Is med school really a magnitude harder than undergrad?

[slightlygifted]

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I see tons of people with the mindset that med school will completely redefine what "hard" means, but based on my own experiences and talking with my peers, I am not sure I can buy into that. I personally have class/lab starting at 8am and ending at 12pm everyday, followed by research until 4-5pm and then homework/studying in the library until 8 or 9pm almost every day(upper level physics classes), and then there are the clubs/volunteering that take up 20+ hours a week as well. And as far as I can tell, almost every pre med I talk to is in a similar situation, if not more difficult. Everyone I know including myself pretty much have had to give up all semblance of a social life starting their sophomore year. So when I look at medical school, where it seems as if all lectures are online and not required and the grading is pass/fail and 98% of people pass, is it really harder/more stressful than undergrad??? Are med students busting out 6-7 hours of clubs/research/volunteering every day in addition to coursework with cut throat competition that they need to be in the top 10% of their class in? somebody tell me why med school is so much harder than what we currently go through.

 

[TheWeeIceMan]

20+ hours a week of clubs/volunteering?
20 hours a week of research?

You are doing something wrong. Being a pre-med isn't that difficult.

 

[Jennyfishy]

What you're describing is being busy and stressed with other commitments. However, your academics aren't consuming all of your free time. Apparently with step exams, you won't even have time to do much else from studying even if classes are p/f. When clinical rotations start, they will be your time schedule but for clinic and nothing else

I haven't actually started my first year yet, but this is what I have been told by student hosts and friends who are med students now

 

[Microglia]

I see tons of people with the mindset that med school will completely redefine what "hard" means, but based on my own experiences and talking with my peers, I am not sure I can buy into that. I personally have class/lab starting at 8am and ending at 12pm everyday, followed by research until 4-5pm and then homework/studying in the library until 8 or 9pm almost every day(upper level physics classes), and then there are the clubs/volunteering that take up 20+ hours a week as well. And as far as I can tell, almost every pre med I talk to is in a similar situation, if not more difficult. Everyone I know including myself pretty much have had to give up all semblance of a social life starting their sophomore year. So when I look at medical school, where it seems as if all lectures are online and not required and the grading is pass/fail and 98% of people pass, is it really harder/more stressful than undergrad??? Are med students busting out 6-7 hours of clubs/research/volunteering every day in addition to coursework with cut throat competition that they need to be in the top 10% of their class in? somebody tell me why med school is so much harder than what we currently go through.

Eh, it's not so bad. Replace all the EC hours you're talking about (and get rid of all that idle time you secretly have but don't admit to haha) with studying and it's just about the same as the kind of schedule you're describing at the worst of it, and some weeks are pretty good. The only thing that's tough about the first two years is continuing to study..efficiently..every day. Also, in undergrad it only took me a weekend to study 1/3 of each semesters worth of material. Each week here takes me diligent studying at least 5 days a week. On the plus side, no more ECs unless I want to do them, optional class attendance and P/F grading are quite nice and make studying all the time not so bad.

I hear such horrible things about 3rd year from friends at schools all over tho. Rumor has it it's just fecal disimpaction after fecal disimpaction for hours and hours some days with no sleep..

 

[m0biusace]

Medical school is different than undergraduate because what you do has much, much less variety. All time I spent working or volunteering is now time spent studying. It's not too different in hours-spent, but its so, so much more repetitive and self-isolating. Couple this with the fact that your studying is never "complete" per-se because the volume of material is easily double that of a heavy ugrad quarter, so you feel that you can always adjunct your learning with a different textbook, with talking it over with some more people, with doing more flash cards, with going down to the anatomy lab and reviewing just one more time, etc. This can build a certain anxiety and guilt in that any moment not spent studying is a moment that just might be wasted.

Also, time in medical school is much less flexible. In undergraduate it was always easy to tone down my volunteering hours a certain week or two, or opt to not grade as many papers that week (I worked as a TA for a former gen chem professor). You don't have that liberty in medical school. Aside from whatever hobbies you manage to hold on to, you basically eat, breathe, and live medicine. Fortunately, I find it fascinating as hell.

