Hi,
I am a premed student at the University of Pennsylvania and I was trying to understand what the academic calendar is like i medical school. Google hasn’t been very helpful so I was hoping someone would explain what its like in each year of med school and if possible during residency
@Nupenn97, I think your question would be better answered in a medical school discussion forum like studentdoctor.net.
Or try the med school forum here on CC.
Med school student has little vacation. Most of the time they have to study for the exams of one kind or the other. In residency, their work load is between 60 to 80 hours per week, they use vacation to catch-up sleep.
Just look at the academic calendar for various medical schools. If you are looking for vacation time in med school or during residencies you may want to choose a different career.
There are some scheduled vacations in medical school. Most med schools have a 2 month break after MS1–although some do run on a compressed schedule and don’t have one. Once clinical training starts immediately at the end of MS2, there are no extended breaks. Med students may get a rare 3-day holiday weekend off if they are assigned to an outpatient rotation, and med students may get a week off for the December winter holidays. But that’s about it. MS4 students have a flexible schedule and can schedule blocks of time not on service because they need time off to do residency interviews–but that time off is busy and not for vacation. Depending on when the med school holds graduation, newly minted doctors have 2-6 weeks off before they need to report to their residency sites in mid-June.
Vacation for residents depends upon the terms of their employment contracts. Most residency programs offer 2 weeks paid vacation. A few offer 3 or 4 weeks. However, you cannot simply announce the week before that you want to take vacation. You need to schedule it with your chief resident at the beginning of your employment year (in July). The chief may or may not be able to give you the dates off you want–it depends on the program’s staffing needs and whether other residents have requested the same week off-- and generally you cannot take 2 weeks off in a row. (You miss too much training.)
During the first summer between Year One and Year Two, my son had about 4 weeks off…about mid June to mid July.
During the second summer between Year Two and Year Three, my son only had 2 weeks off.
During the summer between Year Three and Year Four, my son may have only had a few days off.
Some of the above was due to school schedule and some was due to research demands.
During Year Four, son has had bits of time off here and there because of interviews and away rotation. He spent 2 months straight in Calif. One month at an Away Rotation, and then the second month (Nov) had a mix of residency interviews and Thanksgiving break.
Just met my daughter for dinner on Saturday. She is a first year medical student. I think she gets a couple months off this coming summer BUT she is expected to do something during that time. Right now she is considering staying at the school and doing research that involves getting up in the middle of EVERY NIGHT for her summer time off and caring for research animals. I think it might involve more than 60 hours a week of work. She is considering it because she believes the research would be published and this would help her with residency.
There are other options for her that would allow her to take a vacation but it looks like vacationing is taking a back burner for the next few years in her life.
So I agree with the above don’t start planning your vacation.
Many med schools have their academic calendars on the web. However, there are usually 4 calendar tracks…because each class-year’s students have a different time-table. So if a child is a First Year (MS1) now, the correct calendar to follow might be marked as 2020 (for the grad year).