A New Start After the Doctoral Qualifying Exam

The Exhaustion of a Year Ago

• Between July and August 2022, at my former resident training hospital, I was evaluated as unfit, making it very difficult to continue.
• I was given a chance to improve, but the truth is that both my body and mind had reached their limits at that time, even feeling as though my life was hanging by a thread.
• Looking back now, I believe that under the same environment, I absolutely had no remaining energy to think about how to improve.
• I decided that no matter what, whether pursuing further academic studies or continuing to work, I had to leave first, take a breath, and only then would it be possible to rebuild from scratch.

The Doctoral Qualifying Exam and the Challenge of Restoring Physical and Mental Condition

• After leaving the hospital, the immediate challenge I faced was the doctoral qualifying exam.
• Because I was so busy at the hospital that I forgot to apply for a leave of absence, I was delayed by two years, meaning I was already a third-year doctoral student when I went back to study.
• The university regulations stated that the doctoral qualifying exam had to be passed within three years, and three subjects had to be passed. This meant that in the upcoming third year, I only had one year left to prepare, with only two chances remaining: the fall semester and the spring semester.
• Another trouble was that my psychological state was stuck in negativity; at all times, I felt a sense of powerlessness that no matter what I did or what effort I put in, there would be no reward.
• Therefore, the immediate challenges I faced right after leaving the hospital were:
  • Physical and mental exhaustion, a sense of powerlessness toward everything.
  • A broken physical fitness and broken sleep.
  • The loneliness, anxiety, and fear of stepping into an unfamiliar field alone (my undergraduate major was medicine, and I entered the computer science doctoral program with almost zero foundation).
  • A sense of uncertainty about where to go and having no direction for my career.

Progress of Improvement

• Acknowledging the current situation, separating subjective emotions and objective problems as much as possible.
• Treating the psychological and physical states as part of a systemic problem, and listing countermeasures.
• Analyzing the problems, identifying the scope of what can be controlled, and slowly beginning to improve from the bare minimum.
• Searching for usable paradigms and methods from past psychological counseling experiences, spiritual self-help, and popular science books.

Results

• Teased apart the impact of the habits and mindsets of my family of origin on my body and mind, and found ways to address them one by one.
• Established a list of scientific attributions for chronic fatigue and poor sleep quality, alleviating the anxiety of self-doubt.
• Starting from the most basic act of sitting alone in a cafe, to traveling alone, and reading alone, gradually rebuilding and strengthening my self-awareness and value in every exploratory journey.

Phased Tasks Accomplished

• Spent nearly a year passing the doctoral qualifying exam; unexpectedly failed biostatistics the first time, and spent half a year passing it with fear and trepidation.
• Briefly revised a paper I had written before, establishing some basic workflows for writing papers.
• Reviewed basic calculus and took courses to acquire fundamental concepts in linear algebra and vector calculus.
• Used the Flutter framework to write a cross-platform App capable of audio recording, speech recognition, and processing text using a GPT model.
• Explored outside to figure out the basic train of thought for potential development using a medical license, having spent two years in a large hospital without a specialist certification.

Phased Tasks Yet to be Completed

• Exercise Habits for Strengthening the Body:
  • Currently, I only do basic cardiovascular spinning and social badminton.
  • Targeted physical strengthening pathways are needed, including scientific training goals for cardiovascular endurance and muscle strength.
• Habits of Thinking, Summarizing, and Long-Term Repetitive Note-Taking:
  • My ability to gather themes and elaborate is too weak.
  • My old writing habits are too long-winded and not concise enough, failing to convey the main points.
  • Not focused enough, easily having my attention consumed by fragmented information.
  • The threshold is set too high, resulting in articles constantly failing to be finished.
• Time Tracking and Management Techniques:
  • The framework established a long time ago is too cumbersome and not concise enough.
  • It was temporarily abandoned after leaving the hospital to accommodate physical recovery.
  • I should slowly compress time utilization to the extreme to improve productivity.
• Training and Improving Social Skills:
  • To be frank, the environment of my family of origin is not a good environment for practicing expression.
  • It is not easy to build relationships with strangers.
  • If I need to rely on being a physician as a basic livelihood, a certain level of social communication skills is still required.
  • If I want to move towards a consultant, manager, or PM role, clear and powerful expressive abilities are still needed.
  • In fact, there is a record of perfect performance when physical fitness is intact, the brain is supportive, and sleep is sufficient.
  • Therefore, part of the improvement plan should be merged with the aforementioned physical training habits.

Upcoming Specific Goals

• Find a gym and set scientific goals to improve physical fitness by at least fifty percent to cope with increased challenges.
• Complete an online basic course in Python data science.
• After passing the qualifying exam, take two to three departmental courses, which must include NLP.
• While working part-time at a clinic, familiarize myself with and enrich my knowledge of lasers, medical injectable fillers, skin diseases, and chronic disease medication management, and absorb clinic management experience.
• Find research topics and generate at least two to three papers within a year.
• Find practical topics and write Flutter mobile applications to embody the value of my own medical information integration.
• Prepare the Usher Syndrome Association with partners.

Honestly, I am somewhat tied to my family of origin. I am the youngest of three children in my family; my brother and sister are over a decade older than me. Now I am the only one left in our hometown. Otherwise, after leaving the hospital and cooling down, discussing with others makes me feel that going to a medium-to-small hospital in another city that isn't as tiring, and getting a family medicine specialist certification, might still be an opportunity.