Survival 101

 General advice to ease your passage through the initial turbulent weeks of adapting to AMC or any other.

#1 Avoid Confrontation

Seriously. Do not go there , you'll regret it. 

Think peace, love , respect, basically all that hippie shit.

Channel your John Lennon and Bob Marley.

And for God's sake, lay off the Marilyn Manson, Black Sabbath and all the death metal.

#2 Comply

Go along with most of what they tell you, unless you have a valid reason not to.

When you fuss too much , you're singling yourself out and painting a large red target on your back -metaphorically of course. And they will remember you.

#3 Respond, don't react.

Specks of rust in your water? Flick it away.

Did that guy just flash you a creepy smile? Don't make eye contact.

Go into autopilot mode, or better pretend you were abducted by droids from another universe , who fiddled with your brain and made you incapable of emotion and reprogrammed it to respond with the most appropriate response.JK. You don't have to take it to such extremes , but you get the idea.

Wait, is it just me or did that sound suspiciously like propaganda. Definitely not the intention!
but these are 3 golden rules to survive (mostly) unscathed , any sticky situation AMC throws at you.
And there will be several of those.

But most importantly, use your own judgement.
You only need 3 months to prepare for that exam. Absolutely not. Following such advise blindly,
will inevitably result in bawling your eyes out the night before the exam and flunking all your internals and possibly your finals. Use your head! and do what you feel would be in your best interests.

Intro to Med School

When you're a student aspiring for a medical seat in a hellhole coaching centre,
you have this image, this vision of what Medical College will be like.
 One you play out in UltraHd with Dolby 7.1 surround sound in your head,
which pushes you on your roughest days when you're an inch away from calling it quits and throwing in the towel.
Which propels you through the endless exams, while you're thinking entirely
 in terms of minutes , hours spent and to go , chapters left and practiced MCQs .
And then you're walking down the stairs of the examination centre , wondering if that was it?
Did it  all just end , in a span of 3 hours that possibly determined your career or the lack thereof?
 Did you just ace that ? or was all of it a dream conjured up by your tortured subconscious,

 in an attempt to alleviate your skyrocketing stress.

But it's real and it just happened. You're dazed as you get your tentative scores.
The days pass in a rush as you catch up on your endless sleep debt and hours of movies , the internet , book , manga , anime and the interminable list of entertainment , hobbies and the social life you put on hold.
Wait , ok,  not a social life - that was non existent anyway.
All the shopping and prepping during the counseling , as they allot you a seat in med school feels surreal.
This is real and its happening.
That's when you snap out of lalaland. You find out you're going to a B-2 city.
You've been demoted from a metro kid [all ignorant 19 years of your life] to a med student in a small city (?) in the middle of the rural nowhere of your state.
Boom.
That's reality crashing in.
You try to be upbeat and actually fool yourself into thinking you're going to be just fine , it's such a quaint place  and of course , there's always security in a small place, more freedom to explore!
Power to you!
Then you remember....... that you don't speak the local language,
all 10 years of your life in the state and you have only two words of the language memorized to show for it.
Your brows begin to furrow as all the implications begin to seep in.
You're screwed, you think to yourself .
'How are you going to communicate with the locals, students , patients?' , you ask yourself and a thousand other doubts fly across your mind .
You're having a panic attack.
You'll learn the language , the other students would speak english or at least hindi and you'll get an app for anything else you need to learn , you reason with yourself.
'It'll all work out', you tell yourself in an uncharacteristic surge of optimism.
And the day finally arrives , you load your stuff up and head off to meet your fate like the proverbial lamb.
This was me , a year and little more than half ago . This is my journey through A Medical College(AMC)

Welcome to AMC*
Fill in endless paperwork,
Now piss in a bottle.
Turns out what follows the paperwork, is the medical tests which includes , wait for it, a urine test.
So , I followed this old aaya to the biochemistry lab and was handed an empty drug bottle for 'peshab'.
Peshab.
I kid you not.
My introduction to medical school was anything but abrupt.
Absolutely the way you expect to be initiated into the medical fraternity.
A urine test.
It doesn't end there , then came the eye tests. Being the klutz that I am , I forgot my glasses , as usual , and had to wait for another hour for my turn , which mum certainly did not appreciate .
As demonstrated by her and naani's hushed whispering in malayalam , of which I caught only 'careless' and 'late'. I'm happier not knowing *grins*
But that's it , you're in and you have no clue what you're in for.
Not a damned idea.
You naive idiot you.

*name changed to protect privacy
(would it make a difference anyway?)