I really liked most of medical school. The years are progressively better (from my perspective) as you get more clinical and hands-on, and further away from rote memorization of biochemical pathways and arcane minutiae that have only the obscurest connections to actual patient care. As a first-year resident in emergency medicine in the Bay Area, I am very happy I went to medical school - I am sure that throughout my training and career I'll have ups and downs, but it doesn't feel like I wasted my time, especially as I am starting practicing as a physician. Every so often, those obscure pieces of trivia that I memorized do come up (in EM especially, you get to see all sorts of things, and sometimes it's fun recognizing the weird findings of autoimmune disease or dermatological things, even if you're not going to order the assays to definitively diagnose them in the department).

Living out here in SF it's interesting to compare my past and current life to the friends I have who are involved in tech. I think similarities are the often-seen lack of work/life balance (something I think I developed over three years of working before entering medical school and I would encourage any new MS1 to prioritize thinking about), and the sometimes-overwhelming feelings of "imposter syndrome" or constantly feeling like you somehow fooled people into getting where you are, or that you don't know the things other people think you know. There's also a lot of love for the latest and greatest in technology or theoretical frameworks for understanding disease, sometimes at the expense of things that have been used for ages and that work quite effectively (tincture of time and observation for almost anything, ice for pain, physical exam for evaluation of hemodynamic status).

Tips for incoming first year -- if you're tech-savvy, or at least can touch-type, consider checking out Anki, and reading others' tips for utilizing spaced repetition in your studying. Focus on backwards planning your own curricula, using released tests or your professors' advice to get an idea of what will be tested material. Get, and do, as many questions as possible -- BRS, UWorld, NBMEs, etc. Make flashcards from the questions you get wrong. Repeat and repeat.

Feel free to ask any other specific questions, I'm a bit fried from a long shift. :-)