i_wanna_be_Brown

Bartleby,

The Harvard undergrad experience in terms of academic rigor isn't that different from Brown, and I agree with you that conceptually, the coursework in undergrad was more difficult than med school but the volume was less and, as Miami is saying, for me wrapping my head around a difficult concept takes less time than memorizing a list of drugs and side effects. I like to think of it like this: In college I had many exams that even if they were open book, you probably still wouldn't get a 100 because you had to go beyond the book. In med school that was never the case except for maybe 1 or two exams.

I could also use my PhD coursework in contrast to my MD course work. I spent far less time studying for my PhD classes and yet the tests were much more difficult (and not P/F) because it involved generating experiments or analyzing data to predict a model or writing out explanations of things (in contrast to multiple choice regurgitation). How difficult or challenging something is speaks very little to how long it takes to do. If I asked you to write out by hand every single number from 1 to 1000000000000000000000000 would you call that a challenging task? It's certainly not as challenging as your advanced science courses but I bet it would take you a looooooooooong time to finish.

I too worked 10-15 hours/week in a lab as a senior. I don't know what your "handful" of extracurriculars was but my team required roughly 30 hours/week during the season and my fraternity executive board positions were easily another 25/week. Kaplan was another 10 hours a week. Being VP of my IFC was probably another 5-10 hrs/week. I consider all of that "free time," and enjoyed it more than studying.

There is moaning and there is accepting that your life has changed (and yes, there were plenty of whiners in my class too). I agree with you that pre-clinical med school years are very manageable, and I often said that if I felt as bad as some of my classmates made their lives sound (which I'm sure they're exaggerating), I would have slit my wrists. But the fact remains that med school and med school related things take up a larger proportion of your life than school does in college. I no longer have the opportunity to read greek plays or study roman mythology with people who are experts in the field like I did in college. I don't get to walk 10 ft to the dining hall to eat with my friends who spent the whole day doing stuff totally different than I did. I don't get to walk around the frat house any more. I don't have my teammates. My life isn't over nor am I so swamped I have no room for myself, but the fact is that once you leave college, you can't go back.

Bartleby007

Most of us who were successful in the first two years of med school treated school like a job. You put in your time. Memorize what's necessary. Regurgitate it on the test. Rinse and repeat. Embarrassingly little reasoning/analysis was demanded of us. This changed quite a bit during the 3rd year. Although we had to learn the algorithmic nature of patient care (more memorization), the clinical work was easier in the sense that one could map pathology/symptomatology/diagnosis/treatment onto a living, breathing person. The best part about it was that we helped "the team" manage the patient load (teamwork!) and, in certain instances, helped patients get better. It was a lot of fun.

It's certainly true that, in the first two years, there's a lot of data to be absorbed -- kind of like drinking from a firehose. I took a straightforward approach. I'd simply ask our professors what we needed to memorize for the test. At office hours, they were surprisingly forthcoming and helpful.

There was one girl in our class who had an ability approximating photographic memory. (Remarkable person in other ways as well. She was an incredible pianist, and she played the bass guitar surprisingly well.) She didn't spend much time studying...yet all that "trivia" was accessible at test time. It was really fun studying with her. She was a machine! On several occasions, she helped clarify my notes when they were illegible. :-)

Bartleby007

@i_wanna_be_Brown:
To be honest, I have no idea what the undergrad experience is like at Brown. Based on what you've written, I have to say that our academic experiences in college were very different. Since you played a varsity sport and dedicated a large chunk of your life to frat leadership, I think it's safe to say that your academic/extracurricular-balance differed greatly from mine. Playing a varsity sport in college is a significant time commitment. I felt bad for many of the student-athletes whom I tutored in college. They didn't have as much time to enroll in interesting classes or take advantage of the other educational opportunities on campus. For their core curriculum classes, they ended up enrolling in "guts" rather than other courses that promised to be more interesting (but also more work).

My Ph.D. in-class coursework was minimal. The department gave us credit for pre-clinical med school courses to help streamline our Ph.D. training. The tests in the courses I was required to take were kind of a joke. The journal club-style classes were fun, though. The vast majority of the work in grad school was in the lab, doing experiments, playing with histological samples, futzing with the microscope, submitting papers, giving talks, attending talks, cussing at the foreign post-doc who broke the cryostat, seeing whether ketchup or mustard migrates faster through a 10% polyacrylamide gel, etc.

