The Favorite Pasttime
Nita Chen (2016)
ink on paper
The life of a medical student can be quite isolating at times. In many ways, the struggle to become competent and knowledgeable on the wards becomes so all-consuming that it is so easy to become one-dimensional. After long hours during the day trying to keep up with the fast-paced schedules of the hospital, we return home with more studying and brushing up to do so that we may be ready for another day of endless learning. It is one simple task — to learn as much as we can — but it is one that can seem too much at times. It can become so overwhelming that at the end of the day, the preferred choice of extracurricular activity easily becomes rest and sleep. The limited remaining hours of the day require us to weigh our social obligations against the necessity of self-care. And sometimes, self-care demands that we take the time to reclaim those lost hours of sleep, finish the chores that we left untended to or even to binge-watch that Netflix series that needed attention.
Medical Student Editor and in-Training Staff Member Emeritus
University of Florida Fixel Movement and Neurorestoration Institute
Nita Chen is a current movement disorders fellow at University of Florida Movement and Neurorestoration program. She is Class of 2017 medical student at Albany Medical College. To become cultural, she spent her early educational years in Taiwan and thoroughly enjoyed wonderful Taiwanese food and milk tea, thus ruining her appetite for the rest of her life in the United States. Aside from her neuroscience and cognitive science majors during her undergraduate career, she holed herself up in her room writing silly fictional stories, doodling, and playing the piano. Or she could be found spazzing out like a gigantic science nerd in various laboratories. Now she just holes up in her room to study most of the time.