Questions!

[Jewels1986]

I'm trying to decide between Calgary and Toronto (and feeling very lucky to have to choose!), and I have some questions about Calgary that I didn't think to ask earlier. I'm really sorry for the length, but I'd appreciate it hugely if anyone has input on one or more of them! I had a wonderful experience at my interview and am just trying to resolve some doubts.

 

(1) Are there any student interest groups and/or service activities (e.g. health promotion for inner city kids, etc.)? The other schools that I interviewed at (especially U of T) really emphasized these, but at Calgary I don't remember hearing about any.

 

(2) Is it possible to fly home (Ontario) to visit family during the study breaks before course exams in the first two years?

 

(3) Do people manage okay in the clerkship year without a single day off? It seems like it would be really easy to burn out.

 

And lastly, I'm pretty shy, have only a minimal interest in hockey (sacrilege, I know!), hardly ever drink, and much prefer long chats with friends to parties, so some of the social activities the students were talking about didn't really appeal to me that much. Would I fit in all right? I know that might sound like a silly/stereotypical question, but I don't know anyone in Calgary or anywhere near it, so I'm worried about feeling out of place and lacking a support network.

 

Thanks for reading!!

[George]

Hey Jewels,

I don't know how much help I can be given that I haven't started, but I remember a few things from interview day that might help:

 

1. Seems like there's a lot of specific interest groups - the two that I remember from the post-interview presentation were Global Health and Emergency Medicine, but there was a ton more on the slide. As for service-oriented, I don't really remember any particulars other than "Manuary" (which is arguably a service? ), but I also think that if you have a certain interest, you can always try to start something up yourself (and I do recall the Glabers saying that there's a lot of support for students starting up new groups and whatnot).

 

2. Obviously no real idea, but I'm from Toronto as well, and my thoughts are that it's probably easier to fly back *after* the exams (when workload is lowest). Also, one thing that I like is the Friday afternoons/Monday mornings off - it means you can always catch a flight to Ontario on Friday afternoon and return Monday morning.

 

3. Do other schools give copious amounts of time off during clerkship? All I know is Calgary gives time off for CaRMS interviews. Also (please forgive me if this sounds snarky), once residency hits how much time do you really expect off anyway? I'd imagine that, if anything, having a fast-paced clerkship would help prepare you for what's coming the next year.

 

4. YOU DON'T LIKE HOCKEY!?!?!?!?!?!?

Honestly, I think it'll be fine - the "family" vibe seems crazy strong. I'm sure that in a class of 135, there's going to be a fair number of others that can't skate/don't drink/aren't type-A personalities. Really, the work-hard-play-hard mentality seems pretty applicable at just about every med school, but I don't think it's like party or be left behind.

 

Anyway, these are all just my impressions of UCalgary... but I hope it helps

[Guest MEDDOC]

Hey Jewels,

 

I'm deciding between UofA and UofC. But I think I'm prolly gonna go to UofC. I was also worried about "fitting in" because I don't drink, I'm not a big fan of parties and neither hockey. But a med student told me that outta 130+ students you are bound to find at least 5-10ppl who have similar interests. So, hopefully if you come to UofC I'll know at least one person!!

 

Good luck with your decision between UofT and UofC!

[sky2685]

Hi there,

 

Yes, we definitely have student interest groups for service activities and such. In fact, one of the positions on the student council is the Outreach coordinator. Some projects include: going to local schools to speak about med school or sun safety programs (a student-led initiative), as well as volunteering on the Alex Health Bus (community-based medicine) and at CUPS (the urban health care center in the downtown core, which had been started by U of C med students years ago).

 

As someone who is also from Ontario, I can say that it can be challenging to find the right time to visit home, but it is possible. I prefer the red-eye out of Calgary on the Thursday night of a long weekend and make a four day weekend out of it. Otherwise, there are also enough flights Friday afternoon to make the trip worthwhile.

 

And no worries about the whole not drinking/partying thing - you are most definitely not the only one. The Orientation Committee is well aware of that, and is doing a great job planning a variety of events that will appeal to many different interests.

