Starting anything takes a bit of courage. Starting medical school just fresh out of high school, while still in your teens, takes a load of courage and a leap of faith. And for me, it was a blind leap of faith.

At that point in my life, I had not yet figured out what I wanted to do, unlike some of my friends. I didn’t have a clear idea of the career that would suit me best. Looking back, the societal expectation to make such a life-altering decision at such a young age seems like an utterly misguided idea at best.

You see, I had wanted to be different things when I grew up at different points in my life. My first dream job was becoming a police officer. The reason was simple: policemen at my village commanded a lot of respect(or fear, I couldn’t tell the difference) and walked around with guns, which, as a five-year-old, I found to be really cool. The next thing I had dreamt of becoming when I grew up was a bus driver because bus drivers travelled constantly for a living, and I loved(and still do love) travelling. Next, I had dreamt of becoming an accountant. This one was because a very charismatic accountant came to our school during careers day and I found his job to be particularly interesting. That was back in Form One. And it was the last time I had thought seriously about what career I would like to pursue.

After getting my KCSE results, I was spoilt for choice about what undergraduate program I could apply for. So, naturally, I just applied for the course that had the highest cut-off points. That course was MBChB- Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery. That’s how I landed in Chiromo Campus in the middle of September 2015, not quite sure of what I was doing but ready for a challenge.

There are many words I could use to describe my experience during the first year of medical school. Exciting. Confusing. Exhausting. Intense. But there was a common feature that this myriad of experiences had: they all smelt of formalin. First-year medical students usually dissect cadavers during their anatomy classes. The cadavers are preserved by a chemical called formalin which has a strong acrid smell. Because we would spend long hours in the anatomy laboratory dissecting the cadavers, our clothes, our hair and even our skin would smell of formalin after a long day there.

Sometimes I felt that the formalin had infiltrated my brain tissue and shut down my short-term memory. That’s because I would have a hard time recalling an anatomical fact that had been stated by one of my tablemates just a few minutes before. I would have blamed my poor memory squarely on the formalin had I not also been suffering from chronic lack of enough sleep, a more plausible culprit.

I remember going for supper at the university mess after the dissections and not eating much because I could still smell formalin in the Ugali even after thoroughly washing my hands. Not that the food was appealing to eat in the first place. Sometimes I would have a headache from the smell of formalin that would not subside for days. At the university hostels, I shared a room with three other medical students. So, for a few minutes after we all arrived from the dissections, the room would smell of formalin, exactly like the anatomy laboratory. But in this case, the formalin was wasted on living beings.

On top of the academic rigours of medical school, the transition from the highly structured life of my high school to the relatively freeform days of university life was hard to navigate. In high school, days moved slowly but they felt like they had a definite end. Days in the university moved at an astonishing speed, all mashed up together. At the university, you could decide to do absolutely nothing but listen to Avicii’s Levels on repeat all day and no one was there to police you. No housemaster to kick you out of the dormitory. No hawk-eyed teacher-on-duty to chase you to class. No mum to cajole you to study. At the end of the day, you were the one and only judge of how good you spent your day.

Friends. Friends are the family we choose. Friends are the family we choose to share the best moments of our lives with. Making new friends is one of life’s small pleasures. But in medical school, making friends was a survival strategy. Friends simply made life tolerable in one of the most intellectually draining years of training in medical school. Friends formed an informal support group. Some people retained their high school classmates as their friends in medical school. Others tried their luck with new friends they met at the lecture hall. Some people had no trouble forming a large group of friends over a matter of weeks. Others were either unsuccessful at making new friends or simply did not care. I became instant friends with my three roommates, probably because they were the people I spent the most time with outside of class. We would go for supper together after a long day of school and talk about our hopes and fears. And maybe finally agree on who would be exiled the coming weekend.

Almost seven years down the line, my experiences as a first-year seem like a drop in the ocean of experiences I’ve had ever since. Those experiences are small pixels in the beautiful mosaic that my time in medical school has been. A mosaic that has been equally decorated by all the highs and lows. There were many things I could have done better but I believe I did the best I could with the knowledge I had at that time. If I had one piece of advice that I could give to my younger self, it would be to just take my time to learn and grow; it would be okay in the end.