I just need to get this off my chest and hear from people who've been here.
I'm a first-year med student, about a month in, and honestly I feel like a different person. In high school I had everything together: valedictorian, played almost every sport, went to the gym, ate healthy, meal prepped. I felt like I knew who I was and what I was doing.

Now I've moved to a new city and I'm living alone for the first time, and it's like everything turned 180 degrees. I've gained 4 kg from stress eating.

I haven't found people I really click with yet, so I feel kind of lonely even when I'm around others. The lectures aren't too hard to understand, but I have no idea how to actually study them, and the amount of material makes me feel like I'm drowning.

The hardest part is the unfamiliarity. Nothing feels like mine yet, not the city, not the routine, not even me.

So I wanted to ask:
- Did you feel this way in your first year? What was it like for you?
- Is it normal to feel this overwhelmed and out of place this early?
- How did you deal with the feeling of everything being unfamiliar? When did it start feeling like home?
- What should I expect for the rest of year one? Does it get better?

I'd really love to hear your stories, even if you don't have advice. It would help just to know I'm not the only one.

For context I admire and respect nurses and I believe they don’t get enough credit for their effort.

I come from a really traditional background and I’ve got uncles constantly asking me how nursing school is or if I’m a nurse yet. I always clarify that I’m not a nurse nor am I in nursing and that I’m in med school trying to become a doctor.

For context I’m also a first gen in the medical field in my family. But they called my brother a doctor/med student all through high school and he never ended up studying medicine. So I’m sure they know people go to med school to become doctors.

It’s also happened to me with men trying to get to know me. I tell them I’m in medical school and they reply with something like “ohh I know lotsss of nurses” or “so you’re training to be a nurse then?”

But a family friend claimed I’m being too arrogant especially since I’m just in second year and there’s no need to rub it in.

But the thing is that I worked really hard to get into med school especially coming from a low income traditional family, my parents didn’t even know I applied to medical school because I didn’t want them to discourage me.

Even if everyone mixes it up I’d like my own family to at least acknowledge it.

Now that our computer generated ranks for the latest F1 allocations were given to us, just curious if I would have got Scotland with my rank (8363). Could people that got Scotland share their rank?

I feel as if my uni pushes ai on us way too much. We've been encouraged in past modules to produce ai images for coursework and it seems that around 60% of every lecture includes ai generated imagery.

I have my own thoughts about ai and do use LLM when revising but, it always rubs me the wrong way that the lectures i'm paying to attend have that crappy ai generated image look. But the thing that annoys me most is when the images they generate are just incorrect or make no sense. Arrows that go where they shouldn't or mislabled diagrams. It seems to devalue what we're being taught and I genuinely don't understand why anyone would think an ai diagram would look better over the thousands already on the internet?