 

Best of luck with your decision!

[Wolvenstar]

Bah! Hockey is over-rated... Soccer on the other hand! Now there is a real sport!

[Jamer]

Really? Because I don't think diving on the ground and crying like you've been shot when no one touched you 50 times a game constitutes realism.

 

I'm probably crazy, though.

[krgregg]

if you considered it a real sport, you wouldn't be calling it "soccer" ;-)

[Wolvenstar]

Well we are in North America. i would call it football but then everyone would think I am talking about american football. As for the pansys who cry 50 times when no one has touched them well.....we can only hope that one day they all just leave the sport. lol

[Jamer]

To completely hijack this thread, if you suspended players for blatantly diving (via watching video replay after the games), it would completely stop. It's almost as if they encourage it by doing nothing about it, and it's not the ref's fault since they've perfected acting like panzies.

[Who M.D.]

(1) Are there any student interest groups and/or service activities (e.g. health promotion for inner city kids, etc.)? The other schools that I interviewed at (especially U of T) really emphasized these, but at Calgary I don't remember hearing about any.

 

In addition to the groups Sky2685 mentioned, we have a group that's doing adolescent health promotion by giving talks to schools. The outreach project is different every year—this year was sun safety, but will probably be something else next year. If there's anything in particular you'd like to do that we don't yet do, you'll find plenty of support to help you get that started!

 

(3) Do people manage okay in the clerkship year without a single day off? It seems like it would be really easy to burn out.

 

You actually do get most weekends off in most rotations. So you do get days off.

 

There is also a 2 week Christmas holiday, and a 2 week holiday during CARMS interviews. And some rotations are less intense than others, and electives tend to be less intense than core rotations. So there are periods of lessened pressure.

 

And lastly, I'm pretty shy, have only a minimal interest in hockey (sacrilege, I know!), hardly ever drink, and much prefer long chats with friends to parties, so some of the social activities the students were talking about didn't really appeal to me that much. Would I fit in all right? I know that might sound like a silly/stereotypical question, but I don't know anyone in Calgary or anywhere near it, so I'm worried about feeling out of place and lacking a support network.

 

You'll be fine! In a class of over 150, there are many different groups of people. The presentation of social activities is a pet peeve of mine—the people who have time to volunteer to do those presentations tend to also be the socialite type who have a little extra free time as well (by virtue of not being married, not having children, etc.). So you the view of social life here that you got is skewed. Most (though by no means all) student events tend to be parties, but I think that's because parties need planning; those of us who don't party don't need to do any elaborate planning for our social activities.

 

Good luck deciding on your school!

[Jewels1986]

Thanks everyone for the replies! I really appreciate it. Now I'll just have to decide whether going to a program I might like better is worth being so far away from family. I'm glad I have a couple of weeks to think about it!

 

Jumping topics a little, if anyone has an updated link to the medical students' association webpage, would you mind posting it? The only one I can find hasn't been updated in quite a while.

[Who M.D.]

Jumping topics a little, if anyone has an updated link to the medical students' association webpage, would you mind posting it? The only one I can find hasn't been updated in quite a while.

 

The web site probably won't be updated until this summer (long story about transition difficulties, desire to completely redo the web site, no time right now to do that, etc.). If you have questions, please post them and someone will try to answer! You'll be getting a small "survival guide" electronically if you accept admission here which will give you some good information.

 

Good luck with your decision. It must be tough choosing family v. your preferred program!

[Jewels1986]

Ok, thanks for the info - I'll just post here then. The other two things I was wondering about were whether students felt they learned enough clinically with such a short clerkship (it's only 54 weeks, and all the Ontario school ones seem to be around 70-80), and if it would be difficult to match back to Ontario for residency.

[Guest MEDDOC]

Hey Who M.D.

 

If you don't mind I have a few questions about the UofC.

 

1. Because you guys have a 3 year program, do you find that you have enough time to absorb all the new information that is coming at you in your first 1.5 years?

