I liked path 2nd year but not nearly as much as I found out I liked it once I spent time in the field. My problem with 2nd year was that things were tailored towards every med student, some of whom want nothing to do with microscopes, and most of whom want only to know "what is on the test." I was lucky, I picked a good microscope partner and we spent lots of time looking at things.
2nd year is tough because you are just looking at individual slides (usually) in isolation. While it is true that by that point you have gone through all of normal histology, it still is difficult to get a grasp on the true beauty of the slide and all that is going on. You are looking for what the lesson is intending to teach you.
Plus, 2nd year you have a ton going on, and lots on your mind. A lot of time you don't really want to spend a ton of time in a lab looking at microscope slides. And, at least at my school, the labs were the last thing scheduled every day so everyone often wanted to get the heck out, if they went at all.
What I really liked about 2nd year path lab was the chance to spend lots of time on certain slides and talk about them with the pathologists who were helping to teach. They were able to go over things with me, point out ways of looking at things, etc, that piqued my interest.
Day-to-day pathology is quite different from 2nd year lab.
