Hours per week on Required Courses that are irrelevant to Step 1 in your school??

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Required Hours on Doctoring, Group Discussion, Shadowing, Humanity, and Scholarly Concentration

  • 0 to 5 hours

  • 5 to 10 hours

  • 10 to 15 hours

  • 15 to 20 hours

  • 20 to 25 hours

  • 25 hours+

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libraryismyhome

libraryismyhome

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My school requires every student to do multiple things that are irrelevant to Step 1.
Ethics, Health Policy, and Biostatistics are relevant to Step 1 so don't add them to your hours.

Requirements that are Irrelevant to Step 1
Doctoring: physical exam, patient interview, and etc
- 4 hours per week

Shadowing: going to hospitals and shadow doctors
- 5 hours per week 6+ hours if the site is far away

Humanity: reading poems and essays written by health professionals
- 4 hours every other week = 2 hours per week

Scholarly Concentration: students choose their concentration: research, public health, global health, biostat, disparities, and etc
- Varies, 1~2 hours per week

Clinical Problem Solving: discussing patient cases but unfortunately not directly relevant to stuff we learn
- 4 hours per week

Total: 16 to 18 hours per week

Additionally,
Volunteer Hour Requirement before graduation 40 hours
Teaching Hour Requirement before graduation 20 hours

I understand some people arguing that step 1 isn't everything to be a doctor.
However, medical school does not make me an attending physician. It should help me to be a resident physician. Therefore it should help me to build the strongest residency application possible.

How about your school?
 
Last edited:
Psai said:
There's a lot more to being a doctor than passing step 1. Doctoring? Seriously? That's pretty relevant to step 1 imo
Click to expand...

I agree with the first statement. However, at least my school's doctoring is relevant to Step 2 but not Step 1.
But guys,, please cast your vote. I want to learn how other schools are.
 
The "Humanity," "Scholarly Concentration," and "Ethics" components are pretty irrelevant, but the others seem fairly important. It may not be organized in the best way, but Doctoring, Shadowing, and Biostats seem like they would be relevant for USMLE and certainly teach you information you'll use as a physician.

EDIT: and my school also has a Humanism class, which is awful. You're not going to learn compassion or cultural competence from a mandatory weekly 2 hour lecture in a hall with 200+ other students. We also have a tobacco cessation class, which is pretty bad. In addition to this we have a hefty community service requirement and medical spanish requirements. We also have the "shadowing" in first year, but you can make the best of this time and learn about different diagnoses. Then we have required society meetings and some other stuff. There's a few other classes we have that don't seem to have much clinical application, but i think i've said enough...
libraryismyhome said:
My school requires every student to do multiple things that are irrelevant to Step 1.
Ethics, Health Policy, and Biostatistics are relevant to Step 1 so don't add them to your hours.

Requirements that are Irrelevant to Step 1
Doctoring: physical exam, patient interview, and etc
- 4 hours per week

Shadowing: going to hospitals and shadow doctors
- 5 hours per week 6+ hours if the site is far away

Humanity: reading poems and essays written by health professionals
- 4 hours every other week = 2 hours per week

Scholarly Concentration: students choose their concentration: research, public health, global health, biostat, disparities, and etc
- Varies, 1~2 hours per week

Clinical Problem Solving: discussing patient cases but unfortunately not directly relevant to stuff we learn
- 4 hours per week

Total: 16 to 18 hours per week

Additionally,
Volunteer Hour Requirement before graduation 40 hours
Teaching Hour Requirement before graduation 20 hours

How about your school?
Click to expand...
 
Last edited:
GaiusOctavius said:
The "Humanity," "Scholarly Concentration," and "Ethics" components are pretty irrelevant, but the others seem fairly important. It may not be organized in the best way, but Doctoring, Shadowing, and Biostats seem like they would be relevant for USMLE and certainly teach you information you'll use as a physician.
Click to expand...


Ethics is part of Step 1. Though the way my professor teaches is complete bulls.h.i.t.

Please cast your vote! 🙂
 
GaiusOctavius said:
The "Humanity," "Scholarly Concentration," and "Ethics" components are pretty irrelevant, but the others seem fairly important. It may not be organized in the best way, but Doctoring, Shadowing, and Biostats seem like they would be relevant for USMLE and certainly teach you information you'll use as a physician.

