Pre-school is a time you developed skills, friendships and relationships. These basics have set the path for the rest of your life. It is where you learn pre-skills that lay out the basics for everything else. So, here are four vital skills that you learnt at 3 years old to help you to develop the skills of a medical student.
Believe me this is the stuff great doctors are made of!
1. Personal and social skills
During pre-school, you will have been taught the importance of sharing, friendships and boundaries through play. You will also have had the chance to work with others and alone to develop yourself as a little person. Toddlers learn how to generate appropriate emotional responses to situations and be resilient.
Emotional resilience:
This links strongly to a vital skill that all medical students work on. Emotional resilience. Setting boundaries in your studying, relationships and projects you work on as a medical student help you to self-preserve. This skill enables you to direct your energy into things that matter and stay motivated. Forming appropriate responses allows medical students to show empathy to patients and make good decisions under emotional stress.
Sharing:
Learning to share and take turns are skills of a medical student that allow them to be selfless towards patients. Not to mention, generous with their time towards peers. This helps to form strong relationships.
2. Mathematical development
Secondly, as a toddler, you will have developed basic maths skills by counting everyday objects like bricks!
Little did you know, you were learning some skills of a medical student such as mental agility and speed.
For example, medical students have to be able to cope with science and numbers within their course. Similarly, as a doctor, you will use your mental agility for so many things! From drug dosage to quick sums, having a sharp brain is essential!
You can thank 3 year old you for that one!
3. Physical development
Obviously, in addition to those first swimming lessons you spent coughing and spluttering, preschool taught you a ton of physical skills!
Fine motor skills are developed initially by playing with dough, building towers and drawing. However, if you ask a surgeon to draw you the Mona Lisa I reckon you’d find they’re pretty good!
In addition, doctors have good manual dexterity and the ability to use their hands in a coordinated way. Whether it be for stitching a wound or injecting a medication, fine motor skills are essential.
**adds unicorn playdough to basket**
4. Language development
Imagine being born screaming and crying into a compeltely new world and to learning it all from scratch.
…
Now you understand what it’s like starting medical school, imagine how it must be for babies!
Nonetheless, with all jokes aside, the way babies develop their language is very similar to the most effective learning style.
Repetition, repetition, repetition.
Language is learnt by through simplifying the information and repeating it back to those around you! You also probably read the same 3 books over and over again and picked up some words!
Repetition, active recall and condensation are the top three skills of a medical student to develop for studying.
If that’s how you learnt the entirety of your language, how effective will it be for your medical school workload!
I hope this post has been weirdly interesting and has given you the motivation to dust off some of those old skills and learn through play! Learning should be fun and being a medical student should be too.
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