By Inyang Udo-Inyang
It’s 5:00 a.m. My favorite time of the day. The calmness of the early morning is quite unlike any other time of day. There is something about the tranquility at 5:00 a.m. that distills my deepest thoughts.
Today is a special kind of 5:00 a.m. Today I am taking a reflective journey the likes of which are far and few between. Today my 86 classmates and I get to choose the order in which we will be rotating through the various third-year clerkships.
At this point I can’t help but submit to the journey my mind takes me on, so many flashbacks almost all at once: the first time I donned a white medical coat, my first time at the hospital, the last day of the first year of school, the first time in the anatomy lab. I am also afforded a brief reminder of the feeling of taking my first medical school exam, surely not the fondest memory of them all.
These first two years have been an unbelievable experience. There is something truly unique about this training—its pace, its insistence, its unique ability to request and elicit your very best. We are two months away from being fully submerged in the clinical world and I can only imagine that true to the past two years, it’s going to get tougher, faster, and more exciting.
I’ve come to realize a truth about my classmates and myself. A truth our mentor at Geisel, Dr. Joe O’ Donnell has repeated from day one: We are enough. As we approach the next phase of our medical education I can’t help but smile to myself knowing that we are enough.
Inyang Udo-Inyang is a second-year student at Geisel and a member of the Urban Health Scholars. He is originally from Lagos, Nigeria, and graduated from Oberlin College in 2012, where he majored in biochemistry.
Read more about students' experiences in their own words at the Geisel Med Blog.
