- Joined
- Dec 23, 2016
- Messages
- 191
- Reaction score
- 685
It's extremely variable. Reliably, you'll have to be there for:
- exams every couple weeks (I had them every week but i think that has changed?) - that's an hour and a half or so. Could be more on the last week of each course since you have a final exam, and possibly an OSCE (clinical skills exam) or practical (anatomy exam).
- learning community where you talk through theoretical patient cases with an attending in a small group setting. It is scheduled for 2 hours. My group's preceptor never had us complete the pre work for it and dismissed us after 30-40 minutes. The amount of time is variable depending on your preceptor. It was usually annoying to show up to this right after exams, but it's one event that will reliably make you close to ~8 other people. A couple of my closest friends where in my LC group so I am appreciative of it in that regard. The preceptor might be a senior resident, current physician, or in my case a retired physician. Our preceptor did offer to write all of us residency rec letters if we wanted them.
-Clinical skills where you work in fake clinic rooms with patient actors. That's 1:15 a week. It's really helpful and refreshing to have during M1 when you have no real patient experience. I personally thought it felt more like a chore in late M2 once I started seeing some real patients in FOD (discussed below)
-There may be miscellaneous mandatory (often from zoom so not necessarily on campus) lectures and meetings, that could be related to physician and society course, community engagement course, patient presentations, or other random stuff. I feel like there was maybe an average of ~1-2 hours of stuff like that per week but it could be 0 or well more than that if it's something big. I'll attach a screenshot or two of a couple random M1 weeks I had. The preclinical curriculum has been shortened significantly since I was an M1 so don't get too attached to the lecture titles. The mandatory things are in orange, blue, or have an "M" by them. To be honest, by the end of M2 I would not show up to a lot of the lectures in this last category (the attendance button works from home) but I wouldn't recommend doing that from the start.
-During the latter half of m1 and all of M2, you spend one afternoon clinic per 2 weeks with a primary care preceptor at an on campus site called Fundamentals of Doctoring or "FOD". As with all things clinical your experience will be preceptor dependent. In general, that's mostly shadowing during M1 and very slowly turns into more of M3-practice during your second year. I remember it occasionally had some annoying busy-work assignments, but If you're interested in being a doctor you should theoretically enjoy the actual in-person part itself. I requested to be paired up with my preceptor again during my M3 internal medicine rotation and he's now writing me a residency rec letter.
Overall, I certainly felt like the amount of mandatory in-person events was a bit more than I wanted, considering I wanted none. I don't actually know if our preclinical curriculum has more or less mandatory in person time than the average med school curriculum. Hopefully that answers your question.
