All you busy med students!

[ocwaveoc]

About how many hours of free time do you have a week?
Please indicate
1) # of hours in the gym/week
2) # of hours "playing" on the weekend/week

I hear of how time consuming med school is (1st and 2nd yr). I just want to get a feel for it.

What about for the 3rd and 4th yrs? How much free time do you have per week as broken down as above?

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[NoktorNoL]

About how many hours of free time do you have a week?
Please indicate
1) # of hours in the gym/week
2) # of hours "playing" on the weekend/week

I hear of how time consuming med school is (1st and 2nd yr). I just want to get a feel for it.

What about for the 3rd and 4th yrs? How much free time do you have per week as broken down as above?

I'm a First year...It's really not that bad until the week before exams
(as a head's up...we started with Anatomy, Biochemistry and a Cell Biology/Histology class with a little Physiology in it, so we have three classes...some schools just start with anatomy)...

I go to the gym every day for about 1-1.5 hours
I go out Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights until the week before exams...going out means I don't do any work from 5 or 6 until the next day..and sometimes not the next day cuz I'm too out of it
I still to go football games on Saturdays, and plan to go to basketball games when the season starts (aka tomorrow night)
I play IM sports

The key is to figure out if you need to go to class or not..I don't and it saves me time because I can sleep then make up the lectures on my own time in less time than the lecture would take.

Basically the only thing I miss is sleep...going out on weekends doesn't exactly help the catching up on sleep cause...Actually, I've found exam week to be the best time to catch up on sleep because we just have exams in the afternoons on Mon and Wed, and one exam on Friday morning...the rest of the time is for study and...sleep!!

Now..second year is supposed to be much harder, though many second years still go out, it may not be as often. Third and fourth years I almost never see...third years probably because they have rotations and many of them are not in Charlottesville, and fourth years probably have better things to do than hang out with first and second years...but they definitely have a lot of free time.

 

[DocPsychosis]

About how many hours of free time do you have a week?
Please indicate
1) # of hours in the gym/week
2) # of hours "playing" on the weekend/week

I hear of how time consuming med school is (1st and 2nd yr). I just want to get a feel for it.

What about for the 3rd and 4th yrs? How much free time do you have per week as broken down as above?

I'm a 1st-yr at UT-Houston. I go to the gym about an hour a day, 4-5 days per week (more than I did as an undergrad!). On the weekends, I study most of Sat afternoon and Sun all afternoon and evening. Friday and Saturday nights after dinner I take off, and weekend mornings I take off to sleep in. This semester we're taking anatomy, biochem, histology, and an usually heavy developmental anatomy course (in class 3-5 hrs per day total, plus gross & histo labs).

I think the 2nd yrs have it easier here, or at least they're in class less. And what Noktornol said about MS3s and 4s.

 

[ocwaveoc]

Wow, your schedules don't sound as bad as I thought how the 1st yr is going to be. I was expecting to study until 11 PM every week night and study 6-8 hours on Saturdays and Sundays. I thought I would be lucky if I had enough time to goto the gym 2-3 times a week for 1.5 hrs each time. But, it seems from your experiences that there is plenty of time. Maybe you two are efficient at time management or things come very quickly and don't require going over things a couple of times to really understand the material. A

Anyways, the first yr is a bit less intimidating now.

 

[Soggun]

Wow, your schedules don't sound as bad as I thought how the 1st yr is going to be. I was expecting to study until 11 PM every week night and study 6-8 hours on Saturdays and Sundays. I thought I would be lucky if I had enough time to goto the gym 2-3 times a week for 1.5 hrs each time. But, it seems from your experiences that there is plenty of time. Maybe you two are efficient at time management or things come very quickly and don't require going over things a couple of times to really understand the material. A

Anyways, the first yr is a bit less intimidating now.

Well, depends how motivated I am on any given week - but there's always time to go to the gym for an hour a day (and you should do that - helps keep you sane). If I'm working hard on a given week, between class and studying I might be out from 8:30 AM til 9:30 or 10 PM. I try to get done by then though so that even if I don't go to the gym I can do sit ups or push ups or something on my own for an hour.

You're right though, how much time people spend varies a LOT from person to person. I also found that I was sort of lulled into a false sense of security after our first block (kind of a very, very quick and intense review of college material) so I didn't work as hard during the 2nd block and, though I had much more free time, my grades suffered. The best bet would probably be to find a schedule and stick to it (study til 7 or 8 every night?) and then just up it a week or two before an exam. Then again, easier said than done.