Is medical school really as impossible as everyone says it is?

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I understand that medical school will be difficult. There is obviously a lot of material to learn, and it is very competitive. I always hear that medical school is like learning to drink from a firehose, and many say that it is the hardest thing ever. To a pre-med student, this sometimes sounds discouraging like it isn't worth it. Some people make it sound like medical school is impossible, but people graduate every year. How hard was medical school for you? What tips do you have for current or future medical students (and residents)?
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daleAZ said:
I understand that medical school will be difficult. There is obviously a lot of material to learn, and it is very competitive. I always hear that medical school is like learning to drink from a firehose, and many say that it is the hardest thing ever. To a pre-med student, this sometimes sounds discouraging like it isn't worth it. Some people make it sound like medical school is impossible, but people graduate every year. How hard was medical school for you? What tips do you have for current or future medical students (and residents)?
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First of all , nothing is impossible. Second of all , if it’s impossible , how come we have so many doctors on this planet . Only certain, people will Graduate med school , and these are the ones who worked hard and had the mentality to do so . Yes , the curriculum might be tough if not the toughest ,dedication and hard work will put you in the right place .


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daleAZ said:
I understand that medical school will be difficult. There is obviously a lot of material to learn, and it is very competitive. I always hear that medical school is like learning to drink from a firehose, and many say that it is the hardest thing ever. To a pre-med student, this sometimes sounds discouraging like it isn't worth it. Some people make it sound like medical school is impossible, but people graduate every year. How hard was medical school for you? What tips do you have for current or future medical students (and residents)?
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Ya its hard, not impossible, but really hard. My first block did not go well (still passed) but not where I wanted to be. But you get used to it, you get better at studying, and you'll meet some pretty awesome people, at least I did. Don't let the challenge discourage you, if you can get into med school, chances are you can graduate from med school
 
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Khaled Rahman said:
First of all , nothing is impossible. Second of all , if it’s impossible , how come we have so many doctors on this planet . Only certain, people will Graduate med school , and these are the ones who worked hard and had the mentality to do so . Yes , the curriculum might be tough if not the toughest ,dedication and hard work will put you in the right place .


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Obviously, I don't think it is "impossible." It is just a euphemism.
 
daleAZ said:
I understand that medical school will be difficult. There is obviously a lot of material to learn, and it is very competitive. I always hear that medical school is like learning to drink from a firehose, and many say that it is the hardest thing ever. To a pre-med student, this sometimes sounds discouraging like it isn't worth it. Some people make it sound like medical school is impossible, but people graduate every year. How hard was medical school for you? What tips do you have for current or future medical students (and residents)?
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More like learning to drink from a firehose while running after the fire truck.

A doctor friend of mine once described it as "being taken to his intellectual limits."

Impossible? No.
 
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I struggled immensely first and second year
 
Med school is freaking hard. I'm slightly non-trad and thought with some life exp it would be easier, but med school is just a beast. You'll read people saying they treat it like an 8-5 job. While I'm sure there are people doing this, in my experience and knowing a lot of other people in my class, this just isn't the case. You're not studying 24/7, but your life is generally pretty consumed by all the activities of school. Hats off to all the parents out there, they are truly superheroes in my eyes.
 
M4 here almost done with medical school. Honestly I found the first two years to be easier than college. I ended up studying a bit more, but tbh I found a lot of the hype surrounding the first few years to be hyperbole. Third year and certain rotations (Surgery, OB, etc) do in fact suck and are in fact difficult.
 
Everyone's experience is different. 1st and 2nd year for me were easy. There was a lot of material, but never so much that I felt overwhelmed as long as I put in the time each day to stay caught up. Clinical rotations were more stressful due to it having less structure and being graded on a non-pass/fail basis. Residency was rough due to the hours, added responsibilities, higher expectations, and in some ways less support, but it was also nice to finally be contributing to a patients' care instead of just "playing doctor". Many of my colleagues had very different experiences.

From an admissions standpoint, if there was any doubt about a student's ability to succeed in medical school, they simply would not be offered an acceptance. Plain and simple. So if you are accepted, have faith in the system. You are not the first to walk this path, and certainly will not be the last. Almost everyone enters medical school with worries and doubts. In fact, I worry more about the people who don't have any.
 
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honestly, just be able to say "no" to things (and 'yes' to studying)... that will get you through med school.

I'm almost laughing as I type this but I used to go and park in the parking garage and take the ticket to park in the morning. So I would drive up around 745 am grab the ticket and park, then go to lectures from 8am to noon. But then... I would find one of the rooms and study .... until midnight when the gates at the parking garage went up and you could leave for free. My car seats were littered with those tickets from the parking ramp.