I understand what you're saying about a task taking a long time to complete. Writing all the numbers between 1 and 1x10^24 is not difficult; it's rather pointless and very annoying. Although I acknowledge the need for building up a fund of knowledge in the pre-clinical years, there were many times I wished that I could have skipped the first year of it.

mcat2

Not many people have an ability approximating photographic memory. Asking them to absorb huge amount of information within an unreasonably short time could be a challenging task for them.

DS is now in his preclinical years. According to him, for some materials for preparing STEP-1, it is often the case that almost every sentence in the test-prep materials is important and need to be memorized/internalized one sentence at a time (if you set your target score high.) There are really not many "short-cuts" you can take such that if you conceptualize something important, you could deduce most of others -- like what you could possibly do in some basic physics or chemistry course at the UG level.

DS once made a comment that you still learn sciences in your first two years in med school. But for whatever reason it may be (he did not elaborate), they made the students learn it in a "bad" way. One of the MDs once posted here that it may be done out of necessity (her speculation); otherwise the length of med school education, including the clinical years, may become well too long. (The debt level of the student is already too high.)

curmudgeon

Bartleby. Thank you for joining in. I find the discussion fascinating. Of, course y'all have meandered so far off course the OP is unrecognizable....but heck. Don't that always happen? lol

D's experience as a hard science major was that other than sheer volume , pre-clinical was just not that difficult. (And in some cases dumbed down/limited from her UG.) She survived but she's a machine. In her case, a combine. She just mows it down, processes it into orderly form, and spits it into the truck. MS3? I simply don't know how an un-fit, less than perfectly healthy person could survive. It is a bear. Still, nothing that requires genius IQ or other-wordly imagination or conceptual skills.


(Aside: Doesn't it start making sense to y'all? Med school is not much theory, it's mostly practice. The MCAT doesn't test for the greatest knowledge in the test areas, just basic competence and great stamina........ and the ability to read and learn on the fly.


This conversation reminds me a little of the 3 drop outs from my law school class. None failed. Two left because they realized that they were more interested in concepts of jurisprudence and ethics than Rule 106 of the Texas Rules of Civil Procedure or the UCC. One went off to International Relations , the other to the seminary. The third fella left because he liked flying for the USMC more than the law.).

curmudgeon

Now, back to the OP. Graduating in 3 years IMO is something they will care about. If by "they" we mean "some" and by "care" we mean "gonna be looking at it and wondering 'why did she do that?'" Especially if it makes the student younger (which is not the OP's kid's case).

In no instance imaginable will it be a positive. It doesn't show great tenacity or intellect. Just shows she crammed 4 years into 3. In Texas, it is not at all un-common for a high school senior (through AP and dual-credit) to have second-semester soph standing as an entering freshman.

Bartleby007

For what it's worth, when I served as a student representative on the M.D./Ph.D. and med school admissions committees, I never heard a committee member criticize an applicant for graduating in 3 years specifically. Things may be different at other institutions.

The only problem I see with graduating in 3 years is that it leaves the applicant less time in college to impress the admissions committee with his/her body of work. What's there (in the applicant's file) needs to be excellent.

@mcat2: I never said that, in order to be successful in med school, one needs a photographic memory. The example I provided was that of an outlier, a gifted classmate of mine. With her ability, she did great on the tests. There were lots of us (limited by "normal" memories) who did well by putting in the time, triaging the important stuff, memorizing the necessary stuff, and regurgitating it on demand. Not difficult really.

The "shortcut" to absorbing info in med school is caring for a living, breathing patient who either has pathology that you're studying or has pathology that you're willing to study. At least that's how the clinically relevant material got burned into my brain. The first patient I encountered with a helminth infection...inspired me to learn the differential for eosinophilia, the various types of parasitic worms, what it does to the immune system, treatment, side effects of the meds, etc. I feel very strongly that students should have quality clinical interactions as early as possible during medical training. The fall term of the first year isn't too early.

FYI, the STEP-1 review materials have, by design, a high density of frequently tested info. They're review books. All the fat has been trimmed off. Presumably, your son was already taught the same material within his med school's curriculum, so the material shouldn't be unfamiliar at all.

