Picking a Medical School: Curriculum Structures

Many schools out of the 125 can be lumped into the "traditional" format category.
While they may vary, they have one things in common:

These traditional type schools are categorized in this way due to how the four years of your med school experienced are scheduled out.

In the traditional curriculum, your first two years in medical school will be spent almost solely in the classroom. There you will learn pathology, anatomy, biochemistry, etc. This means that in the first wo years you will have limited contact with actual patients.

In the second two years, you will go directly to the wards to do clinical work. This is where you will put everything you learned in the past two years into action.

In the third year, you will be rotating times in the "core specialties" such as internal medicine, surgery, ob/gyn, and pediatrics. This year will also be your opportunity to figure out which specialty you are most interested in.

This will be important in your fourth year, where you will be picking rotations that focus on the specialties you are most interested in going into. You will be finishing all of your prerequisites and doing internships during this year, as well as interviewing for your spot in a residency program.

This type of format has only been around since about the 1980s. In this type of format, it is believed that early patient contact is integral to the making of a "new" doctor.These types of schools focus on getting their students around patients from day one.

Another difference in the integrated medical school format is the way the material is broken up. Many of these schools choose to teach information by breaking it up into body systems.

For the people who choose the integrated format, they believe that it is easier to learn all about a body system before moving on to the next one and breaking information up into "categories."

In the schools that use the integrated format, there are almost no formal lectures. Instead, students learn in small groups. Each group is presented with a clinical scenario that they have to do research on and ultimately teach/present to the class.

This often means that you are pushed to learn on your own and to begin thinking the way working doctors do.

Of course, the line between the traditional and integrated formats is not black and white.

Now that you know the two main categories of schools, it is up to you to look into the approach the schools that you are interested use. You will find that there will be a wide array of approaches.

Mainly, consider the environment in which you learn best. Also consider your personality and personal preferences.

Keep in mind that you will learn, one way or another, the same material as every other doctor so think about how you want to spend 4 years of your life learning.