Going through medical school is definitely harder than getting into medical school

[Goro]

Sometimes I wonder if people just want to be able to complain about med school being hard. Like they think it's impressive to suffer.

N=1 but I really enjoy it so far. Undergrad was harder because it wasn't nearly as interesting.

Well, to be fair, it's a med student's job to complain.

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[M&L]

My nights now are 5p-830a (i end up doing a 24 hour shift though)

nights were similar places I rotated at. My peds sub-i was about 5p-830a. Other places were 5p-7a.

oh my god this sounds horrible!!!! jesus... i am so sorry

 

[IMG69]

Sounds a bit like my school, we had 18% of the class fail and have to resit first year and then about 8~ had to repeat the year entirely. In first year we have 4 exams - each one is 50% of your mark and that equates to 2 public health exams and 2 clinical science exams we call them oh and throw in an OSCE. After 1st year you only have one exam each year and it's 100% of your grade along with more OSCEs. Usually first decile is someone scoring<75%, the exams are extremely ambiguous we have no idea if we're actually learning the right things and they do this on purpose, they think if we're getting 90's then we'll get too cocky and think we know it all. We have a 3 strike system with resits; throughout the whole degree your allowed 3 resits and yes people use them all up just on first year. We have about a 20% lee-way between passing the exam and first decile, ~52% may be the pass mark then like I said above 75 may be the highest mark, also if you get 2 SD below the pass mark you have to repeat the year and there's no chance for a resit.

Each year we're given a list of 400 diseases/condition and they're ranked in terms of what our expected level of knowledge on the disease/condition should be and that's all we get told and let me tell you nobody has a clue what they're doing, our lectures (which we have about 30 for the whole year) even now in my 3rd year are poorer quality than my first year lectures yet we're expected to manage everything as if we were a first year resident and how to handle emergencies and i'm not just talking below 8 intubate.

It sure as hell makes it fun when exam season comes around. Pretty interesting to see how other med schools operate.

Where I grew up you need about a 96% average to get into med school, as in about 2 questions wrong per paper/subject across 8 subjects for that year, this is of course without affirmative action, e.g my cousin didn't get in with a 96% while 65% is needed to meet the cut-off if you come from a background they recognize as needed in Medicine.

 

[efle]

It's funny, because I was an organic chemistry major (not premed at the time, lol) and liked it because it was all conceptual and intuitive and not memorization to me. Medical school felt pretty similar, and other than some of the less-relevant portions of anatomy and histology, I never felt as if I was forced into straight regurgitation.

I recognize that I'm an outlier on this front, but it has always made me wonder whether the understanding came before or after the memorization (aka did memorization make the understanding easier, or did the understanding make the memorization easier and therefore less in-your-face).

Just night shift thoughts, sorry.

Yeah I'm with you on that one mehc. Orgo, physics, calc and stats were always much, much less studying than bio classes because there was so little to memorize, it was all application. I watched a lot of people much more studious get weeded out.

But funny enough my old roommate who I used to crush on the college curves beat me by 10 pts on step! If you can survive the premed part, work ethic gets the last laugh in medical training for sure

 

[deleted889094]

Well, to be fair, it's a med student's job to complain.

Well my school must be offering overtime

 

[ciestar]

oh my god this sounds horrible!!!! jesus... i am so sorry

Depending on what you go into, you’ll do similar. That’s residency.

 

[M&L]

Depending on what you go into, you’ll do similar. That’s residency.

well, my top choice is pathology. it is not like this.... but i hear you.

 

[FutureBlackDr]

I keep hearing people say that the hardest part about medical school is getting in. I don't think this could be further from the truth.

As an MS4 at a US MD school, 20 students of the 100 person class we started with are gone. At least 14 of those were due to academic reasons, and they either left or repeated years. The remaining 6 are taking research or MPH years, since they're gunning for competitive specialties.

Even failing one exam pushes you to a very dangerous place, because the retake is the only thing standing between you and repeating a year. And my school's academic policies are honestly not even strict, they're actually quite lenient.

I very much enjoyed med school, but it is a dangerous beast. If you don't take it seriously, it will chew you up and spit you out and you'll only have a mountain of debt to show for it.

What school did you attend?

 

[IlDestriero]

My medical school experience was very different. Very few had to retake classes, one repeated 1st year. Pretty much everyone graduated.
2 got thrown out for cheating, one quit 4th year to start a business, the one that repeated 1st year graduated with the following class. A couple didn’t do residency, but that was to pursue other opportunities not because they couldn’t pass the USMLE.
Considering 6000+ people apply for ~150 spots, it’s definitely harder to get in than stay in.
There were a few MD PhD students as well, I forgot about them. As far as I know they all passed the 1st 2 years. If you can survive lethally boring classes and manage a million of pieces of data, you can survive the clinical years.

 

[LunaOri]

Sounds a bit like my school, we had 18% of the class fail and have to resit first year and then about 8~ had to repeat the year entirely. In first year we have 4 exams - each one is 50% of your mark and that equates to 2 public health exams and 2 clinical science exams we call them oh and throw in an OSCE. After 1st year you only have one exam each year and it's 100% of your grade along with more OSCEs. Usually first decile is someone scoring<75%, the exams are extremely ambiguous we have no idea if we're actually learning the right things and they do this on purpose, they think if we're getting 90's then we'll get too cocky and think we know it all. We have a 3 strike system with resits; throughout the whole degree your allowed 3 resits and yes people use them all up just on first year. We have about a 20% lee-way between passing the exam and first decile, ~52% may be the pass mark then like I said above 75 may be the highest mark, also if you get 2 SD below the pass mark you have to repeat the year and there's no chance for a resit.

Each year we're given a list of 400 diseases/condition and they're ranked in terms of what our expected level of knowledge on the disease/condition should be and that's all we get told and let me tell you nobody has a clue what they're doing, our lectures (which we have about 30 for the whole year) even now in my 3rd year are poorer quality than my first year lectures yet we're expected to manage everything as if we were a first year resident and how to handle emergencies and i'm not just talking below 8 intubate.

It sure as hell makes it fun when exam season comes around. Pretty interesting to see how other med schools operate.

Where I grew up you need about a 96% average to get into med school, as in about 2 questions wrong per paper/subject across 8 subjects for that year, this is of course without affirmative action, e.g my cousin didn't get in with a 96% while 65% is needed to meet the cut-off if you come from a background they recognize as needed in Medicine.

OMG! In which circle of hell did you go to medical school?!!!

 

[treatem-and-streetem]

Yeah.....at least for me...im sitting here wondering why it was so hard to get into med school

 

[efle]

Yeah.....at least for me...im sitting here wondering why it was so hard to get into med school

Competition. That's the only reason. A 50th percentile MCAT predicts successful passage of boards and graduation, yet the median admit is >80th percentile.

So depending how you look at it, you could argue it's more than twice as hard to get in than it is to get through.

 

[IMG69]

OMG! In which circle of hell did you go to medical school?!!!

I guess its a UK thing since we don't have all the USMLE steps to complete they naturally have to make the course harder? I honestly find it fascinating that in the US you have a test after every block, that's incredible, I couldn't imagine studying for only 1 topic at a time but obviously USMLE is the real deal breaker.