 

[Ismet]

The material itself is not hard. The majority is just memorization and integration. It's the pace that's difficult. So much material is covered for every exam that you have to study almost daily in order to keep up with it. An undergraduate course might meet for 3 hours a week for 15 weeks. At med schools like mine with block scheduling, we spend about 18-25 hours/week on one topic for anywhere from 1-7 weeks depending on the course. There are days where we go through 150 pages of material in lecture. There's no way most people can learn everything in time for the exam. I know people hate that "drinking water from a fire hose" analogy, but I've always thought it was spot on for med school.

You are confusing "busy" with "hard." You cannot compare the efforts of doing research and participating in clubs/volunteering to being in/watching lectures and studying. Pre-clinical is rather mentally draining, because there is so much material to keep up with that many people who don't learn how to study efficiently will start to burn out. We do have time for a life, though. I am in a few clubs/organizations, I do research, and I take time to do the things I enjoy. I am, however, rather content with being average (or even below average) so that I can continue to do the things I enjoy and stay sane. If I wanted to be at the top of the class, I would have to give up a lot of things I enjoy (including my sanity) in order to study even more.

 

[JJMrK]

It's probably not that much harder if you're content with passing. If you want to honor things, get a good board score, do meaningful research and pull down AOA it's probably (conservatively) 2-3x as much work as undergrad. That doesn't include busy rotations that will really teach you what it means to work hard.

 

[Law2Doc]

As ismet said, it's not the difficulty level, but the pace and volume. If you fall behind you'll never catch up. So you have to be diligent every day. In undergrad you have a hard day now and then but it's not a constant, and you might have times you can slack off. The drinking out if a firehouse analogy remains a good one. Drinking water isn't hard, but the volume/pressure can be.

 

[Law2Doc]

It's probably not that much harder if you're content with passing. If you want to honor things, get a good board score, do meaningful research and pull down AOA it's probably (conservatively) 2-3x as much work as undergrad. That doesn't include busy rotations that will really teach you what it means to work hard.

I actually don't think it breaks out this way. Some of the people working the hardest are happy just passing. Usually the people doing well are those who become more efficient, and as a result you probably end up with a Bell type distribution with those at the top and bottom of the class each working harder, and those at the middle either working reasonably hard not to be at the bottom or those working hard because they are spitting distance from doing well. But bear in mind that adcoms do a good job in cutting away the fat, so the level of competition in med school is much higher than anything you were exposed to in college. You often need to do A level work to be average in med school. All the people who get into med school were good college students, but in med school half will be below the median for probably the first time in their lives. Most won't like the experience, and will work harder to try and avoid this.
And you have that kind of internal pressure even ignoring the fact that how you do is going to impact your specialty choice and where you can get trained within that specialty.

 

[Chipster.]

20+ hours a week of clubs/volunteering?
20 hours a week of research?

You are doing something wrong. Being a pre-med isn't that difficult.

It's easier to take on that workload if you're...slightly gifted. Cue CSI Miami theme music.

 

[TexasSurgeon]

I see tons of people with the mindset that med school will completely redefine what "hard" means, but based on my own experiences and talking with my peers, I am not sure I can buy into that. I personally have class/lab starting at 8am and ending at 12pm everyday, followed by research until 4-5pm and then homework/studying in the library until 8 or 9pm almost every day(upper level physics classes), and then there are the clubs/volunteering that take up 20+ hours a week as well. And as far as I can tell, almost every pre med I talk to is in a similar situation, if not more difficult. Everyone I know including myself pretty much have had to give up all semblance of a social life starting their sophomore year. So when I look at medical school, where it seems as if all lectures are online and not required and the grading is pass/fail and 98% of people pass, is it really harder/more stressful than undergrad??? Are med students busting out 6-7 hours of clubs/research/volunteering every day in addition to coursework with cut throat competition that they need to be in the top 10% of their class in? somebody tell me why med school is so much harder than what we currently go through.
.

 

[notbobtrustme]

Without a work ethic, med school will eat you alive. If you put the work in, you'll be fine.

 

[QuantumJ]

My approach to undergrad was to always treat it like a full time job M-F and then do what ever extra needs to be done on the weekends. A few med students I've talked to said if you come into it like this it's not such a shock

 

[Microglia]

My approach to undergrad was to always treat it like a full time job M-F and then do what ever extra needs to be done on the weekends. A few med students I've talked to said if you come into it like this it's not such a shock

I'm kind of surprised, I never found that there was enough to do in undergrad that it was necessary to study every week even. Cram sessions for a weekend every month tended to be fine haha.

