Imagine going through finals week for four years straight. No wait, add an extra three to eight years to that.

When I was interning at a medical clinic in high school, one of the doctors told me he had huge exams every other day. It’s like finals week, but for four years and even more because of residency.

College is supposed to be the time of your life, they say.

Someone who wants to go to medical school in the United States has to go through four years of undergraduate studies, four years of medical school and anywhere between three to eight years of training. On top of that, you need a near-perfect GPA, you should be doing enough extracurriculars to wear your brains out every second of every day and you need to have top scores on the MCAT, which is nearly six hours long and includes biology, chemistry, physics, sociology, psychology and even more things. Oh, and you need at least two years of undergraduate prerequisites within your four years of college.

If you’re in Canada, you need three, maybe two years of undergraduate studies and if you’re lucky, you’re entered into a fast-paced medical track so you can graduate a year early. Fast-paced tracks are longer and even more rare in the U.S.

In the UK (or most of Europe), it doesn’t take eight years of studying like it does in the United States. You complete six years of school and then follow up on residency, which you do in the United States anyway.

The process of getting into medical school is even tougher. I’d give you a hypothetical example, but why don’t we use a real, personal example instead? Here’s my story.

If you think about it, a typical school day for a pre-med student is, well, very rough. I am a pre-med student majoring in Biology and minoring in psychology at Adelphi University. I’m also in the Levermore Global Scholars program and a class representative on the Levermore Global Scholars Student Leadership Council. I’m the secretary of the Muslim Student Association (previously the Head of Public Relations), a writer and Social Media Director for Odyssey At Adelphi, a Writing Tutor at the Writing Center and a student writer and student worker at the Office of the President at Adelphi University. On top of that, I write for a music website called Punk Mouth.

It’s summer right now, but if I wasn’t currently visiting family in Pakistan I’d be working in the office at least 16 hours a week. I was working from the end of finals to right before I left America anyway. When I get back to New York, I’ll start working right away again. I need the experience for my resume, I can put my writing skills to the test and the money will really come in handy for those pricey medical school bills.

When the semester starts, a typical day for me (Monday, Wednesday and Friday) will be pretty heavy. I start classes at 8 a.m. next semester, which means I have to wake up at 5:45 a.m. When I end my classes for the day, I’ll either start work about 10 minutes later in the office or attend meetings and have some small breaks. Five hours later, I’ll either tutor for another few hours or go home, only to get home around 7-8 p.m. (or 11 p.m. if I’m scheduled to tutor that day) because my commute via the LIRR and MTA is roughly an hour and a half or more going one way. When I get home, I’ll still have to finish whatever homework and studying I didn’t finish in between my small breaks during class. Somewhere in between that, I’ll still have to find time to shadow doctors for my pre-med requirement. I’m only in my second year at Adelphi right now, but I’m doing the best I can in order to build up my medical school application and resume.

My friends get upset when I can’t spend some time with them at the Underground Cafe, but they don’t know that I would do anything to spend some time with them but I physically can’t.

At the same time, I have days where I just want to give everything up and do something less extreme. I dropped pre-med for an entire semester and was set on getting a PhD in Chemistry. When I was a Biochemistry major, I joined an organic chemistry research group and worked really hard, but it wasn’t enough for the chemistry department so I left my major for Biology and dedicated 100 percent of my time to getting into medical school. It’s too much work for me sometimes and I just want to change my major again and relax like all my non-medical friends do.

It might not be a lot of work to some people, but it’s enough to tire me out, especially with housework and family to take care of. However, I know it’s for the best because when I become a doctor, I’ll look back at what I did to get there and realize that it was all worth it. I just wish it wasn’t such a stressful road. Suicide is the second leading cause of death in medical students and they’re scared to get help. “They’re often afraid they won’t be able to practice, they’ll lose privileges,” says Jay Lynch, MD.

If the workload is that stressful, shouldn’t we call for a revamp of the United States medical school system?