 

2. What would you rank your day to day stress level in the first 2 years?

 

3. What are some drawbacks that you found about the UofC school?

 

Thanks so much!

[Who M.D.]

Ok, thanks for the info - I'll just post here then. The other two things I was wondering about were whether students felt they learned enough clinically with such a short clerkship (it's only 54 weeks, and all the Ontario school ones seem to be around 70-80), and if it would be difficult to match back to Ontario for residency.

 

Based on the licensing exam results, UofC is consistently one of the top 3 schools in "clinical reasoning". So we certainly seem to learn enough clinically. I've heard comments from classes ahead of me that UofC students tend to be viewed as very strong clinically. In general, our curriculum puts a really heavy focus on clinical medicine, but tends to put little focus on the basic science and and the pathological science behind medicine. That's probably why we do so well when it comes to clinical medicine.

 

As for matching into Ontario residency, I think the shorter clerkship is probably a disadvantage, but not a huge one, and depending on how you plan your clerkship and what you want to go into, it may not be an disadvantage. They key disadvantage to attending UofC when it comes to matching into Ontario will be your dearth of electives. We only have 16 weeks of electives while at 4 year schools, you'll have summers where you can do extra electives. Many residency programs like to have seen you in action. Some put more emphasis on this than others (e.g. surgery puts a very strong premium on this; more competitive fields put a higher premium on this as well). So if you attend UofC, you'll be limited in how many Ontario schools to which you can "shop" yourself around through electives. However, if you have a small number (1-3) schools in Ontario in mind, and you only have one or two programs you're considering, it is very doable to do an elective at each of those universities in the relevant disciplines.

 

I don't remember the match results for this past year, but I think close to 25% of our graduating class matched into Ontario. The 2007 statistics for which schools everyone matched to can be found [link]here[/link]. These numbers of course are only so useful—we don't know what everyone matched into, or where they wanted to match. But it is certainly very possible to match into Ontario as a UofC grad if that's what you are worried about. Depending on your desired discipline and the number of schools you're considering, going to UofC may make matching into Ontario harder though.

[Who M.D.]

1. Because you guys have a 3 year program, do you find that you have enough time to absorb all the new information that is coming at you in your first 1.5 years?

 

No. But from what I hear from friends at other schools, no one manages to absorb everything or even most of what we learn pre-clerkship. Clerkship really exists because you need to practice applying what you learn in medicine before it really sinks in. You can read what heart failure presents with in terms of symptoms, but in real life you probably won't recognize it easily until you've seen 10-20 patients with it. You also won't appreciate how variable it can present until you've seen it many times.

 

I can't precisely answer whether our lack of absorption of knowledge is worse than at a 4 year program. It's hard to measure how much I remember versus how much a friend in a different curriculum remembers. My suspicion is that there's probably no real difference.

 

First, in terms of actual months of pre-clerkship training, we have 17 months. UofA Medicine has, I think, has 16-17 months (depending if they finish school terms in early or late May—I don't remember). So there's not much difference in actual learning time. I really doubt students at 4 year programs study over the holidays, so they really don't gain much studying time having the longer program (what they do gain, however, is the opportunity to do electives—that could be concern for you).

 

Second, the UofC curriculum is very focused on clinical medicine. The advantage of this is that you're learning what you'll really need to know in practice. So what is emphasized at UofC better correlates with the knowledge you'll need in clerkship. That helps with focusing learning.

 

Finally, UofC does fine in licensing exams. So by that objective measure, we certainly do well enough.

 

2. What would you rank your day to day stress level in the first 2 years?

 

Not too high. Near exam time things really peak, but we're relatively relaxed the rest of the time. I certainly don't think we're more stressed than students at other schools. There are many social and extracurricular activities in which to partake.

 

UofC is also very supportive of student needs. Our Student Affairs Director graduated from here in 2000 and is now a psychiatrist, so he's acutely concerned with making sure stress is kept in check and good mental health prevails. Some of our students even manage to raise children while in med school here!

