#10: Lectures

The first two years of medical school are the basic science years, during which medical schools attempt to cram as much clinically-relevant basic science information as possible into the brains of their students. Medical schools generally choose from one of two teaching methods for these two years: lectures, or something called "problem-based learning" (to be discussed in another post). The lecture-based teaching method is the more traditional of the two (as it came about in Italy during the Medieval Ages or something), and is therefore the method of choice of most medical schools. So, if you're thinking of going to medical school, it would behoove you to be ready to sit through at least two more years worth of horribly-taught lecture material.

Overall, lectures in med school are run mostly the same way as their college counterparts, although there do exist a few significant differences that you should be aware of. For example, if you decide to matriculate at a school that engages in lecture-based teaching, you'll be happy to know that the first few sequences will start their lectures for the day at fantastic times like 10 a.m. - a nice change from college that should give you plenty of time late in the night to bond with your friends. Another change from college is that many med schools distribute packets containing all of the Powerpoint presentations for a given sequence at the start of that sequence, theoretically giving you all the material you'll need for your exams right from the get-go. A final difference between college and med school is that lectures in med school will usually be scheduled back-to-back, meaning that there will be less dead time in the middle of the day for you to waste.

Things like these will make you feel like your medical school administration really cares about you, and that they want to help you be as happy, efficient, and productive as you could possibly be. Don't be naïve enough to believe this! Lectures during the first few months of med school are only set up in such a humane fashion in order to ease you into the hell that you've entered, and like almost everything else in medical school, these things will only serve to make your life harder in the long run.

For example, you'll quickly notice that as you progress from sequence to sequence, the time at which your medical school lectures begin will slowly creep earlier and earlier; during some sequences, your lectures for the day will even start at the ungodly hour of 8 a.m. (I'm looking at you, second year neurology sequence). While this is a major issue in and of itself, the severity of this problem is compounded by the fact that more of your nights are spent studying because of how dense and complicated the material becomes in these later sequences. Thus, the late start times that you'll enjoy at the beginning of med school do not adequately prepare you for the bulk of how your medical school curriculum will operate, and will only serve to give you a false sense of confidence in your ability to adapt to the demands of your new environment.

The distribution of lecture packets by your med school may also seem to be a welcome improvement over your college experience. This is because your time in lectures during college was probably spent furiously transcribing your professors' words whilst whispering to your classmates about what had actually been said; now, all of that work has [theoretically] already been done for you. However, the fact of the matter is that now that you have the lecturers' Powerpoint slides, they will no longer feel the need to explain things properly because "it's all in the notes." They will also brush you off whenever you ask them to slow down for the same reason: "it's all in the notes." In fact, only the bare minimum is ever in the notes, but a professor who truly knows how to deal with med students will never let a student's wishes supersede his own right to run the lecture however he wants.

(Thus, there is only one way to get a concrete answer out of a lecturer: hitting that critical mass of student questions that a lecturer cannot ignore. Lecturers will try to give you the impression that they are Almighty God and therefore Can Never Do Wrong, but after careful examination it is safe to conclude that this is in fact false. That being said, if enough students ask them questions over and over, it is possible to temporarily pause their steamroller-like behavior.)

Even the back-to-back scheduling of lectures will quickly become a liability, as your days will go from the manageable number of 4 hours of lecture per day to the egregious quantity of 8 hours worth of lectures and labs (again, looking at you, second year neurology sequence). By the time you get halfway through your first year, you'll come to the end of each day wishing that you'd followed your friends who went into i-banking and are now living "meaningless" lives consisting of making boatloads of cash right out of college and drinking themselves into oblivion every weekend.

In fact, the only redeeming quality to all of this is that most med school lectures are not required; in fact, many med schools actually record their lectures and place them online so that the videos can be viewed from anywhere with a solid internet connection. By this token, we come to the final and most important difference between lectures in college and lectures in medical school: almost no one attends lectures in med school. Out of a class of 170 students, a lecturer would be lucky if 30 students showed up (and unlike most of the "facts" in this blog, this one is actually not an exaggeration).

I would imagine that most of the people reading this blog will fall squarely within the 140 people category.