<p>Keep in mind that at this point it’s all about getting in to med school, a good med school.</p>
<p>Other considerations are secondary. </p>
<p>And she does have a life. As I said, she’s learned surfing. She has a lot of friends and social activities.</p>
<p>I think y’all had a different undergraduate experience than I had. In college, I did a lot of research (10-15 hours/week), took a challenging course load, and was involved in a handful of extracurriculars. Academically, college was far more challenging than med school ever was. Med school was predominantly rote memorization – in that respect, more like high school than college. The difficult thing about the 3rd-year of med school was the time crunch (long hours during medicine and surgical rotations, in particular). When you’re getting up early to round on your patients (sometimes in the neighborhood of 4am), it ain’t pretty. That being said, the first two years…and the fourth year…were very manageable. Then again, that’s just how it was at my med school. It may also have something to do with my academic preparation prior to med school. YMMV.</p>
<p>We all make time for the things that matter to us. If I wanted to talk to my parents, I always had time to do that. During my first two years of med school, if I wanted to go on an early morning or late-night dive or run, I was generally able to do it (provided that I didn’t have to take a test that morning). For the record, in the first two years of med school, I heard lots of whining from several of my med school classmates about the lack of time they had to themselves outside of studying. The whining stopped once we hit 3rd year for a couple of reasons: (1) they realized how much free time they actually had in the preclinical years and (2) they were too busy to whine. :-)</p>
<p>To get back on topic…
I absolutely agree that a fourth year in college would give the OP’s daughter more time to “explore” academically…and non-academically. It may also give her more time to mature and/or gain life experience that would be helpful in her future medical career. Arguably, the older students in my med school class – those who had taken one or more years off prior to med school – made the best doctors. (But that’s just my opinion.) That being said, there are advantages to rushing through school as quickly as possible (start “adult life” sooner, begin paying off educational loans, have a family, etc.). As long as the OP’s daughter makes an informed decision, she can’t go wrong.</p>
<p>I maintain that med school admission committees don’t view graduating in 3 years as positive or negative.</p>
<p>You must have gone to an awesome undergrad–you’re the first person I’ve heard of who thought college was far more academically challenging than med school was! It’s nice to see the variation. I can’t imagine an undergrad that’s considerably more academically challenging than med school! Heck, undergrad was practically a breeze for me, save for a handful of quite difficult classes, and I absolutely loved having plenty of free time to grow up and learn about myself and get heavily involved with my community, student organizations, leadership, research, clinical work, job etc etc while building relationships with friends, family, and mentors. </p>
<p>It’s cool that the end result was the same–both accepted. Guess it really proves the point that if you’re doing things the best way for you, and in the process build a strong profile for med school, you’ll get there one way or another.</p>
<p>@kristin5792: Many different paths…</p>
<p>I went to Harvard for undergrad. I can’t say enough good things about the school – academic opportunities, exposure to the arts, advising, interesting fellow students, etc.</p>
<p>Over the years, I’ve talked with medical buddies who majored in different disciplines (bio, classics, psych, English, economics, etc.), attended different colleges (East Coast schools, UCs, Stanford, etc.), and matriculated at various med schools. We agree that the preclinical years of med school were very manageable for those of us who majored in a “hard” science in college. (I majored in biochemistry.) For the most part, 4th year was a breeze, particularly after 3rd year, which was painful/fascinating/exhausting at times.</p>
<p>Good luck with the rest of school. You have so much to look forward to. You’re really going to enjoy the clinical years!</p>
<p>Well, she’s going to mature and gain life experiences either way. The choice is not in going to med school a year earlier. It’s whether to take a minor and spend the fourth year in college or graduate in three and spend the gap year doing something else.</p>
<p>"Academically, college was far more challenging than med school ever was. Med school was predominantly rote memorization "
<p>Bartle- maybe I missed it, but where are you now in the process? Resident?</p>
