, which is not the case at all. People want status, and they want to be respected, and so they go here, and even in medical school, you know these type of people. You can tell, and it's very frustrating because you suddenly see yourself in this community that you don't identify with. I'm gonna talk about that in a bit, but I think those two, mental health and kind of being in a very cutthroat environment, are kind of the two worst things about medical school. Do you still love medicine? Yes, I do, but I definitely feel a difference from the early states of my first year. I think I was in a very honeymoon phase of medicine, where I was very innocent, very naive. It makes me smile to think about my first year self, because that girl was in for a ride. She didn't know anything about medicine. If I saw a unicorn in the wards, if I saw a living breathing unicorn, I would just accept that as normal, because I had no idea. As you learn about something, your love for it changes. It can either go out completely, or it can grow and change and become something else, because I've seen so much of it. I know a lot more about practicalities of it. How do you deal with competitive students, sharks? How do you deal with competitiveness in medical school? As I've mentioned before, this is something that makes me really sad, really, really frustrated. I think the best attitude that you can have in life, in general, is to be humble, to be appreciative of others around you, and especially in medicine, and this is what frustrates me so much. This is a community where we can grow together as people and as doctors. We are going to be learning from each other, and we have to bring out the best in other people, not the worst. Wanting to be the best at all costs, even if it hurts other people, and wanting other people to go down. These type of behaviors are like tumors in a community. It really brings out the worst in everybody, and it can really break a community from the inside out, where from the outside, it looks like a great community of great hard-working students, and from the inside, I'm feeling in the sidelines. Of course I care about the grades, of course I want to know and I want to do better, but there's just in such importance about grades and being better than the next partner or the next person. They don't see themselves as being partners with anybody. I think it really makes you want to, like I said, be on the sidelines and not interact so much with one another, and that's a real shame. The number one thing I do is just distance myself, because I have enough mental health issues. I have enough anxiety as it is, so knowing that you're being judged by someone else because of your grade, or being in an environment where you're not comfortable talking to a certain person, or you're just experiencing really cutthroat behaviors, really puts me in a bad mood in general. So I just distance myself. I focus on what I love about medicine. I focus on people around me. Luckily, oh my god, luckily I've been so lucky to have friends around me who do not care about my grades. I ran out of memories, so I had to change, and realizing that's getting dark. Like I was saying, luckily I've been able to find a group of people that's really grounding throughout this whole experience. Try to really improve yourself. Tell yourself that this is not going to matter in a few years. You're going to be an amazing professional one day, and they can't stop you from being that. So just be yourself. Keeping lightness in your heart, that not all people are like this. As you can see, it's now nighttime because my battery ran out, so I just decided to take a break. Okay, where was I? I'm feeling kind of iffy giving study advice. I feel like it really depends on what you're studying, what works for you, what your tests did on, and overall. Also, I don't think I have the right answers. I'm just gonna say what I do, what I find works best for me. Do you still hand write notes? If yes, how do you study them? So most of the time I do type on powerpoint. Sometimes I also do lecture notes on paper. What are you doing? Because when you're on lectures, I feel like you can't write everything that's being said. And when I'm on my computer, I type everything. Like I type really fast, and I want to type everything. But when you're writing on paper, I think you're forced to only write the most important things. I like to make maps, and sometimes if a lecture I'm able to really condense a lecture on mind maps on paper, I basically just keep my mind maps and I study from there. I don't even have to do any other notes. Did your new method of studying by making powerpoints help you? Yes, it really did help me. However, it takes a long time. You have to start early, you have to make them fast. I'm able to question myself because I make animations where the questions should look much better visually for me. I'm a visual learner. Overall, good method if you're a visual learner. Very good for huge piles of material where you want to condense. However, it does take quite a lot of time. Reviewing with the powerpoints I felt was the best revision method experience, and I could really remember the powerpoint slides. But in my head, like in my headspace. So study methods are gonna vary. Because I have both midterms and exams, you have evaluations that you have to work for throughout the semester, and then you have to really give your all when you're pretty tired at the end of the semester to do exams. This semester we had eight midterms because we had eight specialties, which is kind of insane, you know? Like we have a lot of evaluations in my college, and on top of that we have lectures that don't match to the midterm that we're having at the same time. So my study method is kind of like keeping up with my notes, doing my midterms as best as possible, and at the end of the semester I have a collection of notes, some on paper, some digital. I haven't memorized basically any of it because there's no active recall at that point. I do active recall if I have a midterm like an oral exam that requires me to really like spit out the information. In my plan, the dedicated study weeks should be just for active