Your toughest first year class??

Host defense, must be immuno. I thought micro and pharm were the toughest just due to all the memorization of strange names.

 

Different courses are more difficult depending on what your interests are.

By far, Anatomy was the largest amount of subject matter and memory. However, Histology and Micro were Hell!! Just boring memorization spit back out. I would take anatomy over before I would take those other 2!

 

I 2nd the micro and histo problems. I read the Lange series "Microbiology and Immunology" section on Immuno over break, and it was fine. Good luck.

 

NeuroAnatomy. The instructor has been teaching it for 40-odd years, and when test time came around he would test us over material he thought he had already covered. On one lab test I missed six questions which were covered in the lab session the week after the exam. Didn't matter to the instructor - he didn't throw any questions out. I learned a valuable lesson - know everything.

 

Biochem. Without a doubt, meaningless, useless memorization of minutiae that had ZERO clinical application (e.g. the structure of the amino acids, the 1 letter abbreviations of them, whether a reaction was a nucleophilic reaction - POINTLESS!!!!!).

Y'all had immuno first year?!?!?!?!
Kristi

 

i found "general pathology" to be the most difficult course i've encountered during first-year med. school.

i'm not sure which portion of the course i'd consider more treacherous: the laboratory portion with obscure slides, or the lecture portion with millions of interleukins.

by the way: how on earth can anyone consider med. microbiology and histology to be difficult?? histology is probably the easiest course present in the med. school curriculum, and microbiology is a pleasure to learn.

 

for me they were micro and phys.. for some reason physiology just didn't sink in till finals...

 

By far, HISTOLOGY WAS THE HARDEST CLASS I HAVE EVER TAKEN IN MY LIFE. Everything looks red, it is INCREDIBLY boring, and the memorization was awful. At least the material in microbiology was interesting!

 

Red! What stain did you guys have? All my slides and pics were pink and purple.

--kris

 

if you are making it to path and micro in the first year then there is no way that you are covering enough detail to really bog you down.

In the traditional (detailed) curriculum, the standard 1st year classes are gross, biochem/cell, histo, neuro/neuroanat, physio, embryo, epidemio

Hence I think what you should really worry about is passing the boards step 1 because they are not going to beat very much of the rest of it into you

I think histo was tough as hell for the 1st 3 months till I got used to looking at tissues...like what H&E looks like, what are the components of an epithelial sheet...what the lamina propria is etc...after that it is pretty straight forward...the problem is that you really have to have a grasp on it to pass histopath the next year

If you can't tell I don't think very highly of PBL

 

I guess I'm the exact opposit of you all, cause I though Micro Anatomy was great! Yeah there was a lot of detail memorizing, but if you give me something to physically look at, I can learn it much better than something you've only told me about. For me, the anti-Christ was my Biochem professor, who spouted off endless reactions and biochemical pathways which I will NEVER see. And they always have 27 enzymes with names 27 letters long! Now THAT sucks!

Histo and Gross were my fav's for sure. I liked Phys a lot too, because it is interesting, and actually usefull for our careers, unlike learning how the body makes each amino acid. Everything I learned in biochem has already dribbled out onto my pillow anyway! I have happily forgotten it all! And I don't care if I ever relearn it for the boards. Those questions will be sacrificed for my sanity's sake!