Who we are

Our names are Sonia and Alexa.

We are fourth-year medical students at two US-MD Schools. We are passionate about medical education and want to help medical students succeed academically while promoting wellness in the process.

Our motivation for writing this guide is simple. Coming into medical school, we were very nervous—as two first-generation medical students in the US, we did not know where to look for advice and certainly suffered from impostor syndrome.

During MS1, we realized that we were not alone, and many of our classmates felt the same way. We attended advice nights and tried to seek out peer mentors to identify the best study strategies in medical school. However, all along, this process was fragmented, and we wished there existed a comprehensive guide telling us all there is to know to both succeed in medical school and have a life outside of it.

With this need in mind, we wrote ‘How to Med School,’ which includes the lessons we learned along the years as well as other pieces of academic and professional advice. Much of our guidance comes in the form of things we wished we had known as first-year medical students.

Now, we are excited to share this guide with prospective and current medical students as we hope to empower you to study more effectively and efficiently. We hope you find this guide helpful.

More about us

Sonia is currently a fourth-year medical student applying into psychiatry. She passed Step 1 on her first attempt. On USMLE Step 2, she scored a 263, corresponding to approximately the 85th percentile. She is an avid tennis and Formula 1 fan, and in her free time, she loves global traveling, cooking new recipes (preferably involving soy sauce), and playing ping pong.

Alexa is also a fourth-year medical student, applying into anesthesiology. She has scored at the 99th percentile on all end-of-clerkship NBME Shelf exams. On USMLE Step 2, she scored a 276, also corresponding to the > 99th percentile. For her academic achievements, she has been elected to Alpha Omega Alpha. In her free time, she loves exploring the outdoors, particularly National Parks, attending Broadway shows, and following several sports teams, including the Yankees, Scuderia Ferrari, and Villanova Basketball.