I didn't do this absolutely every day, but most days I did....and I didn't study every minute of all that time. I was a re-applicant so I felt like I waited so long to get in...there wasn't anything else I was going to put ahead of that. Lots of people got through or even did better with less work and good for them; I just was going after it and I don't regret that at all.

**update** I don't know that I caused this but.... around my third year the parking garage changed the rules so that the gates didn't go up for free anymore during the week. I like to think that they totalled up all those missing tickets and decided they've lost too much so they changed the rules.
 
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I’m a first year US MD student and so far it hasn’t been that bad. It definitely is the toughest academic challenge I’ve faced, but that’s obvious: I’m in med school. I think most people need a solid 7-9 hours of studying per day during the week and some review time on weekends to do well. That’s what I’ve been doing and I’ve had a great balance and done pretty well. I’m not the very top of my class but I’m like top 25% (and sane and doing everything I like to do). People are gonna have different methods of getting those 7-9 hours done. I personally like to wake up early like 5-6ish and go to the gym so I can start studying around 8. I’ll study hard until I get a 1 hour lunch and then keep going until 5. This is the ideal. There’s gonna be mandatory stuff on campus and that takes away time but I try to make that up in the mornings, but if I don’t then it’s ok I’ll just make it up the next day or on a weekend. What I’m getting at is that as long as you out in the hours of effective studying you’ll be ok. Some ppl like to study in 2 hour bursts and finish studying like at 10 pm but in the end they put in the same amount of “actual study time”. It’ll just be personal preference. You just gotta have the mentality of putting in the hours
 
I believe a lot of it depends on the individual and the school.

I have some friends who say they have more free time than they did in undergrad (non mandatory classes) and others who have no free time at all. It also depends on your med school ambitions. If you're planning on a top residency program in a competitive specialty your free time will get eaten up with research and studying.
 
Sunbodi said:
I believe a lot of it depends on the individual and the school.

I have some friends who say they have more free time than they did in undergrad (non mandatory classes) and others who have no free time at all. It also depends on your med school ambitions. If you're planning on a top residency program in a competitive specialty your free time will get eaten up with research and studying.
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I agree. While I joke about the time needed to pass these courses (even do well) is low, I have very little free time due to other commitments. Likewise, my peers that dont use anki have to study far more than I do (inefficiently). In the end, p/f is what you make it
 
3rd year so far has been waaay harder than when I worked as a process engineer. It’s 50 hours/week on a “light” rotation like pediatrics and more like 60-70+ hours for everything else.
 
CidHighwind said:
M4 here almost done with medical school. Honestly I found the first two years to be easier than college. I ended up studying a bit more, but tbh I found a lot of the hype surrounding the first few years to be hyperbole.
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Moko said:
Everyone's experience is different. 1st and 2nd year for me were easy.
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I'm starting to find that if you weren't a good student in college, you most likely won't be a good student in medical school. Its not likely that a switch will simply flip once you matriculate. For those of you that say pre-clinical wasn't ridiculously challenging, how good of students were you in UG? Would you mind sharing your LzM/GPA/MCAT? Thanks.

I would like very much to see a survey of med students at the end of years 2 & 4 rating the difficulty of the 2-year blocks and correlating that with their UG GPA or MCAT.
 
Detective SnowBucket said:
I'm starting to find that if you weren't a good student in college, you most likely won't be a good student in medical school. Its not likely that a switch will simply flip once you matriculate. For those of you that say pre-clinical wasn't ridiculously challenging, how good of students were you in UG? Would you mind sharing your LzM/GPA/MCAT? Thanks.

I would like very much to see a survey of med students at the end of years 2 & 4 rating the difficulty of the 2-year blocks and correlating that with their UG GPA or MCAT.
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Why? It’s not a huge mystery. Also some of us went to ridiculously difficult undergrads where they purposely tried to weed people out, so even if we didn’t have a 4.0, we would be used to the difficulty of medical school. Believe it or not, there are a lot of students that have 4.0s that basically just study the night before or a few nights before a big test and ace it in college. Since you can’t do that in med school, that’s where the “adjustment” comes in.

Also if you go to a P/F medical school, you’ll have an easier time than the people that go to schools that still do letter grading. Where the P/F person may say a test was really difficult because they got a 70 on it, the graded person may say the test was “brutal” because they got an 89 on it. Even the people with “lower” matriculating MCAT scores will have a higher than national average score (since it’s the MCAT, not orgo that is the hard weed out).
 
