Tom Facchine – Medina Stories #03 – Advice For Students Going to Medina

			One thing that my mentors did that helped me out a lot was that they pumped me up with all the great
things about studying in Medina, before I was accepted. And then after I was accepted to study
there, they told me all the bad things, right? So I watched as a lot of people who didn't have that
kind of mental preparation,
		

			you get an ideal right in your head, and you think that it's going to be perfect, and you think that
everyone's going to be nice to you, and you think that everyone's going to respect, you know, and
that's just not the reality. Human beings aren't like that, you know, and everybody's got stuff that
they're dealing with, and every society has good and bad in it. And so, I was in a good place,
because my mentors kind of prepared me for that. So I wasn't shocked. And I wasn't disappointed. And
it wasn't like a crisis of faith or anything. But I definitely saw people who weren't prepared like
that. And for some of them, it was really, really tough for them to deal with that aspect of things.
		

			So I think that's one thing, just, you know, realize that Medina is just like any other place in
some ways, and that there's people there that oppress other people, there's people there who do
drugs, there's people there who do Zina, there's people there who it's like any other place, and we
can talk about whether it's more or less than this place or that place. But that's not the point,
the point is, you're going to, you can see it there, right. So you shouldn't
		

			be thrown into a crisis of faith, if you do see it. The second thing is that, you're still going to
be the same person. When you get to Medina, a lot of people kind of imagine that, once they get to
Medina, they're going to be their most pious selves and their most hardworking selves, and then you
ended up just, you know, playing video games and sleeping oversleeping, your prayers, I knew people
who were in the university who, you know, had a lot of struggles, they were the same person, you
know, they just, you're just now living in a different place. So going to Medina isn't going to save
you from yourself, you've got to put in the work, you've got to work on yourself, when you're by
		

			yourself or with one other guy in a dorm room. And you've got nine classes a semester, and you've
got your lessons at the profits mess sheet, it's just you against yourself, you know, your only
enemy is you, you know, you have to struggle against yourself, you have to discipline yourself, you
have to try to get into good habits, you have to surround yourself with the right people who are
going to push you but also going to encourage you and support you. And that's, that's really, really
important.
		

			The next thing I would say is that, from the academic aspect, everybody needs to have a program,
right. And there's programs out there now that are online, much more so than when I got there, and
much more so than when people before me got there. You know, people can waste doesn't matter how
many years you spend there, right? You don't want to come back from a DSL, I spent 10 years in
Medina and 15 years in Medina. And you just wasted it. Right? And not waste like the other I was
talking about where you're not studying? No, there's people that can actually attend lessons and
take notes and whatever and still come out with very, very little. And that's because they don't
		

			have a program. They just follow things kind of chaotically like oh, so and so's taken teaching this
class or so and so's teaching this lesson or come do this or come do that they never finish
anything. Right? Or even if they do finish something, it's all random, disconnected information.
It's not like a whole program where you come out with the fundamentals. And all the major fields
have, you know, or disciplines of study that you need, and you haven't really gotten into the
intermediary levels of any sort of discipline. Right? So and there's a lot of peer pressure to,
like, some people will be like, Well, why didn't Why don't you come into this lesson? Or why aren't
		

			you calling to shake, so and so's lesson, right? And you just need to have a plan and you need to
have the confidence to be like, that's not my program. You know, my program is I want to get good in
fifth. Or I want to get good in, you know, really good in Arabic, or I want to master the Koran. And
so this is my program, and then you got to stick it out. You have to finish it and you can't let
other people take you off your program. And you know that the first thing that you're gonna study,
this is the first book I'm going to study. This is the second book I'm going to study. This is the
third book I'm going to study and you've got kind of associates and acquaintances that can help keep
		

			each other accountable, right? Because you know, otherwise you're gonna just waste your time.