WE DON'T TALK ABOUT THIS ENOUGH | **toxic pre-med culture & dealing with competition** 

Wow yea seriously. What an environment make people hate each other.

I totally agree with you Camilla! People can be really judgemental and toxic when they know that you're wanting the same thing, I found it really helpful to find friends outside of the field or who had different interests! It also gets way better in med school! Everyone is super empowering of each other's achievements, and genuinely wanting to improve the work culture both in the hospital and within academic centers :)

Thank you Soni!

As someone who was a premed and now going to med school, I think it really depends on the culture of where you're going to school. Sometimes a program is so saturated with competitive, standoffish, invulnerable pre-med students and other programs have more openness like in your case. It isn't the responsibility of one person to change that perspective for an entire program. And I don't really think this is a case of domino effect because that implies one person is the cause of the entire row of dominos falling. One person keeping to themselves isn't the reason why an entire premed program is toxic. Sure, keeping to yourself doesn't necessarily help others open up, but we don't know the severity of her trauma from opening up (which may have been very traumatizing, ie having people plagiarize her work). To put that responsibility onto one person is unfair and kinda harsh, and it also invalidates her feelings as someone who has been through a draining experience. I didn't find it disheartening or standoffish, I actually empathize and relate to her because overwhelming competition is the reality for most premed programs, especially in Canada. I sincerely think that narrowing the blame onto one person is not the solution.

Truly! Thanks for clicking in :)

Hey, I really appreciate the time and effort that you put into this comment! And I can appreciate how you would have that viewpoint. But I can also respond directly to some of the points you bring up. In my MCAT reaction video, I talked about the point of filming the reaction specifically and my fears about making it public. If there wasn't a genuine desire to share my journey, I wouldn't have filmed all the videos leading up to it and sharing my poor practice test scores along the way. I don't have to imagine myself as being honest about this because I HAVE been honest. You are also incorrect about all my videos being "about the good". I literally have a video on my channel talking about how I felt getting rejection videos from medical schools lol I also know that with every video I film where I talk specifically about my experiences, I make sure to broadcast very explicitly that they are MY OWN experiences and that there are many different pathways to medicine. I went on youtube to film my journey because I had no one to talk to about this in real life. Many people in medicine don't, and I want this community to be a safe space where we CAN celebrate each other's achievements without comparison. I think it's ironic that you perceive pretension in this goal, I am surprised that you think it's pretension when half my videos are my looking like crap but working my butt off for my degree. I wonder why you would feel that way. If you feel attacked by my achievements or the content I post, I would advise you to please stop watching. Thank you.