Medical School Curriculum

Class Location: The Internet.

Description: This course gives students an overview of what they'll be doing during their many years of medical school.

Objective: Learn the general outline of study during your years as a medical school student.

If you think getting into med school was hard, wait until you’re actually there! You have many years of hard work ahead of you. The sheer volume of what you have to study will tax you more than the actual difficulty of the material.

Your four years of medical school encompass two main phases. You’ll spend the first two years on the basic sciences and the last two years on the clinical sciences.

Your freshman year will include about 24 to 28 semester hours of material, keeping you in class from about 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday. Your easier classes will include Behavior Science and Genetics. Embryology and Histology will be a bit harder. The most intensive classes will be Biochemistry, Gross Anatomy, Neuroanatomy, and Physiology. Your school may also require a class on malpractice law.

By your sophomore year, most schools will allow you to start seeing patients. Courses will include Clinical Diagnosis, Microbiology, and Pharmacology. Your hardest and most important class during your second year will be Pathology. After completing your course work, you’ll have two to three weeks to study for the first part of the National Boards, which will make you long for the days of the MCATs.

You’ll move into the clinical sciences during your junior year, which will probably include two-month rotations in internal medicine, obstetrics and gynecology, pediatrics, psychiatry, and surgery. During the third and fourth years of med school, you’ll also have to make some important decisions about your internship and residency.

During your senior year, you’ll have the chance to do more rotations in specialties of interest to you, such as pathology or anesthesiology. You’ll also go through matching, the process by which a computer assigns your residency based on the program that you ranked the highest and that ranked you highest. You’ll also have to take the second part of the National Boards.