How many pages do you study per day?

[jjoeirv]

How many pages of textbook do you typically have to study per day in medical school for each of your courses? How many courses do you usually enroll in? In addition to studying, how many hours must you typically spend in labs, lectures, and clinical rotations per day?

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[southerndoc]

During my first two years, I typically read about 80-120 pages per day. Keep in mind that I was in a PBL school that didn't occupy 8 hours per day with lectures.

 

[Rads Resident]

Can't remember how many pages I read a day, however I will say that I relied heavily on the class's note group notes. Most of the top people in my class stayed home reading notes rather than attending most lectures.

I presume you are all familiar with note groups.

 

[Smurfette]

The number of pages I read varies immensely depending on WHAT I am reading. Some texts/notes are so dense, getting through 20 pages can take hours if you want to remember anything. Others are so poorly edited that it takes forever to figure out what they're trying to say. Still other classes you can read 100 pages in the same time frame.

Also keep in mind that some schools provide detailed notes for studying while others have you learn from texts.

My school has 25-30 hours of classes per week on average (some weeks it's 35, others it's 22) for the preclinical years. Average day is 6 hours, mostly lectures with the occasional discussion group or other non-lecture activity. During anatomy, 2-3 hours a day (every day) at my school were lab dissections.

Number of classes at a time varies from 4 to 7 or 8 depending on different factors (We have about 20-24 credits per semester, but that is not representative of the total workload of the individual classes). Some classes require travel to other locations (hospital, clinics, etc.).

Clinical rotations are entirely different b/c if you are doing rotations you are probably a third or fourth year and no longer have any classes---just the rotations and their requirements (grand rounds, etc.). They still need to study, but they read up on things they are doing in their rotations and are thus not trying to memorize minutia such as whether hormone X works via the tyrosine kinase or G-prtn pathway and drawing out the Krebs cycle.

 

[maxbaner]

Don't most students just study off notes and maybe look up more details/explanations in texts? It takes me a while to get through a lot of pages to retain most of the details.

 

[LifetimeDoc]

I read zero textbook pages per day. That's right, zero. It's because you almost exclusively study from class notes and PowerPoint slides. You only resort to textbooks to lookup information.

At my school, we get on average about 50 slides per lecture hour and about 20 hours of lecture per week, so that's about 1000 slides per week of material to review. That doesn't include references to textbook or board review books.

 

[Occams Razor]

I read very few pages per day. I rely on the powerpoints and lecture notes for my classes, and if i don't understand something, i look it up in a textbook or review book, and read the section on there.

i won't read more than 20 pages at a time, because i wont retain it. i take summary notes from what i read, and leave it at that.

 

[Chizwheel]

when you finish med school, you will be back on SDN asking how many pages you get while on call. The answer will not change though...🙁

 

[muscles]

haha; the reason that is so funny is because its true...

 

[AK_MD2BE]

We have a syllabus that is given to us and so the number of pages/day is highly variable. Although this is highly variable, plan on spending 6-8 hours per day studying/class.