What's your favorite Drake song and what's the best sushi place in Chicago?
Favorite Drake song: either Over My Dead Body or Look What You've Done, but I think the entire Take Care album is pretty outstanding.
I don't eat sushi.
I'm starting M1 in August and I've been out of classes for a year-and-a-half. I was also not a science major, although I did reasonably well in the pre-reqs. My biggest worry is not being able to keep up with my classmates were biochem majors and are fresh out of college. My question is, how big is the gap between students like that and students like me? Did you notice that some of your classmates without as strong a science background had to play big time catchup?
As one of those fresh-out-of-college-biochem students, it's hard for me to say. Most of the non-trads in our class didn't seem to have any problem with it. The thing is that even though you've taken a ton of pre-reqs, most of them aren't at all applicable to anything in med school. Anything that's absolutely important will be reviewed, and anything that's important but not reviewed you can look up. I wouldn't be concerned about feeling behind simply because of your coursework. The "secret" reality is that it matters pretty much not at all in my experience.
Your biggest challenge, IMO, will be getting back into the "school world." Unfortunately I don't think medical school is the best way to make the transition back, but you'll get through it.
What kind of lab do you work in? What do you do outside of medical school and how much time do you commit to that vs studying?
I work in a basic science lab in the EM department. I would say that I seem to be in the minority, though; most of my classmates doing research this summer are doing something less "intense" (for lack of a better word). Most of them seem to be doing more qualitative, less bench type of projects (e.g., ethics, clinical stuff, medical education, etc.).
Having a work life balance is very important to me, so I'm probably near the bottom in terms of how much time I commit to studying. That comes at a price, though: I only scored above average on an exam three or four times over the year. Most of the times I was just at or below the average. I would say that, for the typical day, I average ~2-3 hours of studying a day. In reality though I do more of a on/off schedule where I don't study for a day or two and then pump out work for a couple of days. The week or so leading up to a test though is an entirely different animal... most days around then I study at least 5-6 hours, if not more.
Do you have any tips for using lecture time effectivly? Any ideas for getting the most out of it? (Please don't say don't go to lecture cause its mandatory at my school)
Haha, bummer - I don't go to lecture. This last quarter I probably went to class less than three times. Unfortunately I'll have to leave it to others to help you out here. My general advice, though, would be to keep trying things if your current method isn't working. Ask your friends/classmates what they do and try it. You might be surprised at how effective other strategies can be.
Thanks for doing this
. I've been hearing students talk about an 'imposter effect'. Have you or any of your friends ever experienced this? How did you/they shake off this feeling?
And people say that med schools assume you've forgotten everything when they begin teaching you, any truth to this? I feel woefully underprepared and don't know if I should be doing something more productive than simply enjoying the summer. I think I've forgotten
a lot of pretty basic stuff.. argh
Not sure what you mean by the imposter effect.
I would say this is true to some extent. They will assume that you're a college graduate (duh) and thus are at least somewhat intelligent and have been exposed to the basic sciences. They aren't going to expect you to remember the equilibrium expression for an acid/base in water or the mechanism of an SN1 reaction. If you're overly concerned about it maybe take a very, very brief look at MCAT review books to refresh your memory, but frankly I think even that would be overdoing it. As I mentioned above, the fact is that very, very little of what you did in undergrad is directly applicable to medical school.
So you do research? Do you find it hard to balance research and school work?
I didn't do research during the year. Pritzker has a program that basically funds your research during the summer should you choose to do it. Looking back on it I probably could've done research during the school year if I really, really wanted to, but I didn't really, really want to. There are at least a couple of people in my class though that were strongly involved in lab research. That was definitely the exception rather than the rule, though, and I don't know how they did it.