 

[QuantumJ]

I'm kind of surprised, I never found that there was enough to do in undergrad that it was necessary to study every week even. Cram sessions for a weekend every month tended to be fine haha.

I don't really know anyone else who did it besides me either lol. But I took 18hrs a semester of quantum physics, electrodynamics, relativistic physics, etc while I also was a TA for a bunch of labs so I was always grading papers or taking 2hrs to solve one problem. I also did this so when a test came up I never actually studying since I already knew everything I just did a quick review to make sure I remembered.

 

[histidine]

I don't really know anyone else who did it besides me either lol. But I took 18hrs a semester of quantum physics, electrodynamics, relativistic physics, etc while I also was a TA for a bunch of labs so I was always grading papers or taking 2hrs to solve one problem. I also did this so when a test came up I never actually studying since I already knew everything I just did a quick review to make sure I remembered.

Yeah it's really different with engineering/physics. I took some hard physics classes and I actually had to spend time in lecture and on assignments. It was intellectually challenging and rewarding. For biology, class was a huge waste of time. You are essentially paying someone to read a powerpoint to you. I just stayed home and reviewed the hour long lecture notes in 5-10 minutes. Looking back, it was such a waste of time and money. I should have taken more physics/engineering. Oh well...easy As.

 

[Ashley1989]

I don't really know anyone else who did it besides me either lol. But I took 18hrs a semester of quantum physics, electrodynamics, relativistic physics, etc while I also was a TA for a bunch of labs so I was always grading papers or taking 2hrs to solve one problem. I also did this so when a test came up I never actually studying since I already knew everything I just did a quick review to make sure I remembered.

I like this. Did you count TAing into your "full time work" model or would you go home and study additionally? Was it nine hours a day of just studying? I'm curious because some days I spend ten hours TAing..

 

[QuantumJ]

I never spent that much time doing TA related duties but it did take some time. I was the senior TA so I had to decide which labs to do, would do the lab myself to find potential problem spots, solve the problems so I had a key and then actually go to lab, answer student and other TA emails then grade. I did count this as my work day because I was usually doing something by 7am while I watched ESPN and it was much easier to spend this time grading than solving partial differential equations.

 

[Niemi]

.

 

[Microglia]

All this talk of never-ending study, kind of makes me want to study. I. can't. wait. to. start. med. school. this. fall. so. exited. I. can't. take. it.

That said, I believe what current and former med students say about the difficulty & intensity of it all. So I am doing my best to chill out and just relax until my time comes. I really want to be fresh and ready to rumble come this Fall. As much as I love studying, I know what burn-out feels like... hopefully by keeping a low profile for the next couple months I can postpone the inevitable burn-out by a bit longer 🙂

This is the correct strategy. Haha

 

[487806]

My approach to undergrad was to always treat it like a full time job M-F and then do what ever extra needs to be done on the weekends. A few med students I've talked to said if you come into it like this it's not such a shock

I'm kind of surprised, I never found that there was enough to do in undergrad that it was necessary to study every week even. Cram sessions for a weekend every month tended to be fine haha.

I don't really know anyone else who did it besides me either lol. But I took 18hrs a semester of quantum physics, electrodynamics, relativistic physics, etc while I also was a TA for a bunch of labs so I was always grading papers or taking 2hrs to solve one problem. I also did this so when a test came up I never actually studying since I already knew everything I just did a quick review to make sure I remembered.

I agree with @QuantumJ. UG majors like physics and engineering (and usually chemistry) are incredibly time-consuming and fast-paced, and it's the norm to be up-to-date with the material in order to do well in the class. "Cake majors" like biology usually aren't on the same level as hard-science majors. So yes, treating UG like a full-time job works of us.

 

[slightlygifted]

20+ hours a week of clubs/volunteering?
20 hours a week of research?

You are doing something wrong. Being a pre-med isn't that difficult.

Idk, I don't even think my situation is unusual. If I want to purify a protein to study it, It takes a good 12 hour day of constant centrifuging and chromatography etc and then running a protein gel takes forever and then actually studying the protein using some sort of spectroscopy is another 5-8 hour affair. And the protein I work with is relatively simple compared to what some people I know do (4-5 day purification process, 6+ hours a day). As for volunteering/shadowing what not, I guess I will only count like 10 hours cause about half that 20 is for social type clubs.