EDIT: and my school also has a Humanism class, which is awful. You're not going to learn compassion or cultural competence from a mandatory weekly 2 hour lecture in a hall with 200+ other students. We also have a tobacco cessation class, which is pretty bad. In addition to this we have a hefty community service requirement and medical spanish requirements. We also have the "shadowing" in first year, but you can make the best of this time and learn about different diagnoses. Then we have required society meetings and some other stuff. There's a few other classes we have that don't seem to have much clinical application, but i think i've said enough...
Click to expand...
I thought my school was worst in the amount of BS one has to be involved in... Your school definitely got the gold medal!
 
GaiusOctavius said:
The "Humanity," "Scholarly Concentration," and "Ethics" components are pretty irrelevant, but the others seem fairly important. It may not be organized in the best way, but Doctoring, Shadowing, and Biostats seem like they would be relevant for USMLE and certainly teach you information you'll use as a physician.

EDIT: and my school also has a Humanism class, which is awful. You're not going to learn compassion or cultural competence from a mandatory weekly 2 hour lecture in a hall with 200+ other students. We also have a tobacco cessation class, which is pretty bad. In addition to this we have a hefty community service requirement and medical spanish requirements. We also have the "shadowing" in first year, but you can make the best of this time and learn about different diagnoses. Then we have required society meetings and some other stuff. There's a few other classes we have that don't seem to have much clinical application, but i think i've said enough...
Click to expand...


dayum... how many hours per week then?
 
Psai said:
There's a lot more to being a doctor than passing step 1. Doctoring? Seriously? That's pretty relevant to step 1 imo
Click to expand...
reading poems and shadowing have 0 relevance. Shadowing is the biggest scam they make med students do by the way, and if ur school makes you do this they should lose accreditation. Shadowing is for pre-meds.
 
libraryismyhome said:
dayum... how many hours per week then?
Click to expand...
Depends on the week. Minimum is 4hrs. Maximum is 14hrs. Average is probably around 6 hours. This is not including community service though. It's just the total number of mandatory hours (with absolutely no relevance to step 1) spent in lecture hall, at a local school teaching about tobacco cessation, meeting with our society, etc. Last week we had a mandatory meeting focussed on ways to cope with stress. They talked about meditation for 30minutes and then made us do a guided session...
 
"Doctoring" and "Clinical Problem Solving" both sound pretty essential, if you ask me. Even if you don't use those skills on step 1 (and I'd be surprised if you didn't pick up handy trivia and knowledge in clinical problem solving), you'll need them in third year, fourth year, and residency.

You have valid complaints about poetry-reading and shadowing, though.
 
W19 said:
Unfortunately most med schools have these nonsense....
Click to expand...

My school makes us shadow patients our first year, not even physicians. It's only a one time thing, but it consists of you sitting in the waiting room awkwardly with a patient, following them up to the desk to talk to the receptionist, back to their seat, back up to hand in their paperwork, back to their seat, into the visit, etc all the while documenting their anxiety level at each contact point of their visit. You do this with multiple patients for an entire day. At least you only do this once, but it literally wastes your entire day to teach you that patients sometimes wait a long time to be seen and get nervous (because surely none of us have ever been patients ourselves and can relate to this)
 
JW2020 said:
My school makes us shadow patients our first year, not even physicians. It's only a one time thing, but it consists of you sitting in the waiting room awkwardly with a patient, following them up to the desk to talk to the receptionist, back to their seat, back up to hand in their paperwork, back to their seat, into the visit, etc all the while documenting their anxiety level at each contact point of their visit. You do this with multiple patients for an entire day. At least you only do this once, but it literally wastes your entire day to teach you that patients sometimes wait a long time to be seen and get nervous (because surely none of us have ever been patients ourselves and can relate to this)
Click to expand...

I feel sorry for you man.
 
JW2020 said:
My school makes us shadow patients our first year, not even physicians. It's only a one time thing, but it consists of you sitting in the waiting room awkwardly with a patient, following them up to the desk to talk to the receptionist, back to their seat, back up to hand in their paperwork, back to their seat, into the visit, etc all the while documenting their anxiety level at each contact point of their visit. You do this with multiple patients for an entire day. At least you only do this once, but it literally wastes your entire day to teach you that patients sometimes wait a long time to be seen and get nervous (because surely none of us have ever been patients ourselves and can relate to this)
Click to expand...
This is what we pay our money for! No one will convince me that preclinical year could not be taught in 18 months without affecting students at all if they take out all these useless [insert]...
 
cbrons said:
reading poems and shadowing have 0 relevance. Shadowing is the biggest scam they make med students do by the way, and if ur school makes you do this they should lose accreditation. Shadowing is for pre-meds.
Click to expand...

Yes, how horrible of them to make you put down First Aid for 2 hours and go interact with a physician and patients. Also "shadowing" as a medical student will typically allow you to do more than just be a shadow.