Med school's tough for sure, in particular the pacing. But it definitely doesn't have to be -- and shouldnt be -- competitive! Part of how competitive the environment is or isn't has to do with the med school but it also has to do with the class. Y'all have to decide, collectively, as a group, that you're going to get through it together and support eachother. Maybe that happens, maybe it doesn't, but it takes effort from every individual to make that happen not just the school. Your class' and school's "culture" is what you make of it. You might also thrive in certain situations, classes, environments where others don't, and vice versa. Try to help eachother out and be there for eachother when you recognize that you are in the luckier group for the moment. It's easier said than done when everyone is pressed for time or stuck in their own lane, but it's a good ideal to strive for. More likely than not, you will find your closer support network pretty quickly and that will obviously help too.

The approach to learning in med school is just different than in UG. You are learning a lot of things very shallowly and very quickly as opposed to a smaller number of things quite deeply as you did in UG (or a very small number of things extremely deeply if you've been to grad school). The content also never goes away. Accept that you will never be done learning physiology, although your command of it and what is actually practical and important for you will certainly change. The same concepts come back over and over at different angles depending on how you're curriculum is structured / what you're taking at the time. Personally, I like the pancake metaphor a lot better than the firehose one. The only thing medical school asks you to do is eat 5 pancakes every day. No big deal right? Not really! But!...you have to eat 5 pancakes every single day, and if you eat just 4 pancakes one day then the next you have to eat 6. If, god forbid, you fast for one day then you'll have 10 pancakes to eat the next day, etc. This old metaphor seems almost prophetic in the Anki era of medical education.

I'd say I'm less stressed *about school* than I was in UG because overall I feel pretty good about being able to Pass and I also know that at my school even if I don't pass it's definitely not the end of the world. It's nice to not have to aim for the maximum score on every exam. My sources of stress are simply keeping up, because falling behind means more pain later (pancakes etc.) and more existential (i.e. deciding what kind of doctor I want to be, actually learning medicine, trying to be intentional about finding good role models in medicine and becoming a great physician for patients, a good scientist, and not just a great Step 1 score, etc.)
 
I went to a small liberal arts pre med mill where we had essay O Chem tests and class sizes of 12 to 18 in upper level chem classes. Enter med school 225 students and all exams are K type questions. A whole different paradigm for studying. First 2 yrs were an adjustment, but a type A stubborn persona got me through. 3rd and 4th yr were great. I loved the problem solving and intervention. It's hard for most students, but Grit, as I often say is the most important quality a student needs. Good luck and best wishes!
 
I've heard from residents that I've shadowed with say that just getting into med school is the hardest part. Also, once you're in, the medical school doesn't want you to fail in order to keep a low attrition rate so they provide you with the resources you need in order not to fail out which I thought was interesting. Don't know how true all of this is, but something to keep in mind.
 
Ultravox Vienna said:
I've heard from residents that I've shadowed with say that just getting into med school is the hardest part. Also, once you're in, the medical school doesn't want you to fail in order to keep a low attrition rate so they provide you with the resources you need in order not to fail out which I thought was interesting. Don't know how true all of this is, but something to keep in mind.
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Yes, we dont have many failures. They remediate a course(s), and sometime repeat the year. Occasionally 1st years struggling will be offered a spot in our Post Bac. I would say at least 50% of those students who leave do so by choice. They dont want to donthe work and pay the price, often they are in med school because of parents.
 
What makes it difficult is the sheer volume of material and the things that compete for your time. I have a wife and kids so it is a little more of a time crunch for me. But even with non-mandatory lecture, you still have to get the material. So not going to lecture doesn’t mean you suddenly have all that time opened up because you have to get the info somehow.

Then there are the mandatory small groups, anatomy lab, clinical skills labs, etc. Plus research. Plus any sort of volunteering if you choose to do that or interest groups if you choose to do leadership in those.

All of that adds up, and then you have to find time for family and friends.

So when you look at any actual topic we learn, most of them are not terribly difficult for anyone who can do well in college and on the MCAT. But they’ll condense entire semesters worth of material from undergrad down into a week or two. And that will be just one part of the module. So they’ll do that for pharm, path, histo, physio, anatomy, biochemistry, all at once. That’s what makes it hard.

They do make it hard to fail out though. At least at my school, they try really hard to help you if you’re struggling. There are tons of resources available and you can always go get help. They’re investing a lot into you and they accepted you because they believe you will be a good physician. They want to help you get to there.
 