 

[_drinkcoffee_]

I agree with @QuantumJ. UG majors like physics and engineering (and usually chemistry) are incredibly time-consuming and fast-paced, and it's the norm to be up-to-date with the material in order to do well in the class. "Cake majors" like biology usually aren't on the same level as hard-science majors. So yes, treating UG like a full-time job works of us.

Generalizations like this make everyone stupider. Your major doesn't define who you are. Most of the smart kids who wanted to go to top med schools in my top 10 undergrad and got 36+ MCAT were bio majors because they knew what they wanted. Many of my friends are math/physics people with really poor study skills. Anecdote vs. anecdote... just stop it.

 

[histidine]

Generalizations like this make everyone stupider. Your major doesn't define who you are. Most of the smart kids who wanted to go to top med schools in my top 10 undergrad and got 36+ MCAT were bio majors because they knew what they wanted. Many of my friends are math/physics people with really poor study skills. Anecdote vs. anecdote... just stop it.

No one is saying bio majors are dumb or physics majors/engineers are smart. There is a difference in rigor and intellectual challenge between majors though...

 

[Swagster]

Wouldn't all that depend on your major and your living situation? For me, many undergraduate hours were spent at a job that had nothing to do with medicine, just to get by. Not having to work 20 or more hours a week and instead spending that time on the books seems like the lifestyle won't be that drastically different. Cram when you have to and relax when you can. The thing that stresses me out more than time commitment is the feeling of being so far in debt.

 

[_drinkcoffee_]

No one is saying bio majors are dumb or physics majors/engineers are smart. There is a difference in rigor and intellectual challenge between majors though...

I don't agree with this idea at all. The variability between schools is much larger than the variability between majors. I've had more math and numerical modeling as a bio major than my cousin studying mechanical engineering at a big public school.

If we're talking about "rigor," let's quantify it. Oh, that data doesn't exist? Let's go back to anecdotes.

 

[NickNaylor]

Generalizations like this make everyone stupider. Your major doesn't define who you are. Most of the smart kids who wanted to go to top med schools in my top 10 undergrad and got 36+ MCAT were bio majors because they knew what they wanted. Many of my friends are math/physics people with really poor study skills. Anecdote vs. anecdote... just stop it.

Here comes the academic dick waving contest...

 

[Ashley1989]

Here comes the academic dick waving contest...

I just inhaled my coffee. Thanks a lot!! Hahahahaha

 

[histidine]

I don't agree with this idea at all. The variability between schools is much larger than the variability between majors. I've had more math and numerical modeling as a bio major than my cousin studying mechanical engineering at a big public school.

If we're talking about "rigor," let's quantify it. Oh, that data doesn't exist? Let's go back to anecdotes.

I find that incredibly hard to believe, maybe if you were a computational biology major? But ok...

 

[_drinkcoffee_]

I find that incredibly hard to believe, maybe if you were a computational biology major? But ok...

Believe what you want - I do exactly that, but my degree says Biology, which I think illustrates the arbitrariness of declaring some majors rigorous or not rigorous (or not even "Hard Science") without further context. Whatever, I've had enough of arguing on the internet for the next year or two.

 

[Ismet]

Idk, I don't even think my situation is unusual. If I want to purify a protein to study it, It takes a good 12 hour day of constant centrifuging and chromatography etc and then running a protein gel takes forever and then actually studying the protein using some sort of spectroscopy is another 5-8 hour affair. And the protein I work with is relatively simple compared to what some people I know do (4-5 day purification process, 6+ hours a day). As for volunteering/shadowing what not, I guess I will only count like 10 hours cause about half that 20 is for social type clubs.

While you should understand the how and why of your protein purification protocol, the time spent running the protocol is not mentally demanding work. It's a lot of downtime waiting for the centrifuge and gel to run. The actual steps you take are just following a predetermined protocol. Maybe you've figured out how to have good time management, which is great, but just because you are used to a busy schedule doesn't mean you will be prepared for the demands of medical school. It's a different kind of busy, a constantly mentally demanding kind of busy.

 

[Instatewaiter]

I see tons of people with the mindset that med school will completely redefine what "hard" means . Everyone I know including myself pretty much have had to give up all semblance of a social ?