 

3. What are some drawbacks that you found about the UofC school?

 

Before I go all negative, I want to make clear that these are my opinions and that others in my class disagree with these. Do not take me as the final word.

 

1. UofC puts very little focus on basic science and pathological science. You get a very strong basis in clinical medicine: how to investigate, diagnose, and treat illness. You get very good training in clinical skills as well: how to take a good history, communicate well with patients, how to examine them, etc. But I think UofC does a relatively worse job of teaching the physiology, biochemistry, pathology, histology, etc. behind the illnesses we learn about. Some like this: you aren't learning material you won't use day-to-day. As well, if you come from a background where you've learnt something like physiology or biochemistry, you don't have to relearn everything you already studied in undergrad. But it does mean you have less understanding of why illnesses work as they do. If you're the type who wants a strong theoretical background in this, or if you remember best by having a deep theoretical framework to tie everything together, You'll find the UofC curriculum a little frustrating.
    
   
2. The teaching quality at UofC is highly variable. We have about 1200 lecturers over the course of our pre-clerkship years. While some of our lecturers are excellent, many are pretty bad and zip through 120 slides in a 50 minute lecture. It's often hard to keep up in some lectures.
    
   
3. We are a little rushed to come to a decision in what we want to do in residency. We have to apply for residencies 9 months in, and we start work on our applications 5 months in. The dearth of electives hearts in this respect as well.
    
   
4. We don't get many holidays. Right now in first year, we're all a little burnt out from not having had a long holiday since Christmas. This is apparently the low point in the course of the degree though. (Everyone is similarly burnt out at the end of clerkship, but that's the end of the degree.)
   

 

I hope that helps. Once again, these are my thoughts, not the opinions of everyone in my class. Obviously, we all think that the strengths of UofC Medicine far outweigh the negatives—otherwise we wouldn't be so positive about the school here. But I'm sure the students at every med school in Canada think their med school is great. It's very much a personal decision whether UofC "fits" you best.

[sky2685]

1. UofC puts very little focus on basic science and pathological science. You get a very strong basis in clinical medicine: how to investigate, diagnose, and treat illness. You get very good training in clinical skills as well: how to take a good history, communicate well with patients, how to examine them, etc. But I think UofC does a relatively worse job of teaching the physiology, biochemistry, pathology, histology, etc. behind the illnesses we learn about. Some like this: you aren't learning material you won't use day-to-day. As well, if you come from a background where you've learnt something like physiology or biochemistry, you don't have to relearn everything you already studied in undergrad. But it does mean you have less understanding of why illnesses work as they do. If you're the type who wants a strong theoretical background in this, or if you remember best by having a deep theoretical framework to tie everything together, You'll find the UofC curriculum a little frustrating.

It's true that there isn't much lecture time devoted to these topics (it varies with each course), but what we do get is the most relevant, "cut-to-the-chase" parts - the success of U of C students on the licensing exam as well as the match speak to the fact that we are not disadvantaged by this teaching style. We have 24-7 access to the Anatomy labs here, and so that gives us plenty of opportunities to self-study what has been briefly covered in class. At this stage of the game, I personally think it is appropriate that we are not spoon-fed all our information and that there's a little bit of an onus on us to take some initiative.

 

2. The teaching quality at UofC is highly variable. We have about 1200 lecturers over the course of our pre-clerkship years. While some of our lecturers are excellent, many are pretty bad and zip through 120 slides in a 50 minute lecture. It's often hard to keep up in some lectures.

I think that's true for any institution. One of the strengths of U of C is that they truly care about student feedback. So, if there's a lecturer that really couldn't get his or her point across, we have an opportunity to write about it in survey at the end of each course. Next year, the lecturer may be asked to change the style of presentation, or may be replaced.

 

3. We are a little rushed to come to a decision in what we want to do in residency. We have to apply for residencies 9 months in, and we start work on our applications 5 months in. The dearth of electives hearts in this respect as well.