We start seeing patients in January of MS1 at my school so there's less need for required shadowing here, but I think it's essential to have SOME clinical exposure during the first 2 years.
 
Ismet said:
Yes, how horrible of them to make you put down First Aid for 2 hours and go interact with a physician and patients. Also "shadowing" as a medical student will typically allow you to do more than just be a shadow.

We start seeing patients in January of MS1 at my school so there's less need for required shadowing here, but I think it's essential to have SOME clinical exposure during the first 2 years.
Click to expand...

To be fair, it's a lot easier to appreciate when you're looking back rather than when you're in the thick of things
 
I'd be interested in how much all the humanism classroom education ultimately changes medical students.

I have a theory that academia is getting this wrong. Being graded on this stuff or forced to sit through lectures ultimately won't yield any results in my opinion. By time you are on rotations any poems you read or silly multiple choice questions where 99% of the class selects "E. Take a through history and physical and address the patients emotions and concerns." are long gone.

I think you learn by example from peers and preceptors. This is where the attention should be focused IMO but also the most difficult thing to change.

All that said I kinda miss those BS classes. Its kinda like summer camp or something, and yeah studying FA for every waking moment for 2 years just doesn't really work.
 
JW2020 said:
My school makes us shadow patients our first year, not even physicians. It's only a one time thing, but it consists of you sitting in the waiting room awkwardly with a patient, following them up to the desk to talk to the receptionist, back to their seat, back up to hand in their paperwork, back to their seat, into the visit, etc all the while documenting their anxiety level at each contact point of their visit. You do this with multiple patients for an entire day. At least you only do this once, but it literally wastes your entire day to teach you that patients sometimes wait a long time to be seen and get nervous (because surely none of us have ever been patients ourselves and can relate to this)
Click to expand...

"One hour in, the patient seems to be getting increasingly agitated, wondering why a random person is following him everywhere. This is a damning reflection of our healthcare system, where a schizophrenic patient like himself isn't able to afford antipsychotics to relieve his hallucinations. Let's see how things go as I follow him into the restroom."
 
Psai said:
To be fair, it's a lot easier to appreciate when you're looking back rather than when you're in the thick of things
Click to expand...

Very true. I'm on a medical education elective and first hand seeing this "disdain" for the 2-3 hours per week of clinical time. But when I started 3rd year, I was very thankful for the 1.5 years of seeing patients for a couple hours per week. Definitely something you can't fully appreciate until later on.
 
At my school, we spend maybe 10-12 hours per week on fluff classes. I thought my school was bad with all the BS coursework, but this thread has really put it into perspective for me.
 
Ismet said:
Yes, how horrible of them to make you put down First Aid for 2 hours and go interact with a physician and patients. Also "shadowing" as a medical student will typically allow you to do more than just be a shadow.

We start seeing patients in January of MS1 at my school so there's less need for required shadowing here, but I think it's essential to have SOME clinical exposure during the first 2 years.
Click to expand...

Giving up one day obviously isn't that big of a deal, I'm just saying it's a pointless exercise to follow patients around for a day and write up what their experience was like. I don't see the merit in sitting awkwardly next to a couple patients while they each wait for 2 hours. Nothing compared to what they're doing to OP of course at his/her school, just another example of time being wasted on something silly.
 
5-10 maybe? I never really resented it though, except when something was scheduled the day before a test. Medical school should be more than just a glorified Step 1 prep course; besides, everything you mentioned could potentially help your residency application in some way or another.

I will say that 5 hours of shadowing per week seems excessive.
 
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Señor S said:
5-10 maybe? I never really resented it though, except when something was scheduled the day before a test. Medical school should be more than just a glorified Step 1 prep course; besides, everything you mentioned could potentially help your residency application in some way or another.
Click to expand...

Maybe because they feel sorry for you.
 
JW2020 said:
Giving up one day obviously isn't that big of a deal, I'm just saying it's a pointless exercise to follow patients around for a day and write up what their experience was like. I don't see the merit in sitting awkwardly next to a couple patients while they each wait for 2 hours. Nothing compared to what they're doing to OP of course at his/her school, just another example of time being wasted on something silly.
Click to expand...

The example of what you have to do (waiting with the patients) sounds like it's very poorly executed but from a medical education standpoint I can see what they're trying to achieve. They want you to see what a medical visit is like from a patient's standpoint, because they're assuming (perhaps wrongly) that most medical students are generally healthy and don't have first hand experience having to wait for hours, meet with a case worker, fill out a ton of paperwork, etc just for a doctor to spend 10 minutes with them. But like I said, sounds poorly executed.
 
