Book excerpt: Being a physician is an amazing privilege, and it can be a deeply rewarding career...but first you have to get through medical school. Students, who were often at the top of their class prior to medical school, now find themselves surrounded by equally bright, hardworking, overachieving classmates and facing new challenges from rigorous curricula to specialty selection to navigation of unchartered territories of mentorship, clinical rotations, and research. Thriving in medical school requires more than smarts--it requires new learning strategies, organization, time management, teamwork skills, mentorship, adaptability, resilience, and more. This book brings together advice from medical educators, practicing physicians, and current medical students to help new medical students not just survive medical school but handle the transition with grace and position them to succeed and thrive.