"You should not be sleeping more than 5 hours per night" - Student Services Director

[jw3600]

Don't be obtuse. You know that once you ID his school it isn't difficult for the school to find his thread and figure out who the student is, especially since he was military and has given away other info.

My school is routinely on SDN, supposedly to address interviewee questions but I'm skeptical. If we don't want to turn this forum into a place where med students don't post at all for fear of their home program discovering them, leave it alone. If you have questions for OP you can always PM him.

Relax. I said I didn't read every one of his posts so I didn't know how many identifiers he had given. If you are gonna bitch about your school in very specific way you should probably make a new account. Regardless this school should 100% be outed.

---

Members don't see this ad.

 

[Affiche]

View attachment 214669
Relax. I said I didn't read every one of his posts so I didn't know how many identifiers he had given. If you are gonna bitch about your school in very specific way you should probably make a new account. Regardless this school should 100% be outed.

Feel free to make a helpful thread listing the schools with debilitating attendance policies. This provides pre-meds with all the info they're complaining for without adversely affecting the students at those schools.

 

[Goro]

Feel free to make a helpful thread listing the schools with debilitating attendance policies. This provides pre-meds with all the info they're complaining for without adversely affecting the students at those schools.

 

[Mr Roboto]

Don't be obtuse. You know that once you ID his school it isn't difficult for the school to find his thread and figure out who the student is, especially since he was military and has given away other info.

My school is routinely on SDN, supposedly to address interviewee questions but I'm skeptical. If we don't want to turn this forum into a place where med students don't post at all for fear of their home program discovering them, leave it alone. If you have questions for OP you can always PM him.

As if the school wouldn't recognize their own attendance policy?

 

[Affiche]

As if the school wouldn't recognize their own attendance policy?

There are multiple schools with the same policy.

Enough derailing.

 

[jw3600]

There are multiple schools with the same policy.

Enough derailing.

...isn't the point of the thread about ridiculous school policies and how the school gives bad advice about how to deal with it?

 

[jw3600]

Right...the thread is about how to deal with attendance policies. That doesn't require the name of OP's school. If you have any advice to share, please do so. You can quit quoting me.

I quoted and liked your post. You're quite a peach.

 

[BroDoc22]

DO school?


Sent from my iPad using SDN mobile

 

[Crayola227]

DO school?


Sent from my iPad using SDN mobile

OP never said, and aside from trying to identify his particular school, isn't important to the thread. It's already been addressed that there are MD and DO schools with similar policies, so it is not a DO vs MD school issue.

 

[wholeheartedly]

let's reroute the discussion back to giving the OP advice on how to get through the block

 

[hello1234!]

I personally find the taking pics for attendance to be kind of creepy and intrusive.... that is not done in high school or college, so then why do they think it's ok to treat med students like this... ...

 

[hello1234!]

best thing to do though is to keep a positive attitude, and remember that med school will be done with soon, I almost never think about my life as a med student now... ... also, I slept less and eat terribly during med school and gained weight and I regret this (don't do what I did), make your health a priority.

 

[wholeheartedly]

I think this degree of supervision really goes against the idea of helping med students become mature life ling learners. I mean it does suck when you put a bunch of time and effort into prepping a lecture and a bunch of people don't show and of those that do, a bunch aren't paying attention. But this is overkill. Learning beyond med school is going to come in much different formats.

 

[BeddingfieldMD]

This is not accurate over the long haul. Sure, there are times in med school and residency when you'll get only five hours per night of sleep or less. But over time, the body will demand the sleep you need. If you naturally need around eight hours of sleep each night (as most people do), you won't be able to "force" yourself to only sleep five hours for four years.

That said, your 14-hour figure may not be too unreasonable. I definitely remember periods of med school where I basically had time for nothing but school-related activities.


Sent from my iPhone using SDN mobile

 

[SpartanWolverine]

It sounds like you're doing well in school overall. Yes, the attendance policy sucks and I don't envy your required schedule. But you should be able to (more than) effectively learn four hours of material between attending the lecture and studying 5.5 hours at night. I expect that you were originally on the right track and that you could likely study more efficiently; I don't think sleep is to blame. Are there other/more senior people at the guidance center you could talk to? Strategies to more efficiently review the material might be beneficial.

 

[Azete]

It sounds like you're doing well in school overall. Yes, the attendance policy sucks and I don't envy your required schedule. But you should be able to (more than) effectively learn four hours of material between attending the lecture and studying 5.5 hours at night. I expect that you were originally on the right track and that you could likely study more efficiently; I don't think sleep is to blame. Are there other/more senior people at the guidance center you could talk to? Strategies to more efficiently review the material might be beneficial.

From what I gathered, I don't think the issue is him getting through the material his school presents. I think he's saying the lectures at his school suck, and he doesn't have enough time to study the slides in addition to actually learning the material via outside resources.

I mean he was getting good grades prior to this, so I don't think his study methods really need any refinement.

 

[Dr Tony T. Chopper]

So here's an executive summary of my situation:
-I attend a school with mandatory attendance
-This block is particularly dense material
-Our lectures are very poorly structured, to the point where I can only reasonably learn from outside resources
-Even with good time management, I have been unable to find enough hours in a day to study all of our school's lectures and find any spare time for outside resources
-I went to our school's guidance center for some advice, and they identified my sleeping hours as the problem

I'm former military, so I'm asleep by 10pm and awake by 5am. I usually exercise in the morning, review material for an hour, and make a good breakfast before leaving for class (starts at 8am). Our lectures are mandatory and run until 4pm (including labs) on most days. Headphones in class are not allowed.

By the time I get home at ~4:30pm, I dive right into studying and 5.5 hours is just not enough time for me to get through 4 lectures of material and eat dinner. I've tried pre-studying slides prior to class, to get more out of class time, but I've found our lectures to be very disorganized and difficult to follow.

To this point I have been getting decent grades, typically in the low A or high B range, but I'm struggling this block and I find it difficult to believe that allocating ~14 hours per day to med school is not enough to comfortably get through the material. So I went to the guidance center to see if they could identify any flaws in my study habits, and they recommend I go to sleep two hours later because it's unreasonable to expect to get 7 hours of sleep per night as a medical student.

Would you all say their assessment is accurate? And if anyone has any additional recommendations I would love to hear them.

That's the same caliber of advice that premeds advisors give lol I get a full 8 hrs sleep almost every night and have been doing well in school. It's not how many hours you have, but what methods you are using to accelerate through as many passes as you can in one day.

 

[Stagg737]

As a general rule of thumb, I think the best advice anyone will find as to how to succeed in a specific school's curriculum is from people at that school. Seeing as the counselors at OP's school seem to be *****s, my suggestion would be to seek out some of the upperclassman and ask how they got through their more difficult sections. No one is going to be able to give advice as valid as someone who has been through the exact same thing.

 

[jw3600]

As a general rule of thumb, I think the best advice anyone will find as to how to succeed in a specific school's curriculum is from people at that school. Seeing as the counselors at OP's school seem to be *****s, my suggestion would be to seek out some of the upperclassman and ask how they got through their more difficult sections. No one is going to be able to give advice as valid as someone who has been through the exact same thing.

Not just the counselors but the administrators as well. Whoever set that schedule up needs to be 86-ed immediately. It's bad for the students academically and the school commercially.