That being said, the number of opportunities we have to shadow during first and second year can really help with the decision making process. A lot of the docs in Calgary (many former grads) are really keen to teach and love to take on students for half a day or a full shift. Residency applications are due partway through 3rd year, which is 9 months into our clerkship rotation.

[Guest MEDDOC]

Thanks sooooooooooooooo much for these very clear and balanced answers. These answers are a HUGE help, I won't know what I would do without you guys!

 

One last questions Who M.D. If you had a choice between UofA and UofC where would you go?

[Rock*]

Since all of the objective comments have been covered, I'll chime in with a subjective opinion of U of C so far after a U of O undergrad.

• The faculty actually CARES about you and tries to address your concerns as soon as possible. You notice it in the little details like how you're given lockers (with locks!) on your first week, 500 pages of printer/photocopier credit a year, free paper based core documents for each block and the literally tons of surveys you're asked to fill out to improve teaching quality.
  
• The associate deans actually come out and talk to us as equals and are always eager to hear our opinions of how our year is going.
  
• The lounge is awesome--each class donates something to it when they graduate and it has turned the place into a relaxation palace.
  

[Who M.D.]

One last questions Who M.D. If you had a choice between UofA and UofC where would you go?

 

This is a hugely personal question in my opinion. What is best for me is not necessarily what is best for you. I urge you not to use this as a major factor in your decision.

 

My choice would be UofC, without question. That's how I felt before interviews. I was even more sure after interviews (though I didn't get an interview at UofA, so I had selective brainwashing). My opinion hasn't changed.

 

What tilts me to UofC are these factors:

 

1. I hate lectures. I do not learn well in them. I learn much better in seminars and on my own. While both UofA and UofC are lecture-first schools, UofC makes greater use of non-lecture learning formats (UofA does use non-lecture formats, but not to the same extent). At UofC we have about 3 two hour seminars a week, we have clinical correlation sessions where we see patients in hospitals, and we learn all our history-taking and physical examination in seminar format. UofC was a better fit for my learning styles. (My first choice of school would have been McMaster and their problem-based learning curriculum, but they didn't give me an interview.)
    
   
2. UofC has the most student-friendly administration of any university or academic program I have ever seen. As Rock* mentioned, the Associate-Dean comes to talk to us—actually, he knows most if not all of us by name! He'll stop to chat in the hallways! Our student affairs office is similarly extremely supportive and friendly. The administration is always extremely receptive to feedback: we elect student representatives to sit on a committee that reviews exam performance after an exam to identify if some questions were unfair or need to be thrown off—basically, they don't finalize our exam marks until we've had an opportunity to make a case for getting rid of bad questions. For students with families and children, UofC does what they can to accommodate including allowing leaves of absences. There are some annoying trends (e.g. some lecturers dislike our use of laptops and there's a constant attempt from administration to balance letting students use laptops with lecturers and seminar leaders' dislike of laptops which is kind of annoying from the student end). Overwhelmingly though, the student-friendliness of UofC Medicine is phenomenal.
    
   
3. I am a big believer in integration in education. I think UofC does a much better job of this than UofA. Or clinical correlation sessions, our early training in history-taking and physical examination, the timing of physical-exam training and procedural skills training to correspond with what we're learning in class, etc.—these all give us a more well-rounded education and integrated education than the the UofA delivers (not to say that the UofA doesn't do so some good integration, and doesn't deliver a well-rounded education—they scored first in Canada on the first part of the licensing exams last year which is a testament to their curriculum having some considerable strengths too).
    
   
4. We have an amazing class. There's incredible diversity of educational and career backgrounds in our class. In our seminar groups and outside of class, you will learn so much from the different students in our class. As an older student, the UofC's older, more mature class seemed like a better fit for me. I also feel that UofC's class is more of a family than the UofA class (though I haven't attended UofA, so maybe I'm wrong). Everyone here is always willing to help each other out and just generally be supportive. I found this really important since I was effectively going to live with this class for three years, spending more time with them than my real family. UofC's student environment seems like a better fit for me.

