First Semester of Medical School: Review & Tips
Courses:
Anatomy (every day)
Histology (every day)
Embryology
Ethics
Radiology
Summary:
What a stressful time! I have never had so many emotional break downs in my life! This is not to discourage anyone, but I gotta be real with you. There have been a lot of adjustments. First, moving to a developing country. Second, dealing with such a different style of academics, coming from a background in the arts. Third, figuring out how to find a balance between my academic, physical, and social life. And finally fourth, feeling trapped on my tiny little campus or apartment that was out of the way from most of my classmates.
In the end, I, the lowly arts major, managed to round off the semester with straight As and Bs. Therefore, anything is possible! I’m not going to lie, I totally failed my first embryology exam. This was a shame because the material was so simple! A fairly easy 25 question exam was lost on me because I was so busy worrying about and studying for anatomy and histology. Despite the setback, I was determined to overcome the failure and ended up scoring 94% or higher on my last 3 embryology exams. The most time consuming courses were anatomy and histology. Both were stressful because we had to study for a pair of lecture and lab exams at the end of each month. Our exam weeks went like this: Tuesday - histo lab exam, Wednesday - anatomy lab exam, Friday - histology and embryology lecture exams, Monday - anatomy and ethics lecture exams. Keep in mind, that Monday-Wednesday we still had regular classes, and only 1 full day off (the Thursday) before the rest of the exams. As you can imagine, there was simply no room for cramming.
Tips:
Histology Kaplan videos and BRS book, don’t bother looking for much histology in First Aid, as you'll see everything that you really need to know once you get to microbiology.
This Anatomy YouTube channel will be a life saver for audio-visual learners like myself, as well as Teach Me Anatomy
This Embryology YouTube channel was helpful for the first few blocks, otherwise First Aid is a great resource for sifting through your lecture material and figuring out what you really need to know for Step 1
Ethics can be found in the First Aid behavioural science section, but please, don’t stress about this course…it is very important, but largely common sense!
Originally published 05/09/2015