Are med students busting out 6-7 hours of clubs/research/volunteering every day in addition to coursework with cut throat competition that they need to be in the top 10% of their class in? somebody tell me why med school is so much harder than what we currently go through.

First if youre unable to keep up a social life in undergrad you are either doing something wrong or are lying to yoursrlf why you don't have a social life.

Almost everyone in med school (myself excluded) was in the top of their class in undergrad. Despite this, half of the class will be below average. The reason 95% make it through med school is that half of your premed class won't make it into med school.

I know of no med students who even volunteered more than once in a while. 5-6 hours would nearly impossible.

Med school isn't conceptually difficult. Your upper level physics courses are probably more difficult than the vast majority of medical school. The volume and speed are much more brisk in medical school. For instance, what the undergrad histology course would do in a semester, we did in 7 weeks. For physiology, it was done in under a semester in medical school. The identical course in the graduate school takes a year. Some have likened it to taking 30 credits a semester instead of the normal 15.

 

[Instatewaiter]

I think many of you all had a very different experience than I did in undergrad.

 

[NickNaylor]

The identical course in the graduate school takes a year. Some have likened it to taking 30 credits a semester instead of the normal 15.

When you calculate credit hours as they usually are - hours spent in lecture per week - 25-30 isn't unreasonable. That's what we were averaging during MS2, and maybe something like 20-24 for most of first year.

 

[sinombre]

I think many of you all had a very different experience than I did in undergrad.

I didn't. It's possible that your avatar is actually a picture of me in undergrad.

Unless you're implying that you were a lot busier in undergrad than in med school... in which case, nevermind

 

[487806]

Generalizations like this make everyone stupider. Your major doesn't define who you are. Most of the smart kids who wanted to go to top med schools in my top 10 undergrad and got 36+ MCAT were bio majors because they knew what they wanted. Many of my friends are math/physics people with really poor study skills. Anecdote vs. anecdote... just stop it.

Nice thread hijack dude. Just miss the point of the argument and wander off arguing something meaningless. Maybe you have a different experience in your UG, but I can fairly say that the academic rigor of physics/engineering trumps that of biology (of course the correlation isn't strong but it isn't strictly anecdotal). Rigor doesn't mean smart. Those two are entirely separate. Maybe you never experienced those fields which made you go off on a meaningless rant.

My point is: there are majors that require intensive academic prep during UG and that'll be incredibly useful in preclinical years as @QuantumJ points out. Whether it is true biology, physics, engineering, basket weaving w/e, it doesn't matter.

 

[Psai]

Ah yes, none of the people in medical school were ever premeds so it's not as though we would have the advantage of knowing what it's like to be a premed and a medical student. We totally lack perspective and respect your 20+ hour a week club and research where you do something for 10 minutes and then sit around for 5 hours.

 

[DrEnderW]

As someone who was insanely thinly spread in undergrad (very time demanding varsity sport, research, and TA/tutoring a lot of hours a week), med school is still a serious escalation of time commitment in my opinion. While I've seen some people agree and others disagree, I think there is a huge difference in work load depending on where you are shooting for in class rank.

Echoing others sentiments, it's not difficult because of challenging concepts, it's just sheer volume. For an anecdote, about 50% of the material on my first biochem test 1st semester M1 covered an entire semester of UG biochem. That class was listed as 3 credits of 27 that semester.

If your goal is to shoot high for class rank, the way to separate yourself is memorizing more minute details and that takes a ridiculous amount time. There's an efficiency factor to it, I agree, but the volume has to get in somehow.

 

[JJMrK]

I actually don't think it breaks out this way. Some of the people working the hardest are happy just passing. Usually the people doing well are those who become more efficient, and as a result you probably end up with a Bell type distribution with those at the top and bottom of the class each working harder, and those at the middle either working reasonably hard not to be at the bottom or those working hard because they are spitting distance from doing well.

I see your point, and agree for the most part. I would argue that a person spending 1 hour reading 1 chapter is both less efficient than someone reading 2 chapters in the same amount of time and not working as hard.

But bear in mind that adcoms do a good job in cutting away the fat, so the level of competition in med school is much higher than anything you were exposed to in college. You often need to do A level work to be average in med school.

