A lot of students ask us the same thing: “Is Medical School Hard?” Well, we hate to say it, but the answer is that medical school is a huge challenge.
It’s a way to get rid of people who can’t handle the pressure and responsibility of having people’s lives in their hands. But you can get through it if you work hard and plan ahead.
In the spirit of getting ready, we talked to doctors, medical school students, and educational forums to find out what the hardest parts of medical school are.
This article will not only help you figure out if medical school is hard but also where students have the most trouble.
The 6 Hardest Parts of Medical School
In this section, we will consider the hardest parts of being in medical school
1. Achieving Balance
One thing that comes up over and over again is how hard it is for med school students to find balance. You could say that medical school is like a marathon that never ends.
Every hour you don’t spend studying could make it hard for you to keep up with what’s being taught. It’s hard to give up free time that isn’t planned, and it can be hard to keep simple good habits like exercising and eating right for brain health.
2. Time Management
Time management is another issue that many medical students and doctors talk about. A lot of med school students have to do a lot of work just to keep up.
One person on studentdoctor.net said that the hardest thing about med school is “accepting the fact that you can do your absolute best and study your tail off and still barely break the class average on exams.” Another person said that one of the hardest things is to realize that you can’t do everything on your list.
3. Life Outside of Medical School
Isolation from other people is another common problem. When you start medical school, you don’t have as much free time, which can hurt your relationships. If you’re used to getting a lot of social support, spending a lot of time with friends and family, and going to a lot of parties and events, you might miss those things when you start school.
There is a lot of change and uncertainty in the lives of medical students, too. When you go to med school, you often have to move to a new city. Then, only a few years later, residencies mean moving again (and again, and again). It’s not a good way to live a stable life without any problems.
4. The Board Exams
Everyone agrees that one of the hardest parts of medical school is taking the board exams to become a certified doctor. The USMLE Step 1 is one of the most difficult tests.
At this point, your knowledge of basic medical science is probably as good as it will ever be. If you have studied hard, you will be able to pass the test and move on.
The Step 2 exam, which is usually taken in the third or fourth year, and the Step 3 final exam, which is usually taken in the fourth year or after graduation, are also very hard.
Brainscape is the best flashcards app in the world. It has flashcards for thousands of subjects, including (you guessed it) flashcards for studying for the USMLE.
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5. Starting Clinical
Most medical school students go through a big change in their third year, when they go from being students to working students and spend a lot of time with patients for the first time.
This creates a whole new set of problems with communication, professionalism, and getting along with other people at work.
Almost certainly, your third year will be a time when you spend a lot of time listening to and learning from people who are older and have more life experience than you do.
6. Memorization
In medical school, students are expected to learn a huge amount of information. In many classes, you will have to memorize at least 1,000 pages of material.
People have said that trying to learn that much is like trying to drink from a fire hose. It will blow you away if you aren’t careful. For many students, one of the hardest parts of medical school is just trying to remember what they have learned.
3 Tips for How to Survive Medical School
Here are just a few of the ideas I learned in school that stuck with me the most. They were hard lessons to learn, but they were good ones.
They might look easy, and you might think you know how to do them. Before I went to medical school, I thought the same thing. I realized quickly that the way I was studying wasn’t going to work, so I made some changes. Here are my best suggestions for making it through medical school. I hope you find them as helpful as I did.
1. Figure Out How to Study and Figure That Out Early
Undergrad teaches you how to stay up all night, but it doesn’t teach you how much and how quickly you have to remember. It takes time to figure out how to study in medical school.
Find out the answer as soon as you can. If you aren’t doing as well, try different ways to study. I started studying with a group, which was something I could not stand in college.
Working in a group forced me to say out loud what I was doing and helped me get better at saying medical jargon. For me, the best way to learn something was to understand it well enough to explain it to a classmate. Don’t be afraid to try out new ways to study. If you don’t try, you’ll never know.
2. Take Notes and if You Write Something Down You Must Read It Later
I’ll say it again: if you write something down, it means it’s important and you should read it later. Taking notes just to look busy or absent-minded won’t help you unless you take the time to understand what you’ve written.
Students often made the mistake of writing everything down and highlighting it in every color of the rainbow, but they still couldn’t explain what they were supposed to have learned. If something is important enough to write down, it should be important enough to read and remember.
3. Manage Your Time
Make a list of what you need to learn and by when. If you have trouble with the subject, give yourself more time. You can’t cram like you used to in college.
Everything works together to make a whole. The fields of biochemistry and pharmacology are the roots of pathology and physiology. They link everything to each other.
Set aside time to study each subject. Don’t forget to read Dubin’s and only read Robbin’s. It’s easy to get caught up in something you’re interested in and forget about something you don’t care about.
