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How many hours studying would you do per week at medical school?

I know it changes throughout the year, but out of interest what would you say your average is?
Also how many contact hours do you have per week?

Thank you

Reply 1

Democracy

Original post by Jamess_

I know it changes throughout the year, but out of interest what would you say your average is?
Also how many contact hours do you have per week?

Thank you

In terms of contact hours:

Pre-clinical - generally 9-5 Mon to Fri. Occasional afternoon off.

Clinical - depends on the specialty. Some are very good at giving you a timetable for each day or week of your placement, others leave it entirely up to you to decide how much you want to come in and what you want to do. An example of a full clinical day might be going on ward round and helping with ward work from 8 or 9 AM til lunch, then sitting in on an outpatient clinic from 2-5. Though you also need to also factor commuting time into this. Some firms will want you to do some night shifts and weekend work too, but these aren't very frequent (the nights are very useful though imho).

In short, it's all very variable and there's a large degree of flexibility. In the clinical years especially it's up to you to make your own learning.

(edited 7 years ago)

Reply 2

nexttime

Yep very dependent on the individual.

We had about 25 hours of contact time in pre-clinical, but you needed to prepare for tutorials and stuff. The amount of time people spent on that varied between about 5 hours and about 75 (legitimately). The 5 people were those like me who hadn't had to work hard at all for a-levels and were perfectly happy cramming at the last minute to get a pass. The 75 were people who had always spent every evening revising and either just loved medicine and learning, or were so driven they'd be devastated to get anything less than a distinction.

I suspect what you do at a-level would be the best predictor of which camp you'd fall into.

Reply 3

navarre

I generally spend 22 hours a week studying (3rd Year). This is on top of the clinical and academic timetable activites. Clinical activities vary, but for example, on ED week (just done), we were in 9-4 on Thursday and 8-1 on Friday. Academic day is every week, and consists of tutorials and clinical skills that are generally 9-5.

During the couple of weeks run up to exams, however, I may up my time studying to 33 hours. This is also true if we have an essay week.

Reply 4

Pennyarcade

Lol like 5 hours on top of class hours max. Loads of people seem to work 9-5 everyday, which is stupid imo (1st year).

Don't get much contact hours cause I'm at a pbl uni

(edited 7 years ago)

Reply 5

Ghotay

In preclinical we averaged around 23 contact hours a week. On top of that I did about 0-6 hours of extra work in first year, mostly preparing for anatomy sessions. I scraped through the year and had one resit. I don't even remotely endorse the way I did things, but it shows how little work you can do and still pass.

Clinical years is of course a whole different story. Now I have no life

Reply 6

nexttime

Original post by Ghotay

Clinical years is of course a whole different story. Now I have no life

Interesting. For us clinical years were probably about the same number of hours as preclinical but far more interesting and less brain-racking so it felt like a lot less! Fourth year (first clinical year for us) was definitely the least intense and most fun year.

Reply 7

Ghotay

Original post by nexttime

To be fair our first clinical year wasn't so bad. And I've heard final year is pretty chill. Think our course is just structured to cram a lot into 4th year and it's been intense

Reply 8

antonyzac

I haven't started my clinical years yet so can only talk about my pre-clinical hours.

Typically, we'd start at 9 and finish at 5, sometimes 6 in second year. The day usually included 4/5 lectures, with some of those lectures being sociology/how to be a good doctor/ethics etc. Sometimes one of the lectures would be an anatomy lab session or computer-based session instead.

After the day was over, I'd go home and basically revise what I'd learnt for that day, annotate lecture slides with stuff that I needed to expand on, and do some extra reading around things I didn't quite get. That usually took me from 6pm - 12am (with dinner in there somewhere...).

That sounds like a lot, but that method kept me on top of all my work throughout the year; I didn't once fall behind, and when I rarely did because of other commitments or leisure/meeting friends, I was never too far behind to catch back up on the weekend. So I guess the main point is that it really depends on how on-top of things you want to be, and whether you just want to pass or actually excel, but that's for you to figure out :wink:

Reply 9

Whosasking

for the love of god shelve medical school you will be broken you won't have fun you won't get to 'save lives' you won't have any tome for friends and you will want to die

Reply 10

Ghotay

Original post by Whosasking

for the love of god shelve medical school you will be broken you won't have fun you won't get to 'save lives' you won't have any tome for friends and you will want to die

Calm down mate

Reply 11

prospectivemed56

How much time do people spend studying at the weekends, versus other time commitments (societies, friends, sports, arsing around)? Really curious about this for next September - I've been out of the learning game for a bit now, and wasn't very studious when I went to uni the first time round!

Reply 12

Sambo2

Original post by prospectivemed56

I have to say I rarely do extra work outside of hospital except in the run up to exams, where I probably spent two weeks doing 12 hour days. Seemed to work OK though I probably could have done better with more effort.