Ultravox Vienna said:
Also, once you're in, the medical school doesn't want you to fail in order to keep a low attrition rate so they provide you with the resources you need in order not to fail out which I thought was interesting. Don't know how true all of this is, but something to keep in mind.
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The rule of thumb is that it's even harder to get out (as in fail out) than it is to get in. As Angus (below) and gonnif (above) have pointed out, med schools do everything in their power to get students to walk across that stage at graduation


Angus Avagadro said:
Yes, we dont have many failures. They remediate a course(s), and sometime repeat the year. Occasionally 1st years struggling will be offered a spot in our Post Bac. I would say at least 50% of those students who leave do so by choice. They dont want to donthe work and pay the price, often they are in med school because of parents.
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It's rare that we have a student who doesn't "get" medical school, and as such, purely academic failures are rare here. The major reasons we lose students are to mental and physical health issues. The next would be followed by those who never develop good time mgt skills, or despite being warned, get overextended by extracurriculars.

The ones who don't want to be here and commit "suicide by cop", or (professor, to be more accurate) seem to be rare here.
 
Detective SnowBucket said:
Please explain what this is
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They don't have the guts to stand up to their parents and simply withdraw. So they just take classes, and fail...then get dismissed. Game over, and they cam go do what they really want to do.
 
daleAZ said:
I understand that medical school will be difficult. There is obviously a lot of material to learn, and it is very competitive. I always hear that medical school is like learning to drink from a firehose, and many say that it is the hardest thing ever. To a pre-med student, this sometimes sounds discouraging like it isn't worth it. Some people make it sound like medical school is impossible, but people graduate every year. How hard was medical school for you? What tips do you have for current or future medical students (and residents)?
Click to expand...

Nahh. Depending on your major, you have already taken classes harder then any med school pre-clinical class. I was a chemist and p-chem brought much more heat then 95% of my classes. It is the speed and depth which washes over you and is so easy to fall behind on.

Make good habits, ask for help, work hard. You can do it!

David D, MD - USMLE and MCAT Tutor
Med School Tutors
 
I am not the smartest guy in the world, but I did not find medical school all that difficult. Time consuming for sure. But nothing about it is impossible as long as you're willing to commit the time to just sit down and read for hours on end. I would definitely do med school again because I found it to be so much fun being a pseudo-adult without responsibilities. Just wait until you're in residency and realize how much time you actually had in med school to have a life. I'm serious, just ask any intern out there right now who's been in the suck for 4.5 months and they'll corroborate everything I just wrote. You'll be fine brotha. Take a deep breath. Enjoy the ride and don't forget to have fun along the way. Cheers.
 
TypeADissection said:
I am not the smartest guy in the world, but I did not find medical school all that difficult. Time consuming for sure. But nothing about it is impossible as long as you're willing to commit the time to just sit down and read for hours on end. I would definitely do med school again because I found it to be so much fun being a pseudo-adult without responsibilities. Just wait until you're in residency and realize how much time you actually had in med school to have a life. I'm serious, just ask any intern out there right now who's been in the suck for 4.5 months and they'll corroborate everything I just wrote. You'll be fine brotha. Take a deep breath. Enjoy the ride and don't forget to have fun along the way. Cheers.
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Not that I don’t love my family, but sometimes I think about how much easier med school would be if I were single or even just didn’t have kids. I’d have so much more time for activities.
 
Goro said:
More like learning to drink from a firehose while running after the fire truck.

A doctor friend of mine once described it as "being taken to his intellectual limits."

Impossible? No.
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I like this analogy goro. its spot on. Will there be a day when I dont feel behind on the material? probably not. Does it usually work out ok in the end? yes. To all he premeds out there it is the hardest thing ive ever done in my life but it sure as heck isnt impossible. When you think you couldnt possibly study anymore you find yourself putting in X more hours and look back and say how in the heck did I just do that
 
Matthew9Thirtyfive said:
Not that I don’t love my family, but sometimes I think about how much easier med school would be if I were single or even just didn’t have kids. I’d have so much more time for activities.
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God bless you bro. Im a single 29 year old and I thought that was hard enough being in med school lol
 
also its not the material thats hard its the volume. People dont realize how much your mind is capable of until you go to med school. the amount of material you learn several days before an exam is literally unfathomable. also, simply passing med school 70+ isnt THAT hard. its getting As all the time that is super challenging and takes a lot of time and dedication
 
AquaticSunrise13 said:
Before matriculating into a medical school whether allopathic or osteopathic is there anyway to get a hold of the Power Point slides for all the courses you will be taking during your first semester so that way you can start studying six months before you actually start medical school to try to create a good foundation and a way to tackle the material for yourself? I know this seems very out there but I’m wondering if this is doable or if anybody has done this before. Thanks.
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Nope. Believe me, I tried. Once I got here and started studying they're like "the ppts are copywrited and you cannot share them because they are the intellectual property of..." so yea no.
 
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