recall, memorizing, and doing practice questions. However, at the end of the semester, there's inevitably, I could never find a semester where I don't have lectures left. So what happens is during dedicated study time where I should be doing active recall, I'm still going through all of the lectures and studying them for the first time. Hopefully I'll be able to have all the powerpoints done until like the study dedicated time period. That would be a dream for me. Also, one of the things that I love about powerpoints is that they can be really visually pretty and it's a lot of fun to make them colorful. So for me, the digital method right now is gaining relevancy. How do you manage to read books even after having so much to do? I really like to abstract myself from everything around me in a way that's more present than if I were to watch a tv show. It doesn't have to be something that really requires you to do research or to be really mentally active. You can read a comic or you can read a really cheesy romance. Keeping you, your thoughts away from what's standing right in front of you, but your brain still focused. I read normally in my 10 minute breaks while I was commuting, while I was eating. So yeah, just utilize your tiny breaks. You can do it. Reading is not supposed to be fun. It's not supposed to be something that you have to do or you're having trouble to do. So just pick books that you know you'll enjoy. Which subject specialty do you absolutely love and what do you hate the most? After dermatology. This viewer saw my finals video and I said that I really dislike dermatology. It's not my most disliked specialty. It's not like dermatology is at the absolute bottom, but it's just really funny that they said that. What is your dream specialty? Which specialty do you want to choose? Do you have a specialty in mind? Medical, surgical, medical, surgical. Why aren't you interested in surgical specialties? So this is all about future specialties. If you're not aware, in medicine you have your basic knowledge, which are four, five, six years. After that you get placed in a specialty that will require even more years of training, but you're already a doctor and you're already practicing medicine and getting paid. It's really like a question for everybody around you, for yourself. Like what specialty you'll be spending and dedicating probably the rest of your life. I really don't know what is my dream specialty. I just want a place where I get appreciated, where I have time for myself, like showing up to my job. I like to talk to people and practice medicine. I see myself in so many specialties. The ones that I've kind of discarded are pathology stuff, like lab stuff. I don't see myself in the lab. I also don't see myself in purely surgical specialties because I don't like surgery that much. Like I've been to many surgeries in these years and I don't like it that much. It's not like I don't see myself as a surgeon, but as just a surgeon, as purely surgical, I definitely don't see myself as. I don't want to spend that many hours operating. I don't know. It's not bad. It's not a bad thing. You know what I mean? Like it's just not my preference, but I don't hate it. If you know what I mean. And I feel like I would rather spend more time talking to patients. I really like the medical part of it, like interviewing the patient. There are specialties that have a mixture of both. So they have the medical part and they have surgical part. So yeah, that's my take on that. It's funny because everybody asks that. Everybody's excited to ask that and I'm starting to ask that. Okay, next question and last question. How do you feel hitting 100k and will you continue YouTube after becoming a doctor? It feels very surreal. I don't really know how to react, what to do. I'm feeling very grateful. I'm thinking about when I first started. Just so unbelievably generous of you to support and to all of your messages. It's just been one of the things that has really helped me to be more of myself and be more confident in myself. And I never had that. And it's very out of character for me to have a community like this to talk to and to express myself to because I'm very introverted and I have a very selected, let's put it that way, friend group. And I normally don't even like to talk about myself that much because I'm a much better listener than talker. I've been practicing through the camera to a point where I'm able to express myself in public speaking better and has translated in that way. This has just improved so much of my life. I'm just forever grateful. I wouldn't have Ollie if it wasn't for this YouTube channel. The number doesn't really matter to me but it's a good reminder that there are people out there who have interest in what I create and it's good too. It's flattering, it's nice, it's all good things. And I feel like I will want to continue posting and I will want to continue making videos. And also I'm just curious to see like what my life will look like and I'm pretty sure I'm gonna want to record that. Just like when I first got into med school, I wanted to record it and I wanted to make videos of that. I'm pretty sure I will want to but I can't speak for my future self. Just don't think about that. Just don't think about it. I feel like yes, I feel like yes, I will want to. Just thank you so much for your interest. Thank you for being here and for asking questions and for hearing what I have to say. It just makes everything so worth it and just makes me so inspired to keep going. And I don't think you guys understand how inspired I am by you. I'm so inspired by your goals and your accomplishments. It's now more than eight, which is crazy. I spent so much time talking. Wow. So I'm gonna go have dinner and maybe I'll save these other questions for later for more chatty videos and I hope it was a good time spent together. Yeah, see you around. Thank you so much for listening again and I hope I was able to transmit how grateful I am for you. Thank you so much for a hundred thousand people on my channel. Thank you so much to everyone who stumbled across it and watches. Just really, really, really appreciate it and yeah, keep working hard. Stay safe. Bye!