Ismet said:
The example of what you have to do (waiting with the patients) sounds like it's very poorly executed but from a medical education standpoint I can see what they're trying to achieve. They want you to see what a medical visit is like from a patient's standpoint, because they're assuming (perhaps wrongly) that most medical students are generally healthy and don't have first hand experience having to wait for hours, meet with a case worker, fill out a ton of paperwork, etc just for a doctor to spend 10 minutes with them. But like I said, sounds poorly executed.
Click to expand...

Definitely poorly executed. It's almost laughable how disconnected from reality these administrators are up in their ivory towers.
 
TaroBubbleTea said:
Definitely poorly executed. It's almost laughable how disconnected from reality these administrators are up in their ivory towers.
Click to expand...

It's still very easy for doctors to lose sight of that, even if they have experience waiting and getting anxious before an appointment. I once had to wait 3 hours for an orthopedic surgeon to glance at my X-ray and tell me I was healing nicely. But now I can also understand why it might have taken 3 hours to see me because I see the other side. Even if I would have known then, I still would have been pissed for waiting that long and anxious for answers. Then you see doctors roll their eyes when patients complain about the wait or are exasperated and short during the visit. It sucks all around.

Not that I think the right way to do it is how that school does it, but I can see what they're trying to do. We have to write a couple essays in certain rotations where we have to interview a patient about stuff. We all gripe about it, but you often learn something if you take it seriously.
 
We recently had a guest speaker who said "Back when I was in medical school the hardest part about Immunology was learning about compliment. These days it's one of the easier topics."

He gave a fantastic speech that was probably the result of decades of experience in dealing with patients.

All these wonderful additions to a curriculum are put in place by people who finished medical school before I was born. I understand these activities are supposed to build empathy but there is a time and place for everything. Trying to put the process on steroids isn't helping.

Administration keeps wondering "why aren't these kids showing emotional intelligence??"

Because I'm jaded from having 3 exams in 1 week and a nonsense required activity that was supposed to teach me empathy.
 
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chizledfrmstone said:
We recently had a guest speaker who said "Back when I was in medical school the hardest part about Immunology was learning about compliment. These days it's one of the easier topics."

He gave a fantastic speech that was probably the result of decades of experience in dealing with patients.

All these wonderful additions to a curriculum are put in place by people who finished medical school before I was born. I understand these activities are supposed to build empathy but there is a time and place for everything. Trying to put the process on steroids isn't helping.

Administration keeps wondering "why aren't these kids showing emotional intelligence??"

Because I'm jaded from having 3 exams in 1 week and a nonsense required activity that was supposed to teach me empathy.
Click to expand...

While I hear that there's so much more to know in medicine than there was a generation ago, I have a simple response:

..."Card Catalogs".
 
I just like how basic interviewing skills are "unnecessary" in the first two years because they're not directly tested on step 1.

Just think how awesome you'll all be taking a M1's interviewing skill level into clerkships:

MS: Hello I'm [Med Student], and I'm a medical student and I'll be taking a history today.
PT: Pleased to meet you. I'm here because my stomach hurts.
MS: Do you have sex with men, women, or both?
PT: umm, I've been married 25 years, but as I said, I'm here about my stomach...
MS: And do you use protection when you have sex with your wife?
PT: umm, the pain is getting really bad, I've been doubled over all weekend
MS: And would you say you have sex monthly, weekly, or more often?
PT: What the hell is wrong with you?
PT: I'm simply trying to take as complete a history as possible, sir. Now do you and your wife partake in any BDSM, and have you discussed appropriate consent procedures?
 
That sucks. I have course that is focused on SPEs and physical exam skills but that is like four hours every 3-4 weeks. Awful what you have.
 
libraryismyhome said:
Requirements that are Irrelevant to Step 1
Doctoring: We did them for like 12 hours per week for like 9 weeks or something, and now we do maybe 10 hours per semester

Shadowing: Preceptor? We do about 30-40 hours per semester

Humanity: WTF? no, we don't do this.

Scholarly Concentration: Research, we are expected (but we mostly don't) do about 6 hours per week

Clinical Problem Solving: This ranges between 2-4 hours per week

Everything above I think is required

Additionally,
Volunteer Hour Requirement before graduation 40 hours - that's not bad... you have 4 years to do it...
Teaching Hour Requirement before graduation 20 hours - Also not bad 4 years...
Click to expand...

My times for our school ^
Honestly I think most of it - while seem like a drag and feels like one - is useful.
 
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