<p>Oh, Bartle’s comments were a catalyst for me to recall some MS1 first term stories. As I have said before DD has a diagnosed learning disability such that she got extra time in HS on timed tests (AP/SAT, too). I noticed in HS that when they got to the more difficult stuff there was a lot of whining from classmates, not her, the busy work of studying had always been a challenge for her. Same at UG and then in her MS1 year many of her friends really struggled at first, class had always been easy for them, studying had been easy. All of a sudden there was more info than they could process their old way. There was terror, there was gnashing of teeth, there were tears, there were failed exams & even failed classes. By the end of that term most of them had figured out their best way to study.</p>
<p>DD never had that problem and I recall specifically that she went away for a weekend before one of her first major exams, some friends from far away were going to be nearby so she went with them. DD did some serious soul searching before taking the weekend off (since her roommate studied from breakfast until bedtime including flashcards on the cereal boxes) wondering if she (DD) was slacking, but really what had happened is that due to her LD she had been over faced with more work than she could easily handle as a kid, she figured out her ways to study and that carried her through UG and med school.</p>
<p>So, yes, she did have an easier time than many classmates in term 1 of MS1 as she did not go through that struggle to learn an new study style. Maybe Bartleby honed his skills in undergrad and found MS1 easier to deal with due to that knowledge.</p>
<p>…I cannot say that UG was a breeze for my D. at all. Very very challenging, but Med. School is much, much more than that. However, she ended up with straight As in UG, but she had very few easy classes. Chemistry was one of them and she ended up to be offerred SI position, but that was an exception and she still prefers anything connected to chemistry, kidneys were one of her favorite at Med. School, she said that nobody else liked it though.</p>
<p>A “minor” means very little to a med school admissions committee.</p>
<p>On the other hand, if your daughter were to do something worthwhile and medically-related during a “gap year,” the committee would certainly take notice.</p>
<p>I’m reading between the lines here…but I’m going to predict that your daughter’s decision will be greatly influenced by how she performs on the MCAT next year:
[ul]Low score: study and re-take MCAT (perhaps multiple times); may consider taking some time off before med school[/ul]</p>
<p>@somemom: I’m out of school now (no residency)…doing research.</p>
<p>@MiamiDAP: Where did your daughter do her undergrad? What was her major?
For the record, I don’t see there being a big contradiction at all between saying something is easy…and in the next breath saying that it was pretty much rote memorization.</p>
<p>Memorization is not necessarily hard, I have heard it is learning how to memorize the sheer quantity they throw at you in med school is hard. And it takes time, lots of time, more than some students were accustomed to using for studies.</p>
<p>Bartleby,</p>
<p>The Harvard undergrad experience in terms of academic rigor isn’t that different from Brown, and I agree with you that conceptually, the coursework in undergrad was more difficult than med school but the volume was less and, as Miami is saying, for me wrapping my head around a difficult concept takes less time than memorizing a list of drugs and side effects. I like to think of it like this: In college I had many exams that even if they were open book, you probably still wouldn’t get a 100 because you had to go beyond the book. In med school that was never the case except for maybe 1 or two exams.</p>
<p>I could also use my PhD coursework in contrast to my MD course work. I spent far less time studying for my PhD classes and yet the tests were much more difficult (and not P/F) because it involved generating experiments or analyzing data to predict a model or writing out explanations of things (in contrast to multiple choice regurgitation). How difficult or challenging something is speaks very little to how long it takes to do. If I asked you to write out by hand every single number from 1 to 1000000000000000000000000 would you call that a challenging task? It’s certainly not as challenging as your advanced science courses but I bet it would take you a looooooooooong time to finish.</p>
<p>I too worked 10-15 hours/week in a lab as a senior. I don’t know what your “handful” of extracurriculars was but my team required roughly 30 hours/week during the season and my fraternity executive board positions were easily another 25/week. Kaplan was another 10 hours a week. Being VP of my IFC was probably another 5-10 hrs/week. I consider all of that “free time,” and enjoyed it more than studying.</p>
<p>There is moaning and there is accepting that your life has changed (and yes, there were plenty of whiners in my class too). I agree with you that pre-clinical med school years are very manageable, and I often said that if I felt as bad as some of my classmates made their lives sound (which I’m sure they’re exaggerating), I would have slit my wrists. But the fact remains that med school and med school related things take up a larger proportion of your life than school does in college. I no longer have the opportunity to read greek plays or study roman mythology with people who are experts in the field like I did in college. I don’t get to walk 10 ft to the dining hall to eat with my friends who spent the whole day doing stuff totally different than I did. I don’t get to walk around the frat house any more. I don’t have my teammates. My life isn’t over nor am I so swamped I have no room for myself, but the fact is that once you leave college, you can’t go back.</p>