 

Those are my reasons for preferring UofC over UofA. I encourage you to talk to some UofA students though. We all are biased towards UofC here (we're attending UofC and so we've been brainwashed, and of those here who had a choice, they chose UofC, so they're self-selected to prefer UofC). To get a balanced opinion, you should make sure to get feedback from some people who chose UofA over UofC.

 

In the end, either school won't be a terrible choice. We're both very good medical schools!

[YoYo]

Thought I'd come in and put in my two cents - hopefully I can get a few converts here.

 

If you're in the fortunate position of picking between schools, there are a few things to consider, but I want to emphasize that academic opportunity is not one of them. There is no such thing as a bad Canadian med school, nor is there one that is better than the others. I've seen mention of residency - do not think that to get a specific match you have to go to a specific school. CaRMS numbers are great to tell you how your school as a population did that year, but it means nothing on the individual level. In all cases, your med school experience will be what you make of it. You can go to as many lectures as you like, you can do as much shadowing as you like, you can do whatever research as you like and you can do your electives wherever you like - that will not change school to school. So don't pick a school based on those numbers. Instead, you need to pick the best atmosphere for you as an individual - for me, that came down to two areas: learning resources/system and environment.

 

Learning resources: 1) The school philosophy. At UofC, the mantra here is 'clinical based learning.' We are a departure from the traditional teaching method (some would call us a heretical sect) in that our learning is clinical, not science based. Rather than have courses on basic science, we have system based blocks where we learn everything about one system and are done with it and move onto the next. Many schools do this, but it is our approach that is different - rather than say 'let's learn everything about the heart' we say 'a patient comes in with chest pain - what is your approach and how do you work through your differential.' All of our learning is about practical approaches to problems; I find this makes our learning much more applicable. True, we don't get as much basic science learning (which pains me as a physiologist at heart) but there is more than enough time to get that background on your own, and I think this method makes our learning more clinically useful. So in short, I think the first thing you should do when looking into a school is find out what it's learning philosophy is - if you're going to be indoctrinated (pun intended) for the next 3-4 years, you better think that you can learn within that doctrine.

 

2) Small groups. About 1/3 of our learning is small groups. However, I really want to emphasize that it is NOT true PBL - our small groups are there to complement lecture - it is the forum where we academically apply what we see in lecture. Ie, we do not learn new material in small group, we apply what we learn. Our small groups are case based; we take the approaches we learn and apply and build on them in a small group discussion. The general concensus is that this really reinforces what we are learning and drastically improves retention of the most clinically relevant material.

 

3) Clinical exposure) This is a huge part of our curriculum - we were out on the wards as part of our course work within the first we weeks. We have a huge amount of mandatory clinical exposure, and just about everyone goes above and beyond that. This is very important as it is the clinical setting to apply the approaches we are learning. One of the great things about Calgary is that every single hospital in the city is a teaching hospital - as such, they are familiar with teaching med students and are very eager to help you learn.

 

4) Facilites. Let's be honest - there's money here and it shows. During my interviews, I was impressed at the facilites here as compared to other schools I saw. And it will only get better for all of you as the construction and development continues. But more than just the facilities is their availability - we have access to everything here, more than I heard offered at my interviews at other schools. All of our facilities are available 24/7 - I'm a night owl, and I can (and have) go to the anatomy lab at midnight and get in some good corpse time as late as I like. All of the exam rooms, standardized patients and procedure simulators are available to us as often as we like - all we have to do is sign them out. There is no limit to the amount of practice available to us - they make sure that everything is at our complete disposal, in whatever way best fits our schedule.

 

Environment: 1) The faculty/staff. As has been sufficiently discussed, our faculty and staff are simply amazing. I love our faculty as much as I can within the guidelines of professional conduct. I have had a conversation with our Associate Dean that started off with the best, most practical career advice possible and ended with a discussion of bad first dates and the practice of 'sneak dating' (if you come here I'll explain that). The faculty here goes beyond being approachable to students, they actually reach out and approach and engage us. No exaggeration, there are at least 5 faculty/staff here that know the names of every person in our class. In addition, we constantly have group meetings with the deans, focus groups and other such activites where the faculty very eagerly seeks our opinions as to the direction our school should be going. Our academic structure is constantly revised, and the faculty very actively seeks our input.

