A Typical Day in Medical School:
Biochemistry 8am to 10am
Embryology lecture 10am to 12pm
Gross Anatomy Lecture 1pm-3pm
Gross Anatomy Lab 3pm-5pm
There are many who believe keeping a religious adherence to class attendance is optimal to success in medical school, and I tend to fall outside of that faction.
But don't judge me.
I tend to take a practical approach to things in life. Constantly questioning the utilitarian purpose of my actions.
For the first few weeks of medical school I often found my mind wandering in lecture, half asleep, and disengaged. The funny part about it was that while the professor saw that half of the class had laptops and were furiously typing away, little did he or she know that they were actually chatting on Facebook and not at all focused on how the descending branch of the occipital artery gives off a superficial branch and a deep branch which are separated by Splenius Capitis and form an important anastomoses with the superficial branch of the transverse cervical artery and the deep cervical artery, respectively.
I quickly began to realize that I was losing roughly 8 hours a day passively learning lecture material. It donned on me to ask the question:
"Why?… Why am I here?"
Was it to appease the professors? No, they would not have noticed if I were present or absent in a room of 160 students.
Was it to better learn the information? No, I could more easily sift through the material at the pace of my understanding if I were to study the lecture materials on my own.
Was it to make sure I had the appropriate information from the exams? No, all lecture notes are posted online. Furthermore medical education is fairly standardized—meaning that there are dozens of review materials in the form of textbooks, review books, and review websites which detail all the information that is required for a given topic.
The more I asked these questions the more I came to the realization that if I was not actively learning from 8am to 5pm then I was simply wasting the majority of my day to inefficiency. With that realization came the conscious decision to actively avoid lectures, which I did not find myself learning. Instead of wasting precious hours daydreaming and barely paying attention, I could study the material more efficiently on my own and maybe even get an extra hour of sleep. After about a week of this new technique I found myself with a deeper understanding of the information.
I am well aware that missing lectures can come with certain downsides. For example, the lecturer may verbally emphasize certain bits of information in class that are not found in lecture notes. While missing lecture certainly comes with certain issues, I find that spending 5 to 7 hours a day actively studying the information on my own more than makes up for these relatively minor downsides.
Throughout all of our educations we have ALWAYS gone to class, listened intently, taken notes, and followed all of the traditional rules of “the student.” Having done so in elementary school, middle school, high school, and college one would think that it would only follow for us to continue doing what we've always done. But, the most important concept that I have learned from this experience is that doing something just because you've always done it that way many times is NOT the most efficient way to go about things. And in this case it happened upon me that class was not the best route for me personally.
The basic question is: does it work for you? If it does, then by all means make the most out of those 8 long excruciating hours of class time per day. But if you find yourself barely awake, passively attentive, and disengaged in class, for the sake of efficiency, take the time for self-introspection and figure out how to make the best use of your time.
And if you are a medical student I’m sure you are well aware of the fact that there are definitely NOT enough hours in a day to study!
With all due respect and hope that you find YOUR way,
Student Dr. Francois (the S is silent people!)
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