<p>Most of us who were successful in the first two years of med school treated school like a job. You put in your time. Memorize what’s necessary. Regurgitate it on the test. Rinse and repeat. Embarrassingly little reasoning/analysis was demanded of us. This changed quite a bit during the 3rd year. Although we had to learn the algorithmic nature of patient care (more memorization), the clinical work was easier in the sense that one could map pathology/symptomatology/diagnosis/treatment onto a living, breathing person. The best part about it was that we helped “the team” manage the patient load (teamwork!) and, in certain instances, helped patients get better. It was a lot of fun.</p>
<p>It’s certainly true that, in the first two years, there’s a lot of data to be absorbed – kind of like drinking from a firehose. I took a straightforward approach. I’d simply ask our professors what we needed to memorize for the test. At office hours, they were surprisingly forthcoming and helpful.</p>
<p>There was one girl in our class who had an ability approximating photographic memory. (Remarkable person in other ways as well. She was an incredible pianist, and she played the bass guitar surprisingly well.) She didn’t spend much time studying…yet all that “trivia” was accessible at test time. It was really fun studying with her. She was a machine! On several occasions, she helped clarify my notes when they were illegible. :-)</p>
<p>@i<em>wanna</em>be_Brown:
To be honest, I have no idea what the undergrad experience is like at Brown. Based on what you’ve written, I have to say that our academic experiences in college were very different. Since you played a varsity sport and dedicated a large chunk of your life to frat leadership, I think it’s safe to say that your academic/extracurricular-balance differed greatly from mine. Playing a varsity sport in college is a significant time commitment. I felt bad for many of the student-athletes whom I tutored in college. They didn’t have as much time to enroll in interesting classes or take advantage of the other educational opportunities on campus. For their core curriculum classes, they ended up enrolling in “guts” rather than other courses that promised to be more interesting (but also more work).</p>
<p>My Ph.D. in-class coursework was minimal. The department gave us credit for pre-clinical med school courses to help streamline our Ph.D. training. The tests in the courses I was required to take were kind of a joke. The journal club-style classes were fun, though. The vast majority of the work in grad school was in the lab, doing experiments, playing with histological samples, futzing with the microscope, submitting papers, giving talks, attending talks, cussing at the foreign post-doc who broke the cryostat, seeing whether ketchup or mustard migrates faster through a 10% polyacrylamide gel, etc.</p>
<p>I understand what you’re saying about a task taking a long time to complete. Writing all the numbers between 1 and 1x10^24 is not difficult; it’s rather pointless and very annoying. Although I acknowledge the need for building up a fund of knowledge in the pre-clinical years, there were many times I wished that I could have skipped the first year of it.</p>
<p>
Not many people have an ability approximating photographic memory. Asking them to absorb huge amount of information within an unreasonably short time could be a challenging task for them.</p>
<p>DS is now in his preclinical years. According to him, for some materials for preparing STEP-1, it is often the case that almost every sentence in the test-prep materials is important and need to be memorized/internalized one sentence at a time (if you set your target score high.) There are really not many “short-cuts” you can take such that if you conceptualize something important, you could deduce most of others – like what you could possibly do in some basic physics or chemistry course at the UG level.</p>
<p>DS once made a comment that you still learn sciences in your first two years in med school. But for whatever reason it may be (he did not elaborate), they made the students learn it in a “bad” way. One of the MDs once posted here that it may be done out of necessity (her speculation); otherwise the length of med school education, including the clinical years, may become well too long. (The debt level of the student is already too high.)</p>
<p>Bartleby. Thank you for joining in. I find the discussion fascinating. Of, course y’all have meandered so far off course the OP is unrecognizable…but heck. Don’t that always happen? lol </p>
<p>D’s experience as a hard science major was that other than sheer volume , pre-clinical was just not that difficult. (And in some cases dumbed down/limited from her UG.) She survived but she’s a machine. In her case, a combine. She just mows it down, processes it into orderly form, and spits it into the truck. 