Hopefully you are speaking to the collective "you" here, as I've finished med school and am waiting around to match and graduate.

 

[phunky]

I would hope so. Undergrad is kind of a joke, even compared to having a full time job.

 

[alpinism]

Yeah it's really different with engineering/physics. I took some hard physics classes and I actually had to spend time in lecture and on assignments. It was intellectually challenging and rewarding. For biology, class was a huge waste of time. You are essentially paying someone to read a powerpoint to you. I just stayed home and reviewed the hour long lecture notes in 5-10 minutes. Looking back, it was such a waste of time and money. I should have taken more physics/engineering. Oh well...easy As.

Heh you're basically describing med school. Except you're paying them 200K for thousands of powerpoint slides every month.

 

[alpinism]

As someone who was insanely thinly spread in undergrad (very time demanding varsity sport, research, and TA/tutoring a lot of hours a week), med school is still a serious escalation of time commitment in my opinion. While I've seen some people agree and others disagree, I think there is a huge difference in work load depending on where you are shooting for in class rank.

Echoing others sentiments, it's not difficult because of challenging concepts, it's just sheer volume. For an anecdote, about 50% of the material on my first biochem test 1st semester M1 covered an entire semester of UG biochem. That class was listed as 3 credits of 27 that semester.

If your goal is to shoot high for class rank, the way to separate yourself is memorizing more minute details and that takes a ridiculous amount time. There's an efficiency factor to it, I agree, but the volume has to get in somehow.

This.

The reason why people disagree about the difficultly and time commitment required for med school is that it's different for everyone.

There are people in my class who knew they were going into FM or Psych and spent 3-4hrs a day studying after lectures + PBL which came out to be like to a 8am-5pm job.

That's definitely more than most undergrads spend on classes even with volunteering/research, but it still leaves plenty of free time.

At the same time, there are people who wanted plastics or ortho and spent nearly all day everyday studying which came out to be like a 8am-10pm job.

That leaves hardly any free time outside of school for other interests and relationships.

 

[histidine]

Heh you're basically describing med school. Except you're paying them 200K for thousands of powerpoint slides every month.

Haha yeah I know, at least for the first two years. PBL and anatomy lab might be the exceptions.

 

[Member10billion]

omg undergrad was so hard. I had to make time to see my friends and go to the mall and sunbathe at the beach and sometimes i'd study but then i'd have to go to the mall again omgomgomg

 

[sourdoughllama]

.

 

[Instatewaiter]

Z

 

[487806]

If you're waiting around to match and graduate, you havent really finished med school have you now?

Research year maybe?

 

[Endure]

Related question here.

I've been told by pretty much everyone with experience in medical school that the material (primarily) requires rote memorization. My issue is that, while I don't mind occasionally memorizing useful information if I have to, I prefer learning by understanding the material and conceptualizing what I read.

Am I going to be at a disadvantage in medical school if I'm not used to "memorizing' what's presented to me? Does anyone feel the same way?

 

[jeghaber]

Related question here.

I've been told by pretty much everyone with experience in medical school that the material (primarily) requires rote memorization. My issue is that, while I don't mind occasionally memorizing useful information if I have to, I prefer learning by understanding the material and conceptualizing what I read.

Am I going to be at a disadvantage in medical school if I'm not used to "memorizing' what's presented to me? Does anyone feel the same way?

I'm terrible with memorization as well. (Even for the MCAT, I couldn't remember the signs in the Doppler and lens/mirror equations so I had to semi-derive them every time I had to use them). I've started using Anki for the Spanish class I've been taking, however, so hopefully I'll be able to build a strong habit by the time med school rolls around. I'd be interested to see how others have transitioned into this type of studying though.

 

[Narmerguy]

Related question here.

I've been told by pretty much everyone with experience in medical school that the material (primarily) requires rote memorization. My issue is that, while I don't mind occasionally memorizing useful information if I have to, I prefer learning by understanding the material and conceptualizing what I read.

Am I going to be at a disadvantage in medical school if I'm not used to "memorizing' what's presented to me? Does anyone feel the same way?

I hate memorization as well, and I'm not very good at it. However, I guess my plan is to just study hard and do what I think is reasonable. I don't feel the need to play some kind of memorization game to be the top of the class. I just want to make sure that I don't forget about the other stuff besides just memorizing textbooks/slides.