How hard is medicine compared to Year 12 VCE

[doingvce]

Hi,
I'm doing my VTAC prefs soon, and I like the idea of being a doctor.
However I just want to know what the course workload/stress of the medical course is like compared to VCE Year 12. How hard is it to manitain a decent grade? How much facts do you have to absorb? What's the hardest aspect of the course? How many contact hours are there? etc.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

[vexx]

Hi,
I'm doing my VTAC prefs soon, and I like the idea of being a doctor.
However I just want to know what the course workload/stress of the medical course is like compared to VCE Year 12. How hard is it to manitain a decent grade? How much facts do you have to absorb? What's the hardest aspect of the course? How many contact hours are there? etc.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

I'm not doing medicine, maybe someone who is can write about their experience..
 but i know that there is a lot more that needs to be 'absorbed' than in year 12, and it is quite difficult (depending on the person) to get a decent grade. there is a huge amount of coursework and most people just strive to pass their course which can be difficult in itself. it all depends on the person you are really. i've heard the contact hours are 25~ish first year and go up to 30, then sometimes up to 40 in the later years.

Someone doing medicine may need to correct me?

Also, try www.medstudentsonline.com -- there is a lot of info discussed there in relation to what you may want to know.

[d0minicz]

hard enough getting in...

[mark_alec]

It is not easy. Consider 25+ hours a week, 8am starts, endless anatomy to learn... I'll let shinny or polky explain more.

[shinny]

Hi,
I'm doing my VTAC prefs soon, and I like the idea of being a doctor.
However I just want to know what the course workload/stress of the medical course is like compared to VCE Year 12. How hard is it to manitain a decent grade? How much facts do you have to absorb? What's the hardest aspect of the course? How many contact hours are there? etc.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

The difficulty of the course really varies depending on what you want to learn, and to what extent. Given that the exam I just had consisted of 88 MCQs and just 1 short answer question within 3 hours (I finished 80% of it in the first hour), you can work out a few things from this:
1. Given that it's all MCQs, you don't need to memorise anything; just understand it. This saves a lot of time compared to VCE where you pretty much rote learn every minor detail, and this takes ALOT longer than merely understanding concepts from reading them once or twice and moving on.
2. You don't need to speed train, and you've got plenty of time to try and recall things or even work things out.
In terms of maintaining a 'decent' grade, it really depends what you mean, and definitely depends on the person. Some people just absorb things easier, and are naturally just better at doing exams. In terms of the amount of facts, well, there's a lot. This is pretty much the reason why aiming to pass isn't too bad, because you just read over everything and hopefully vaguely recall the details in the exam, whilst aiming to do really well consists of rote learning insane amounts of facts. This would particularly be true in anatomy where you've got endless amounts of facts to learn. I'd say the hardest aspect of the course is really just knowing when to stop studying really. There's always going to be something to learn, but knowing where to draw the line will help to maintain your stress levels between 'ohshitidon'tknowanythingandihaveanexamtomorrow' and excessive work stress. Contact hours vary quite a lot between 20-30ish, but add up to much more because of stuff like 5 hour breaks and such.

[polky]

The concepts aren't hard, and it is sufficient to understand the concepts to pass, but knowing the details to get a high score is tough - memorising countless drug names, anatomical terms, self-care facts, developmental theories etc on the off-chance that it'll be on the exam.

The hardest aspect of the course, IMO, is memorising or understanding things in a manner that will serve you well in the future.  The whole point of our course is to be good doctors, and there's no real point memorising all this stuff in first year that is unimportant or you will eventually forget when you actually start practicing.  So learning the information with the long term view of retaining it for the future rather than just to pass the upcoming exam is the most difficult.  (I tend to cram facts then forget them after the exam, like for VCE History.  It depends on your learning style.) Which is why there is a heavy emphasis on clinical applications in the course, I guess.  You tend to get bogged down by all the minuscule details that it's easy to lose sight of the big picture. (especially for anatomy)

As for your other questions regarding contact hours, 25ish is my approximation, but things like crazy illogical 5-hour breaks, extra reading/study and hanging around the anatomy museum would probably up that figure.

[doingvce]

thanks for the replies everyone
so i guess the main thing is selecting how much you want to learn (i tend to go overboard with my subjects atm and it takes ages trying to cover every detail thoroughly)
in terms of "decent" grade i just want to know how much you have to put in to maintain a "distinction weighted average mark (70 per cent)" because my careers teacher encouraged me to apply for scholarships through vtac and this is one of ones i'm interested in
so overall, with your own personal experiences would say you found ur yr 12 "harder" or ur 1st year of med (or how would you compare the 2)
thanks

[shinny]

1st year of med is definitely easier. In terms of keeping a 70%, it shouldn't be that difficult considering that you can get in in the first place. You can do that simply by getting a rough overview of everything as stated above, rather than straight memorisation. Keep in mind that I haven't been in 2nd year yet, and 1st year med is notorious for being easy, and 2nd year is notorious for being the hardest year of med.

[anconeous]

Med is very cruisey at monash for the first year, second semester a little more challenging

Self directed learning is the biggest challenge about medicine and often one that people fail given that they still expect tutorials on all examinable content, and are still on VCE spoon-feed mode. Contact hours are not as greulling as they once were and alot of "softer" content such as sociology and complimentary medicine make up a large part of most of a given weeks timetable

it gets, like any course, progressively more difficult, but at hospital placements the amount of time you put in is totally dependent on you. Getting 70% or above on exams is not majorly difficult and will depend on your work ethic, like any other cours.

oh, 4th year is the hardest year of the course, by far