MS3? I simply don’t know how an un-fit, less than perfectly healthy person could survive. It is a bear. Still, nothing that requires genius IQ or other-wordly imagination or conceptual skills. </p>
<p>(Aside: Doesn’t it start making sense to y’all? Med school is not much theory, it’s mostly practice. The MCAT doesn’t test for the greatest knowledge in the test areas, just basic competence and great stamina… and the ability to read and learn on the fly. </p>
<p>This conversation reminds me a little of the 3 drop outs from my law school class. None failed. Two left because they realized that they were more interested in concepts of jurisprudence and ethics than Rule 106 of the Texas Rules of Civil Procedure or the UCC. One went off to International Relations , the other to the seminary. The third fella left because he liked flying for the USMC more than the law.;)).</p>
<p>Now, back to the OP. Graduating in 3 years IMO is something they will care about. If by “they” we mean “some” and by “care” we mean “gonna be looking at it and wondering ‘why did she do that?’” Especially if it makes the student younger (which is not the OP’s kid’s case).</p>
<p>In no instance imaginable will it be a positive. It doesn’t show great tenacity or intellect. Just shows she crammed 4 years into 3. In Texas, it is not at all un-common for a high school senior (through AP and dual-credit) to have second-semester soph standing as an entering freshman.</p>
<p>For what it’s worth, when I served as a student representative on the M.D./Ph.D. and med school admissions committees, I never heard a committee member criticize an applicant for graduating in 3 years specifically. Things may be different at other institutions.</p>
<p>The only problem I see with graduating in 3 years is that it leaves the applicant less time in college to impress the admissions committee with his/her body of work. What’s there (in the applicant’s file) needs to be excellent.</p>
<p>@mcat2: I never said that, in order to be successful in med school, one needs a photographic memory. The example I provided was that of an outlier, a gifted classmate of mine. With her ability, she did great on the tests. There were lots of us (limited by “normal” memories) who did well by putting in the time, triaging the important stuff, memorizing the necessary stuff, and regurgitating it on demand. Not difficult really.</p>
<p>The “shortcut” to absorbing info in med school is caring for a living, breathing patient who either has pathology that you’re studying or has pathology that you’re willing to study. At least that’s how the clinically relevant material got burned into my brain. The first patient I encountered with a helminth infection…inspired me to learn the differential for eosinophilia, the various types of parasitic worms, what it does to the immune system, treatment, side effects of the meds, etc. I feel very strongly that students should have quality clinical interactions as early as possible during medical training. The fall term of the first year isn’t too early.</p>
<p>FYI, the STEP-1 review materials have, by design, a high density of frequently tested info. They’re review books. All the fat has been trimmed off. Presumably, your son was already taught the same material within his med school’s curriculum, so the material shouldn’t be unfamiliar at all.</p>
<p>With regard to how med schools teach students…
So long as the med school class is populated with smart and highly motivated individuals (not the case at all schools), I’m a big fan of the problem-based learning approach – small groups, presentations, look up stuff on your own, etc. Planting your butt in a seat for 6-8 hours a day with a professor talking at you simply isn’t effective. The reasons that many med schools take this broken approach include: fear of change, bias towards tradition, and the increased work they’d have to do to develop new curricula. </p>
<p>@curmudgeon: Thanks for sharing your daughter’s experience. It’s nice to know that others had a similar experience.</p>
<p>Bartleby,</p>
<p>Did they praise the students for finishing in 3? Was it seen as a positive?</p>
<p>@i<em>wanna</em>be_Brown: Neither positive nor negative.</p>
<p>The OP’s daughter should know, however, that many of the other applicants will have an extra year of grades, upper-level classes, volunteering, and research. Some applicants will have a lot more than that.</p>
<p>I’m sure that her pre-med adviser has told her as much.</p>
<p>@Bartleby007, Thanks for sharing your experiences with us. I heard that although their students do not plant their butt in the class room for a long time, many plant their butt in the library studying for a long time.</p>
<p>DS said one of the MD/PhD students in his class studies especially hard before each class (I think slightly more than 10% of the students are MD/PhD students.), and tends to ask questions in class more often than others. DS thinks she helped other students learning by asking these questions. But some other students do not appreciate it. I guess everybody’s learning style is different.</p>