Failing first year. Need advice on things to help in the repeat year.

[LaughingGas10]

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For a student who has failed in the first year in medical school and has to repeat the year, what are the best tutoring options to get through the year. The toughest subjects for this student were physiology, immunology, pathology and pharmacology.

 

[Hollow Knight]

For pharm I used sketchy. Don’t know how you’d remember all the random factoids by just eating it.

Pathology- Pathoma is the gold standard. But your school might be weird

I normally don’t recommend textbooks but I LOVED Costanzo physiology. Makes things easy to understand and pretty much gets you the depth you need for clinical purposes.

Also, make sure your mental health is in check. If you Les depressed, anxious, have ADHD, etc, that’ll make it tough to pass.

If your school has academic advising, use them.

Also I’m sorry if you’ve been told this but if you haven’t tried anki, that works for the vast majority of people.

 

[Goro]

For a student who has failed in the first year in medical school and has to repeat the year, what are the best tutoring options to get through the year. The toughest subjects for this student were physiology, immunology, pathology and pharmacology.

Do you seek out your faculty for help? How about your fellow students?

My students like sketchy Pharm.

If you're a visual learner, use YouTube videos on the subjects. Short ones.

Seek out your school's learning or education center as well.

 

[operaman]

The key in these cases lies less with finding the right resources and more with diagnosing the underlying issues. The only exception I’ve seen is the highly motivated student who gets so hyper focused on minutiae that they never really learn the high yield material well, but even these folks will usually pass albeit with much more stress and misery than if they’d balanced their time better.

The rest tend to be a mix of various learning issues or mental health issues that they were able to compensate for in undergrad due to their innate intelligence, but once faced with medical school velocity and volumes, they struggle.

I’ve seen some others fail due to outside issues like family drama, relationship drama, etc. Most of these seek help early and often end up taking a LOA to deal with the other stuff and tend to do fine once they’re back.

Addressing the underlying issues is absolutely critical. The sad fact is that M1 is arguably the easiest part of medical school. It’s hard only because it’s new and adjusting to the volume is new, but the material isn’t that complex and you have lots of free time to learn it. Things start to build and eventually you’re in rotations doing 50-70 hour weeks in the hospital while trying to find a few minutes here and there to study for big nbme shelf exams. That’s assuming you were able to pass step 1, and oh you have to also be studying for step 2 while on the wards because that comes up faster than you think. And then don’t even get me started on residency!

So yes find the best resources you can, but also be sure everything else is optimized.

 

[FlowRate]

Agree re: diagnosing underlying issues. Although I was never outright failing, I was underperforming for the first part of med school. For me it was two things that amplified each other:

1. Despite what med school faculty like to say, the vast majority of medical education is memorization-based. Even the "conceptual" material is usually "memorize these things and understand how they interact with each other." That's very different from an engineering undergrad where you don't really ever have to memorize things but do have to understand how complex systems and equations interact to solve problems.
2. I had an undiagnosed medical condition that I couldn't compensate for when confronted with the much higher volume of work and the change in nature of the work (memorizing rather than problem solving.)

So I both had to fix the medical issue AND learn how to do high volume memorization effectively. (Review x5 method worked pretty well for me.)

 

[pazzer2]

I've been out of medical school for more than 30 years, so things were a lot different back for me. In those days we didn't have any electronic study materials.

Some of the best students in my med school class did the following:
1) Get a copy of old lecture notes/slides for each class
2) Read through each note/slide set BEFORE the lecture
3) Attend class and listen to your professor speak. Sit and listen through the lecture and take handwritten notes - preferably on the old set of notes. The professor will sometimes give hints during the class on what will show up on the exam
4) At the end of the week re-review your notes for each class

So this means you'll review each set of material at least 3 times. Repetition is the key in medicine. The more times you hear something, the easier it is to stick in your brain. And don't forget the importance of written notes. Cognitive processes rely on being able to transcribe your thoughts into written form -- helps form better connections into your long-term memory. Don't simply rely on reviewing an AI generated set of notes. The thought that you put into while taking written notes will help you understand the materials better.

The content of medical school is not difficult -- its just dealing with the volume. Pace yourself and I promise you'll do better.