<p>i've been taking premed classes, and i've found that i absolutely hate the lab portions of these classes. i'm wondering, isn't medicine kind of of just like one big lab?</p>
<p>i know this is a very stupid question, but u know how the premed reqs have the science classes w/ labs? those aren’t 2 separate classes right? the labs are in the regular classes like HS and for that matter any other school?</p>
<p>whether the lab is a part of the lecture or not varies widely from school to school and even from department to department</p>
<p>In other words, it doesn’t matter. There is a place on the AMCAS to indicate whether the lab was part of the lecture course or whether it’s a separate course.</p>
<p>Depends on what you hate about the labs. </p>
<p>Running multiple trials? Knowing or not knowing what the hell is going on? Perceived irrelevancy? Time consuming course where you don’t feel like you learn anything? Writing lab reports?</p>
<p>If you can label why you hate the labs, then I could have a better idea if medicine is what you think it is, and be able to tell you what to expect.</p>
<p>i think the thing i dislike the most is the way that it’s so meticulous</p>
<p>i don’t know.. it just gets really tedious for me</p>
<p>wait, so if the lab isn’t part of the lecture class, would that mean i would have to take up another period w/ the lab portion of the class?</p>
<p>Is that not obvious?</p>
<p>i would want to take those 2 things concurrently right? so does that mean some less important classes like GEs need to be taken later? how many classes are in a typical pre-med’s schedule?</p>
<p>Depends on what school they go to. And generally at most schools labs are 3 or 4 hours once a week - and count as 1 Credit Hour. Occasionally there might be a 1 hour/wk lecture component to expressly go over what the experiment entails/what you’re supposed to learn from it. </p>
<p>For example:</p>
<p>My Gen chem class was 4 hours, 3 from the lecture and 1 from the Lab, but you only signed up for one major course number and two extra sections. It was Chem 109, Chem 109L (for the lab), and Chem109R (for the recitation section - some schools call these discussion or quiz groups). You had to sign up for all three sections in order to take any of them.</p>
<p>My Organic Chem class was Chem 251 and was 3 hours - it was only the lecture. Signing up for the lab required you to sign up for Chem 253 and was 1 hour. You could sign up for these independently. The lab/lecture didn’t really correspond that well.</p>
<p>My Genetics class was BIOS 301. It was the lecture and worth 3 credit hours.
The Genetics Lab was BIOS 307 and included a lecture that everyone took at the same time (Friday afternoon at 2:30, it was awful, but it was helpful in explaining what the experiment was going to be, and why it worked, and how it supposed to work…and then a bunch of us went to the bars immediately after class), and then you signed up for the lab section time that fit your schedule. BIOS 307 was worth 2 hours because of the lecture. I actually took Genetics lecture spring of my junior year, but didn’t take the lab course until the next semester.</p>
<p>so how do you think medical work compares to labwork in terms of tediousness?</p>
<p>Well…I mean there are various things in medicine that are tedious, but tedious is a very subjective term. Many things can be repetitive and must be done in a meticulous manner, but they’re only tedious when you don’t like doing them or you don’t see the point. It’s hard to say if you’ll necessarily feel like doing medically related things for your patient will be tedious…</p>
<p>For example - because I just got off my peds rotation - there are some people who think the idea of well baby and well child checks is incredibly tedious - you do the same exam, look for the same things that are specific to each age, give the same talks to parents and so on. But other people, including yours truly to a certain extent (I’m a fan of well baby checks, I think they’re really fun), find them a great thing, and derive a lot of enjoyment on seeing kids develop and helping parents help their kids.</p>
<p>Likewise, other people get tired of dealing with adults who have high blood pressure, hyperlipidemia, cardiovascular disease and diabetes who won’t quit smoking and won’t check they’re blood sugars. </p>
<p>Other folks, like one of my roommates, finds the sequence and process of pathology and preparing specimens for analysis comforting, while I would think it incredibly boring.</p>
<p>Other people can sit in the darkened caves of radiology every day, stare at chest x-rays over and over again, and never get bored. </p>
<p>As my Peds clerkship director said last week in her closing remarks, everyone is looking for variety in their medical careers, but every specialty has their 6-10 bread and butter cases that you’re going to spend 80% of your career dealing with. The trick is to find the specialty with the 8 problems that you’re not going to be completely angry about being woken up at 3am on a Tuesday night to deal with.</p>
<p>so if i understand u correctly BRM, i have my typical lecture class multiple times a week, and then like maybe once a week i go to my lab class?
so in the end, these will add up to the one yr of the science?</p>
<p>If you take them for one year, they will add up to one year.</p>
<p>“As my Peds clerkship director said last week in her closing remarks, everyone is looking for variety in their medical careers, but every specialty has their 6-10 bread and butter cases that you’re going to spend 80% of your career dealing with. The trick is to find the specialty with the 8 problems that you’re not going to be completely angry about being woken up at 3am on a Tuesday night to deal with.”</p>
<p>My father is a neurologist and I said to him that it must be interesting to deal with parkinson’s disease, myasthenia gravis, stroke, ALS etc… He replied that for every one of those diseases he sees 20 migraine patients and 10 seizure patients; and old joke among neurologists is “no one ever dies of a migraine, and if they do, it’s okay”. There is tedium in all fields of medicine.</p>
<p>bigred, when you were an undergrad, what did you think of your lab classes?</p>
<p>Some I liked, some I hated. </p>
<p>As a frosh, one of my friends determined that our motto for gen chem lab should be “half ass it and go home”. That was about right. </p>
<p>Organic lab, better because the TA’s were better, but the experiments were more boring, but it at least looked cool b/c we had a whole variety of glassware set up and such. </p>
<p>My biodiversity lab was pretty awful, but that class was awful so it wasn’t a surprise. </p>
<p>My genetics lab I enjoyed a lot. It was interesting and felt “high tech” and “sciency”. Plus I had copies of lab reports from previous years so I didn’t have to spend much time doing literature searches for lab reports.</p>
<p>My Ecology and Evolution lab was with friends, and the TA was AWESOME (Masa - my friends and I still talk about how nice he was). It was interesting but I like learning about evolution stuff.</p>
<p>Anatomy lab - I was already accepted to med school after the third week of class, so I pretty much stopped caring. It met twice a week and we were required to spend 3 hours each and every time. I spent most of the time working on crosswords with one of my friends who had also been accepted to med school by that point. One lab period we finished crosswords in the NY Times, USA Today, the LA Times, the campus newspaper, and the local newspaper. It was an accomplishment. Then we’d go out to the bars afterwards on Tuesdays…that was nice.</p>
<p>Physics labs were nice because the experiments were self contained with in the lab time. We didn’t have any homework from the labs, so we just had to finish our experiments, write them up and be done till the next week. I had some good lab partners both semesters - they were probably even more willing than me to falsify data…</p>
<p>Thanks for sharing, Bigredmed. Very helpful!</p>