You have to be able to pull yourself away from that and make time to study the things you don’t want to. In the end, it all comes down to balance.
Is Medical School Harder Than Law?
The point of medical school is to teach people how to become doctors. In the first two years of medical school, students learn about basic science, pathology, and pharmacology.
After that, they use problem-based learning to learn about clinical knowledge. Students who want to become doctors have to remember medical terms, body systems, and diseases. Depending on where they go to school, most students take four or five classes at the same time.
During the first two years of medical school, students often get to do clinical work. After two years, you’ll have to take Step 1 of the USMLE exam to see how much you’ve learned.
Clinical training usually takes up the last two years of school. This is when students start working in hospitals, rotating through different departments like surgery or pediatrics. You’ll also start to learn more about specializations that might interest you.
Law school is meant to teach you about the law and how to “think like a lawyer.” Reading, writing, and classroom time are more important in law school. In law school, professors get their students to talk about case facts and use legal principles in real life. You learn how to break down big legal problems into smaller ones and how to analyze each one.
You will learn about real estate, taxes, intellectual property, evidence, trial advocacy, and a lot of other things that have to do with the law.
Law school is more about how you think and what you can remember than about how well you do. You need to be able to understand and think, not just remember things. At the end of each semester, many schools only have one exam, but that exam may be worth 100 percent of your grade.
Is Medical School More Expensive Than Nursing School?
Yes, it costs more to go to medical school than to nursing school. Fees to become a Doctor are usually much higher than fees to become a Nurse.
Since a doctor has to study for many more years than a nurse, he or she will end up with a big bill.
Even though you’ll be making a lot of money, having a big tuition bill adds stress because you have to figure out how to pay it.
I looked into how much college costs on average, but this doesn’t include the cost of living. Only school costs money.
In the US, a four-year medical program can cost anywhere from $150,444 (at a public school in the same state) to $247,664 (at a public school in another state) and more.
The cost of going to nursing school varies, but in the United States, you can expect to pay between $40,000 and $100,000 per year at private schools and large universities. A program that lasts 4 years.
In the UK, it costs the same to become a doctor or a nurse.
For an undergraduate degree at an English school, you can expect to pay up to £9,250 per year.
Most of these are full-time courses that last three years.
In Australia, medical fees are $37,000 a year, and a medical degree costs $180,000 in total.
In Australia, the average cost of a nursing program is between AUD$27,000 and $35,000.
Why Engineering Is Harder Than Medicine?
In engineering, you mostly use your math and physics skills, but in medicine, you mostly use your chemistry and biology skills to study organisms and make or choose medicines.
It doesn’t mean that these things have nothing to do with the fields. I put knowledge to use, but not very well. But some courses, like biomedical engineering, teach both of these things at the same time.
Many people hate math and try to avoid it at all costs. However, they can’t get into medical school, so they go into engineering, where they have to learn thousands of formulas.
People like engineering, but they don’t want to learn math as part of it. These kinds of subjects make it harder to be an engineer.
Engineers need to be able to think a lot more than people in the medical field because most people who go to a doctor at the beginning or middle level have the same kinds of diseases. There will be some differences, but doctors give them medicines based on what they have learned from books.
But in this case, an engineer is always in trouble. The things he studied for four years might not be more important in the real world. People in this field sometimes have to deal with very difficult problems.
This doesn’t mean that doctors don’t know how to solve problems; they do. But engineers need to learn how to solve problems more than anyone else if they want to work in the industry.
The other point is that people who work in medical fields don’t have to worry about job placement because there are so many jobs for them, while there are fewer jobs for engineers these days.
What Is the Average Age to Become a Doctor?
How old is the average medical school graduate? If you go to school in the US, you’ll be about 26 when you finish medical school.
After high school graduation at the age of 18, you’ll spend 4 years in college and another 4 years in medical school.
Can You Fail Out of Med School?
Is medical school hard? Yes. Can you fail out of medical school? Yes. If you don’t follow the rules of your school or don’t follow them at all, you could fail.
Due to the costs of teaching each student, however, med schools will do everything they can to keep low-scoring students from dropping out.
How stressful is medical school?
“There’s no question that med school is stressful and can hurt your mental health. Even if you plan and study a lot, you will probably feel stressed at least a few times during medical school.
So, it’s important to figure out how to deal with stress as soon as possible.
Conclusion:
Is it hard to become a doctor? Absolutely. But it’s also pretty easy to do. If you got into medical school, you are smart because you did well in your first degree and did well on the MCAT.
You have what it takes for sure. Now all you need to do is get ready for the next marathon. Set up good study habits, find a good balance between school and other things in your life, and find study tools that work for you. You can get through medical school if you do these things.
Have we answered the question: Is Medical School Hard? Please let us know in the comment section.
- Check out these medical schools by country.