How students are graded varies from school to school. There are a small number of schools using a competency-based evaluation system that measures student progression in learning a certain set of competencies throughout the course of medical school.
To see individual medical school policies on grading, see the Education section of the Medical School Admission Requirements. Grades do matter in certain instances, but they are only one criteria by which you are evaluated during medical school. Some schools introduce patient interactions early on some in the first week! Typically, you do clinical rotations, also called clerkships, during the third and fourth year of medical school. Rotations give you firsthand experience working with patients in various specialties under direct supervision of a faculty member, fellow, or resident.
The types, number, and length of rotations vary from school to school, but training usually includes clerkships in internal medicine, family medicine, obstetrics and gynecology, pediatrics, psychiatry, and surgery. These labs last between two and four hours.
Typically, these labs cover supplementary material. This includes anatomy, histopathology, and other clinically related skills such as patient interviewing. Many students forego attending lectures in person to study previous material. They then watch lectures — which are all recorded — in 2x speed on their own time at home. A surgery rotation will require you to spend more time at the hospital than an inpatient pediatrics rotation will.
But regardless of the rotation, your instructors will expect you to read and study further at home. During this time, medical school students develop a real sense of what specialties they might be interested in pursuing. All of the insights gleaned from these clinical training experiences will serve as important material in your residency personal statement and responses to residency interview questions.
Some of us need to spend two hours in the gym, five times a week. Others need to spend weekends wining and dining with close friends or family.
Others would just take six to eight hours of sleep a night. If you learn to properly manage your time to keep up with the material and learn to prioritize—say, skipping the clubbing in favor of the gym—you can certainly have the life you want in your preclinical years.
The first two years of medical school are a grind. Which nerve signals the muscles that allow you to extend your arm? Is corneal clouding associated with mucopolysaccharidosis type I Hurler syndrome, due to a defect in alpha-L-iduronidase or II Hunter syndrome, due to a deficiency of iduronatesulfatase? Hunter vs. Hurler syndrome is a classic favorite of board exam question-writers, though they occur in , or fewer live births in the U.
Ultimately, you will move on to more interesting and intellectually stimulating challenges as your knowledge progresses. But these can feel remote when your main task is to memorize on which chromosome the gene affected in neurofibromatosis type II is located. While I was surprised by how much memorization engulfed my study hours, it was reassuring to know that it had little bearing on my future enjoyment of the practice of medicine.
Traditionally, medical school curriculum has been split into pre-clinical and clinical phases; during the preclinical phase, students learn the anatomy, pathophysiology, and pharmacology needed to treat patients, while the clinical phase traditionally the last two years of medical school focuses on developing the interpersonal and technical skills needed to competently diagnose and treat patients as a member of the healthcare team.
Thankfully, medical schools have recently recognized that early clinical exposure is vital in the student educational experience. Because of this, there has been a significant effort by many medical schools to make the first two years of medical school more than memorizing thousands of PowerPoint slides.
Medical school curriculum is highly structured. Everyone applying to U. As mentioned previously, medical school had been traditionally divided into preclinical first two years and clinical last two years curricula. There are probably as many different medical school curricula as there are medical schools. Premedical students can easily get lost in the weeds of trying to understand which curriculum is best for their learning style: Pure lecture?
Flipped classroom-style small groups? A heavy emphasis on early clinical exposure, or time to focus on learning the basic pathophysiology well before picking up clinical skills?
Variations in the structure of the curriculum will affect your daily life as a medical student. Most medical schools use a variety of teaching methods to communicate information to their students. You may have encountered flipped classrooms during undergrad courses; there are many varieties, but the essential idea is that students are responsible for covering the content outside of the classroom and then reinforce and apply this material in small groups. At some medical schools, almost all teaching occurs in large lecture halls, while at others, almost all instruction takes place via flipped classroom-style groups.
Most medical schools fall somewhere in the middle with a mix of large lectures, flipped classrooms, and medium-sized group labs or discussions. When deciding between two otherwise similar medical schools, it can be helpful to consider which structure might work better for your learning style. Of course, this can be a challenge to predict in advance. In my case, I probably would have opted for a flipped-classroom style curriculum if I had been given the choice before medical school.
However, halfway through my first year, I came to really appreciate the flexibility allowed by a lecture-based curriculum since almost all of our lectures were video-recorded, they could be watched at any time from anywhere. One of the simultaneously wonderful and not-so-great aspects of medicine is that typically healthcare providers need to be physically present. This is positive, in that the doctor-patient relationship continues to feel real, even in an era when we are disconnected in many ways.
On the other hand, it is unlikely that those of us in medicine will end up with the flexible or remote-working arrangements that have become more common in other fields, such as tech or advertising. Because of this, I tried to take advantage of the flexible studying arrangement of my preclinical years while I could.
Sometimes this meant spending a long weekend at home with my family and watching lectures from hundreds of miles away. At other times, it meant sleeping in and watching lectures until 3 AM— I felt like I could pay better attention at 1 AM than immediately after lunch at 1 PM.
This also allowed for some flexibility to be involved in student groups. For example, during my second year of medical school I did outreach to community organizations for our student-run free clinic. Recorded lectures allowed me to meet with employees from local nonprofits during their normal work hours, then go back and watch lectures at night or early the next morning. This is how the curriculum worked for me, but everyone is different. Students should consider their own learning style while remembering that they will be more adaptable than they expect.
There will likely be many situations later in life where content delivery is not tailored to your learning style, and mastery is still expected. Many pre-meds experience an atmosphere of ruthless competition in undergrad. Their peers are notorious for hyper-competition and perfectionism.
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