With regard to how med schools teach students...
So long as the med school class is populated with smart and highly motivated individuals (not the case at all schools), I'm a big fan of the problem-based learning approach -- small groups, presentations, look up stuff on your own, etc. Planting your butt in a seat for 6-8 hours a day with a professor talking at you simply isn't effective. The reasons that many med schools take this broken approach include: fear of change, bias towards tradition, and the increased work they'd have to do to develop new curricula.

@curmudgeon: Thanks for sharing your daughter's experience. It's nice to know that others had a similar experience.

i_wanna_be_Brown

Bartleby,

Did they praise the students for finishing in 3? Was it seen as a positive?

Bartleby007

@i_wanna_be_Brown: Neither positive nor negative.

The OP's daughter should know, however, that many of the other applicants will have an extra year of grades, upper-level classes, volunteering, and research. Some applicants will have a lot more than that.

I'm sure that her pre-med adviser has told her as much.

mcat2

@Bartleby007, Thanks for sharing your experiences with us. I heard that although their students do not plant their butt in the class room for a long time, many plant their butt in the library studying for a long time.

DS said one of the MD/PhD students in his class studies especially hard before each class (I think slightly more than 10% of the students are MD/PhD students.), and tends to ask questions in class more often than others. DS thinks she helped other students learning by asking these questions. But some other students do not appreciate it. I guess everybody's learning style is different.

TatinG

Regardless of what she gets on the MCAT in January, it is too late to apply to med school for next year. She plans to apply in June for 2014 admission.

I think all my importuning has worked. She is going to stay four years and hopefully take advantage of the clinical internship opportunities available through the university.

I think her chances are good.

She has a 4.0, with many A+s on the transcript (which aren't calculated into the GPA). I've lost track of how many courses she got the highest grade in the class, large classes.

She told me that one afternoon, on a whim, she took an online MCAT practice test and got a 34. So with the MCAT review course and studying, I'd expect a much higher score than that.

She has done research for two years in a rat lab studying the effects of various anesthesias on the brain. Her name will be listed when the study is published. Her freshman year she worked in other labs. She is working in a Pain Management clinic at the VA also.

She is hoping to go to med school here in California.

It looks like a potentially strong application to me. But then, I'm just a little biased.

TatinG

Actually, she didn't like the pre-med adviser who said she could graduate in three years, didn't really weigh the pros and cons and had a sort of "Whatever" attitude.

somemom

To be blunt, I would take the advice on CC over a random UC adviser. My DD had a stream of different advisers who often gave conflicting advice.

Bartleby007

I was going to ask for clarification on the timeline. If she is currently in her 3rd year of college...and she'll be taking the MCAT for the first time early next year, the earliest possible entry for med school would be Fall 2014. Her realistic choices are: (a) graduating in 3 years and taking a gap year (or more) before med school and (b) sticking around for a fourth year in college while applying to med school in the summer 2013.
The questions I have are:
1. When did she suspect that she was interested in pursuing a career as a physician?
2. If she discovered her interest earlier, why has she waited so long to seek out clinical volunteer opportunities?

Typically, students will do some hospital volunteering in order to determine whether they want to take that career path.
The keyword is "potentially."
The fact remains that she hasn't taken the MCAT yet.
The practice test results are encouraging...but have no real meaning.
UCs aren't exactly lauded for their high-quality pre-professional/career advising.
There are several things I hate about the UC system. This is one of them.

Bartleby007

@mcat2: At the schools which offer NIGMS-sponsored dual-degree slots, 10% is a typical percentage for M.D./Ph.D.s in a med school class.

Excessive question-asking usually tapers off after the first year of med school (sometimes in the first few weeks of school). Students with any modicum of social awareness can sense when the rest of the class does not appreciate the questions being asked. In my class, we joked about pitching in for a straightjacket and muzzle for one particular student who asked excessive questions. The straw that broke the camel's back was when she asked a ridiculous question and then proceeded to leave the room (presumably to do something important). As politely as possible, we cut off the professor's answer in mid-sentence.

It's clear when a student is asking quality questions...or when he/she is "flexing," i.e., just trying to show-off.

FWIW, the M.D./Ph.D. students in my class tended not to ask as many questions as the other students. When we did ask a question, it was usually an insightful one. :-)