Advice for first year medical students
1. Thank you for filling out this questionnaire. Now that you’ve completed the first year of medical school, what advice would you give the incoming MS1s who are about to start this year? You can fill out this survey as many times as you wish, so come back often to share your piece of advice!
I would really recommend trying out a few different styles of studying early on in the year to find the style that works best for you. The style that got you through undergrad might still work best but you’ll have to adjust to the way courses are taught. For example, lecturers will cover most of the required/testable material in their lectures but may skip over some things which are in the syllabus and that you’re still required to know. As such you might not be able to rely only on lecture as your source of information. The syllabus will usually contain everything you need to know, and the objectives, though often broad and vague, are meant to cover the testable, take-home points of each lecture. Try early on to establish a stable routine that allows for you to have a dedicated block of time studying as well as time for yourself. The exams are not so difficult that you need to know every last detail so if you find yourself too busy to take a night off to relax and have fun with friends then you are probably studying too hard.
2. What is your Myers-Briggs personality type? Extroverted vs Introverted Sensing vs Intuitive Thinking vs Feeling Judging vs Perceiving Ex. ENFP
INTJ
3. What equipment did you purchase? Eg. stethoscope, sphygmamometer, tuning fork, etc.
stethoscope(cardio 3) BP cuff tuning fork (128) reflex hammer (queens) penlight
4. What do you wish someone had told you when you first started your first year? What would you do differently if you could do it all over again?
No Response
5. Please comment on each topic below:
Whom to go to if you need help – advisory college mentors, 2nd year students
6. How did you study for small group? What’s the best way to prepare for small group and to do well in small group?
This kind of depends on your small group and what style ends up working well for your group. The facilitators also dictate this a bit too. In the beginning I would recommend coming to each session prepared which means having read over the material and answered all the questions as best you can in a reasonable amount of time. Later on in the year you might find that your facilitator/group works better if you just read over the case/questions and come ready to share your knowledge without having necessarily gone through each question in detail. Again, this depends on your group’s dynamics and what pace you go through the cases.
7. What resources (books, websites, etc) did you use for:
Anatomy – Netters, however I didn’t use it nearly as much as I thought I would and it would probably have sufficed to only rely on syllabus figured and powerpoints from anatomy lecture. This is a personal preference because some people need the extra material to study. Personally I found Netters to contain way more detail than we actually needed to know and as such the diagrams had overly labeled figures which appeared more confusing than the lecture versions of the same figures.
Pathology – Robbins basic pathology- Dr. Abbas really recommends buying this book because the boards pull a lot of questions form here. I think this book is a good resource to have if you are interested in learning more detail but in general I felt the info we needed to know was easily found in path lectures and labs and that this book covers way more than we’ll ever need to know as medical students. I got through most of the year without it and once I got it I only needed it a couple more times.
Neurology – Blumenfeld- This book is highly touted by the BMB faculty and I think it’s quite a shame. The BMB facullty will not put Blumenfeld figures in your sylllabus and will reference them because they assume you will buy it. Honestly every figure you need from blumenfeld can be found in lecture powerpoints.
Advice for first year medical students