 

2) The students!!!! You will not find a more closely knit medical class. You just won't. Period, end statement, no need to order a CBC. There are many social activites amongst the class - much more than I've heard of at any other school. Even more important is the academic end of this - at UofC, competition is quite non-existent, and I think that's the reason we are so close. Come exam time, people will share their study notes will actually share their study notes with one another. Seriously. For me, the choice to come here meant leaving my family, friends and my whole life behind, but since the first day, I have not looked back for a second. I feel completely at home here, and that seems to be the general concensus amongst other UofC students from other corners of the country. Right from my interview, I could see how close the UofC students were, and that is one of the things that drew me here. I hope we were able to impress the same upon you during your interview as the atmosphere here really is one of the unique aspects of our school and one of the biggest reason people come here.

 

 

So that's my long-winded post. I hope this helps you in your decisions.

[Guest MEDDOC]

I can't express how grateful I am for you very detailed answers, they are EXTREMELY helpful and I"m sure they will be very useful to others students in the future as well.

 

If you guys don't mind I have another question. Since you guys have to study all year at UofC do you find that sometimes you start to fall behind and then have great difficulty catching up? I mean since material keeps coming at you non-stop how would you be able to catch up? Or do you often have enough free time to easily catch up?

 

Just to let you guys know I am leaning towards UofC over UofA!

[Who M.D.]

If you guys don't mind I have another question. Since you guys have to study all year at UofC do you find that sometimes you start to fall behind and then have great difficulty catching up? I mean since material keeps coming at you non-stop how would you be able to catch up? Or do you often have enough free time to easily catch up?

 

I think we all fell behind the first day (it was the first day and we were all slacking off still) and we've never caught up. More seriously, in medicine, there is way too much for anyone to know. It's simply not realistic to know everything, so in that sense, we're always behind and falling further and further behind every day. This inability to know everything or even an overwhelming majority of the material is a big change from undergrad.

 

However, the flip side of this is that you don't need to know everything to pass or even do well on exams. Certain material is more important than others. What really matters on exams is that you know how to investigate a patient with certain signs and symptoms, come up with a diagnosis, and then treat him/her. That is a fraction of what we're taught (you don't need to know all the biochemical signalling pathways of a disease, for example, even though it is taught sometimes). When it comes to knowing the "critical" material, there's enough time to catch up whenever we fall behind. It helps that we get a week off before exams that count towards our grade, something that few other schools do.

[Rock*]

The most important purpose of all the knowledge we're learning is to be able to recall and apply them when we see patients. It is to that end that we get so much clinical time to practice applying our knowledge, why we have so many small groups that focus on specific cases, and why all of our exams test our ability to apply medical knowledge. This approach, from what I've heard, consistently impresses preceptors during clerkships with our ability to recall relevant information.

[YoYo]

It's all a matter of how much effort you want to put into it - you can learn things inside-out or you can study just enough to squeak by the exams - it's totally up to you. Another big difference between here and undergrad is that you are not studying for exams - you're studying to actually learn the material. Deciding how much detail you want to go to is all up to you, and of course the more detail the better, but you're the one in control of what you think is appropriate to learn. This ties in with what Rock said - the amount of clinical exposure we get helps us decide what is relevant and worth spending our time studying. In all honesty though, yes, there will be times when you fall behind on your studying, but as long as you budget your time, you will be able to catch up. If you decide to take a weekend break from studying, it means you'll have to work hard the next week - I don't think this is unique to our program. The reality of med school is that it is a lot of work, and sometimes we do fall behind, but with proper use of time (and we have a lot of independant study time for this exact purpose) you can definitely keep on top of things. Do expect to be behind at times (as far as I know, everyone is now and then) but if you put the effort into it, you can also expect to have enough time to catch up.