I'm a a third week med student 🙂 and I feel like everyone studies way more than 2 hours a day. I think I do 3 or 4 monday through friday and maybe 6-7 or so saturday-monday. I'm putting in huge gobs of time and there's just too much material to learn it all well. I guess I'm going to have to hope that the level I've got it at is sufficient to get through the test.
I think you're right on the mark. Listen, we were all pretty smart undergraduates - I know that, through all of my undergraduate years, I never studied much until the last week before the test - I changed a little bit in grad school, but not all that much.
Medical school is a different level, a different league, a different universe. Read some old SDN posts from about mid-semester - you'll hear a lot of people talking about how their friends don't understand, their significant other doesn't understand, their family doesn't understand. And ya know what, they will not understand what you will be going through. I had a physician tell our class "nobody but a fellow medical student or a physician can understand what you're going through and what you're feeling - get used to it."
I don't mean to scare you... but it's silly for anyone to say that you never studied much during your undergraduate years - MOST of us didn't - we were smart enough, we didn't have to. I don't care who you are, you just can't do that in medical school. There is too much material coming at you too fast. None of it is really rocket science, but the volume is totally overwhelming. Medical students, with very rare exceptions, study quite a number of hours every day, including weekends. You can do somewhat less and still pass - but if you want to stay somewhere among the competitive students, you'd better get to work.
I look back on my two pre-clinical years now... and there were some good times, a lot of laughs - once you realize that nobody else in your life really does understand, you get much closer to your medical school colleagues. But, on the whole, first and second year sucked. We got through it, and you'll get through it - it's part of the price of admission to this profession.
It's a competition. if you don't raise up your game along with everyone else you could fail. you don't want to suddenly be faced with a crisis when you get anatomy test 1 back.
Well, yes, most medical students are quite competitive, but that's not really the point. Gross Anatomy, as much as I hated it, is probably the most relevant course you'll take during your first year. Biochem has some relevance, but a lot of it you'll retain until Step 1 and then never think about it again. In Gross, you won't remember every nerve and muscle for the rest of your career - but you do need to have a pretty darn solid concept of the structure of the human body before you can go on to learn how it functions and what happens to it in disease states. You're taking Gross not to compete - but to learn the fundamentals needed to learn to practice medicine.
