Gross Anatomy

First of all, yes. You need to know a majority (if not all) of everything. It sounds daunting, but with persistence and hard work, it can be done. Just take it one day at a time when you are in medical school and try your hardest to understand as much as you can.

Secondly, I want to comment on your "learn everything prior to medical school" idea. Please just go and check out this thread (http://forums.studentdoctor.net/showthread.php?t=574547). There you will see a lot of people saying to just relax and enjoy your time. Honestly, if I had studied anatomy before coming to school, I would have burnt out for the semester long ago. Thankfully this burnt out feeling is just beginning to settle in and finals start today.

Good luck.

 

don't bother trying to study, even if its an hour a day for 7 months, cause your not gonna remember much by the end of the 7 months if all you are doing is doing an hour a day. Trust me, when the time comes, you will learn anatomy. For me, and I think alot of people, I learned anatomy best by being by my body and just going over all the structures over and over AND OVER again. I don't think I would have been able to learn any other way. Just enjoy the time before med school, its pointless to study now...

 

You won't remember a single thing. Don't bother.

 

I second the above.

It seems tempting to make use of the 7 months academically, but it isn't. You don't know how your professors are going to teach/examine you on the material, and that will have a BIG influence on the way you study. It would have been a BIG waste of time if I had tried to start studying early.

Drink some beer, spend time with your friends/family, go on a hike, ANYTHING but study. Having fun and relaxing is really the best way to spend your time before school, though you may disagree at this point.

Congrats on your acceptance!

 

This is the truth.

Just get some good books ("House of God" by Samuel Shem is a personal favorite) and read for fun while you can. You won't have time to read anything FUN once you start.

PS - Anatomy sucks, I truly think it's meant to weed out the weaklings in the first semester of Med school-

 

I just finished anatomy first year. Arguably one of my most time consuming courses, but not most difficult in concepts.

I did pretty well too but what really helped me out a lot was being smart with my studying of anatomy. Repetition is key with anatomy, and you want to find ways that will allow you to repeat review of the material in as little time as possible. Because I guarantee if you give it a very thorough memorization now, you WILL forget most of the details by July. The key is BIG PICTURE. This is what you will retain if you study everything from now. So the smart thing to do is to skip all that excess memorization and just learn the big picture for now. That way when school starts you can focus on the minor details and clinical applications while your peers struggle to get the big picture. I think the best and easiest way to accomplish this is to watch the entire Acland DVD series. Its very good and goes over everything. And you won't be bored to death at the same time. If you do watch it, don't dwell too much on catching every detail. In fact try not to pause, simply watch through each 2.5 hour dvd (6 total) over a few weeks and repeat the cycle a month later.

 

I totally agree with your last comment dude. Anatomy is definitely the right of passage into medical school. As well as physiology for those who aren't as conceptually oriented.

 

Yes, you'll learn them. All of them. Even the tiny ones (but those tend to be easy to name). The other problem with memorizing stuff without a cadaver is you don't get the feel for the relationships - the depth, tracing the vessel/nerve, etc back to where it started, where it goes... every body is different and my school tended to tag the weird/different/interesting stuff every exam. Like the vertebral artery that came off the aorta.

For the love of everything you hold near and dear, don't worry about learning ANYTHING until you hit med school. There are ways to figure this stuff out much better than just memorizing stuff willy-nilly. Thousand of folks have gone through med school before you with no pre-studying. You'll do just fine.

 

I feel like we should create a "Now that's what we call advice!" thread and have this whole pre-studying thing at the top.

 

you'll get nearly everything, but you wont all be tested on it at hte same time and it will build and you'll notice patterns.

just enjoy your summer and dont freak out before it's even necessary

 

I took massage therapy about a year prior to med school that taught all the major muscles, bones, bony landmarks, and muscle actions. I found this knowledge quite valuable to have when I started gross. So I don't think it's fair to say that prior study is not helpful.

That advice about watching the Acland videos is right on. You might want to read approximately the first 100 pages of Moore and Dalley which is a standard med school anatomy text. That first chapter gives you a pretty good overview of the body, the planes, the nervous system, etc. so that when you go in, you will have at least seen this terminology before.

But don't expect that any amount of studying in advance will prepare you for the onslaught of information in med school. I took a summer course in biochem and it was covered in about a week in med school.

 

MSUCOM is one of my top 1 picks (applying first time this summer),

I actually took a Human Gross anatmoy 350 this past fall at MSU (as a post-bacc student), the faculty who taugh the course were directly from the School of Osteopathic Medicine, it was a pretty intense course, I learned alot about the human body, Im sure this class is going to help me a bit when I get to human anatomy in med school.

But honestly, the material I learned in this "simplified" undergrad course was not easy to learn by just self study, its too boring to learn by self study anyways haha

 

Remember your first impressions of organic chemistry in undergrad? Everyone talks about how hard it is. One of the profs at my undergrad had on the first slide of his first lecture: "Organic chemistry has ended more medical careers than lawyers."

I worked hard, thought o-chem was insanely hard, but somehow, I managed to get A's in both sections. Then I take molecular biology and the two semester biochem for biochem majors courses, and only then do I realize how easy o-chem really was. It's on the MCAT, for God's sake. There is nothing hard on the MCAT.

Molecular biology was a very med-school-like class. Memorizing tons of bull**** with arbitrary names like "eIF2f", and what they all do... just because. And the biochem course was just a legitimately hard course. But I managed to get A's in those too.

The only thing hard about o-chem is:
1. It's different... stuff you've probably never seen before
2. It is the first class in the whole pre-med/science major sequence where you REALLY have to study. Kind of a shock to the system.

Anatomy is sort of the same way. You hear the horror stories, it looks intimidating, blah blah blah. Then you work hard and get through it easily. Then you move on to something harder, you step up your game, and get through that too. We are in CMBM now, and I am longing for the days of anatomy.

It's not that bad. It is not impossible. No school will make it so hard that you have to be a super-genius who never has any fun or sleeps, and spends every waking moment studying, in order to pass. Even when one of our profs started dropping embryology questions on our lab practical, it wasn't that bad.

Like o-chem in undergrad, anatomy is the first thing you're going to take in med school. You're adjusting to a new level of effort, and most of it is going to be new (even if you've had anatomy before... this is just different).

It's one of the easiest things you will take in med school. Just go in ready to work hard, and you'll be fine. You'll think its hard when you're doing it, only to realize later how ****ing easy it really was. Just go with the flow.

 

I am stealing this quote.

 

I think that MSUCOM has anatomy in the summer and it's your only course for the summer, which should make things a bit easier than taking it with all of the other first semester courses. If it were me, I'd study the anatomy that was on the first practical exam a few weeks before anatomy starts. I think it used to be thorax and abdomen, but it could've changed.

Also, I really found the Ackland anatomy DVDs to be quite helpful.

 

hehe like your enthusiasm but you won't do any good by studying ahead of time. Have a great freaking time dude..you are in now focus on enjoying some quality time with family, friends, travel if you can.

 

+1 on that one... I actually verbalized something similar. When I went from ochem 1 to ochem 2, about 1/4 of the premeds I knew decided that something else was what they were supposed to do...