funny I stumbled upon this now...if you had asked me a few weeks ago then I would have said contacts are no problem.
I've had soft contacts for the past 12 years and never had a problem excluding an eye infection when I was 13.
Over this year, I probably easily spent 8-10 hours/day focusing real hard on my laptop to watch lectures and study. During the spring semester, my left eye started to bother me every now and then toward the end of the night. It just felt like simple eye strain so I'd switch to my glasses and it'd be good.
A few weeks after 1st year ended, my vision in that eye started to get blurry. I changed out my contacts but it was the same with new contacts and my glasses. A week later my eye started to sting real bad, water, turned red, etc. So I went to eye doctor and she told me I had keratitis from my contact. It's just inflammation of the cornea, but it can cause some bad problems if not treated. Fortunately, mine was a noninfectious ketatitis. It may have been caused by wearing my contacts too long, maybe my contact was scratched, who knows. The bacterial kind supposedly is a lot worse and really hard to get rid of. She put me on a steroid for a week and everything went away except the blurriness. I went back and she gave me lubricant drops to try for another week. It's been a few weeks and I think my vision in that eye is finally starting to comeback. Hopefully it'll stay on that track and I'll be able to wear my contacts in a few days.
Moral of the story: all the studying, staring at a comp all day everyday definitely strains your eyes more than ever before. If it's a late night of studying, do your eyes a favor and just put your glasses on. I'm glad I ran into this problem during the summer when I don't have to study, but I definitely would have preferred not to have it at all obviously lol. I think you're at the biggest risk of straining your eyes during the 1st 2 years when you are doing all of that studying. During 3rd and 4th year you may have your contacts in longer at times, but you are not staring at a computer screen 12 hours/day. For me, it's the computer time over this past year that irritated my eye real bad, not simply wearing them long hours. I've always worn them long hours and no problem until I was wearing that long while focusing real hard at a screen.
As for anatomy, I have soft lenses and never had much of a problem in the lab. At times if I literally had my head close to the body for a while, sometimes the formalin would sting my eyes a little. You just have to stay back and blink a few times to solve that. I think that'll happen regardless if you wear contacts.
