Welcome to “James Munro’s Unintentional How-To.” This is a column requiring reader participation, a.k.a YOU! Are you currently investigating the world of natural medicine? Would you like to know what attending grad school at NCNM is like? We welcome your questions and comments. Please post in the comments section here, on Facebook, or via email. James, a current student, is here to answer your questions. We look forward to hearing from you!

James Munro’s Unintentional How-To: tips and insights from someone who’s probably not doing it right but hasn’t totally failed yet.

I’m a third year student (out of four) in the ND program. I’ve gone down a long and meandering road to get to this point and from the start, I’ve always wished I had a how-to guide to spell out exactly how to become a successful student, person and eventual doctor. I was never able to find such a guide and finally decided to create it myself. I’m here to tell you how to do it. But it comes with a catch – I don’t actually know how to do it. In my experience, the real truth is that there is no single, specific way to do anything. In my life, I have fallen flat, failed, succeeded. I’ve felt confident, scared, accomplished, worthless. I’ve made great choices. I’ve made terrible choices. And quite often, I don’t even really know the difference. But, in the end, everything has led me here and this is exactly where I hoped I’d be.

In this column, I’m offering all of my experiences to you, everything I know. I want to write about what you want to read about. I encourage you to email me with questions or suggestions for topics or things you’d like to hear my perspective on – anything at all. I will be as authentic and sincere as I can be about my experiences. I’ll share the positives, the negatives and everything in between. At their best, maybe my little stories will help you move forward in some small way and at their worst, maybe they’ll make you laugh and give you at least one solid example of what you definitely don’t want to do. Either way, I will never claim to be right or know the way. I will, however, always promise to be totally honest.

And now, I turn it over to you. Email me. Ask me questions. Tell me what you want to read about. In the following posts, I’ll respond to as many of your emails as I can. But if no one emails me, I’ll just address any topic I want and pretend someone emailed it to me: “Thank you all for the overwhelming amount of emails! Today’s topic will be how I stay so handsome through the stress of school.” I look forward to hearing from you and sharing my experiences.

• Please note that this is not a medical column and James is not yet a doctor. Please do not request medical advice here. 
• The views and opinions expressed here are the author’s own  and do not necessarily represent or reflect the views of NCNM.