I agree with most of what
@stere0psis and
@taco1572 said about the preclinical curriculum.
1. Above all n=1, everyone's experience/priorities/level of pessimism/optimism/everything are different, and no one (that I know of) has been enrolled at both UTSW and Baylor, or any other school, so even if you have friends there, it's all going to be subjective/second hand info.
2. We don't have perspective. Everything we complain about (or like) may or may not be useful to us later on and we'll have no idea until we get there, and even then subjectivity and bias will be impossible to differentiate from objective reality. Unfortunately, that's just life.
3. Our pre-clerkship curriculum is very challenging, often without reason in my opinion (see #2). E.g. we so many mandatory events that only serve to distract us from studying for our classes, leading to us having to spend more time 'studying' (including all that extra time wasted). I have found it almost imposible to prepare for and/or gain anything from these experiences (pt interactions, standardized pt stuff, "wellness" meetings, etc.). They all sounded cool at the interview day, but I promise you, you will just be thinking "I could be doing Anki right now." And you would be 100% right that it would be a more efficient use of your time (which you absolutely have to maximize in order to not feel stressed out, see #5.). It's made me a bit jaded that we can't even enjoy what is supposed to make medicine special (getting to be a part of a field where we get to genuinely help people). I'm hoping this gets better after this semester, we'll see.
4. I had the notion that med school content wouldn't be much harder than undergrad, and tbh that's
kind of true (subjective ofc), but every lecture is about as difficult as the hardest lecture/content you had in undergrad, and there's 3-5 lectures a day (plus pbls, plus dissection, plus meetings, plus etc. etc. etc.) and managing that amount of content/random stuff is difficult and puts a strain on mental health, relationships, etc. You can't truly understand the fire-hose analogy until you've lived it.
5. I had the notion that UTSW's curriculum was "harder "than other schools in part, because the type of students that end up at UTSW '28 are more neurotic than other schools, and that's also
kind of true. (at least for me). Everyone I've talk to IRL
feels like they are drowning. But most of my classmates and I have done perfectly fine in our classes so far. But the subjective feeling of struggling is immense and widespread. This is somewhat of a curriculum problem as well, e.g. every quiz we take (which matters almost nothing for our grade) is harder than the final exam, which we have to pass to pass the class, which contributes to our stress for sure. And due to our personalities, even when we
cognitively know we are doing OK, we still feel very stressed because it
feels like we're going to fail. I've had to learn to be OK with not understanding everything 100% and being OK with a sense of impending doom, because I really don't need to study as much as I think I do. If you can master this you might have a life, but it will still be difficult. I didn't want medical school to be my entire life, and at UTSW '28 that's just not realistic imo. You might be able to carve out time for a hobby or two, but you'll be 'behind' and probably stressed out because of it.
Tbh this semester has been a bit of a rollercoaster, and I keep vacilating between 'drinking the koolaid' and embracing the suck, and being pretty jaded and borderline burned out already. Once again, this may or may not be a general medical school thing (I've had some personal stuff that has made things a bit harder than some of my classmates, as far as I can tell).
This is probably more important for ranking than interviewing, so we should revisit this later.
One last thing, I've had at least one faculty team member outright say our pre-clinical curriculum is not what makes UTSW special, but that our clerkships will prepare us to be some of the best physicians in America, which I honestly believe (at least right now lol).
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