Pre-med Discipline

[mcal6]

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Hi everybody,
I'm going to be starting pre-med in the fall (or possibly summer, it depends) and I was wondering just how hard the transition from high school to pre-medicine will be. Will it really be this mind-boggling, torturous, pile of work that everybody's been saying? In sum, how much work do you do outside of the classroom? I know they'll be quite a bit of studying, but how much homework?
Unfortunately in high school I've gotten into the habit of slacking off here and there, though I still have a 4.0 GPA. What steps can I take now to prepare myself for a more rigorous college work?
I'll be majoring in biology.
Thanks all.👍

 

[makushin]

I'm not sure why you're posting in the non-trad forum BUT...

Anything worth doing requires alot of work. I think alot of college students don't realize this and thats why they slack. Don't forget that.

If you're a reasonably smart person it's not that bad. But it's not easy. I personally procrastinate everything, then cram for about 4 days for each major test and this has worked very well for me so far. Maybe 3-8 hours study on each of those days. For liberal arts classes its generally 2 days. I think I study less than anyone in my classes with comparable grades, so your results may vary.

There is generally not much homework in college, but the labs are a PITA and require a couple hours prep generally.

I still think it's much easier than full-time job. So I just treat it like an easy job.

 

[TypeA]

OP, high school is nothing like college as I am sure you can imagine. In high school, most of the discipline is handled for you so to speak. The one piece of advice...it is easy (especially during your freshman year) to get caught up in the freedom that accompanies college. If you are going off to school, ie. not living at home, your life will be completely different. The classes are larger and the one on one love isn't there. Your profs won't do a lot of handholding like the teachers you likely have been used to. Your workload will vary and you can handle it using the cram method (as Macushin has described) or just keep up with everything daily. Neither way works for everyone. You will learn a lot about yourself in college and what works for you will be one of those things.

The good news is that you are not the first, nor the last, to go through it and your struggles and triumphs will likely not be unique. You have demonstrated that you can be disciplined on the high school level and now it is time to take it up a step. You will have to take another step (or 5) in med school anyway so get used to it.

Good Luck! I'm sure you'll do very well.