Doctors-to-be Are Not Attending Class

Ever since mid-first year, I decided that I was a non-lecture attender. Our lectures normally take place in the morning, and we can expect a solid 4 hours worth. Before the days of my remote lecture-watching, I found myself either falling asleep or having my mind wander at about the 2-hour mark. It's difficult for me to stay focused for large spans of time, and it got to the point that I didn't retain any of the information from the lecture I had just attended.

With the wonderful technology of class capture, I'm now able to wake up at a time I deem appropriate and set my own schedule for when I am to learn the lecture materials for the day. If an unfamiliar term comes up, I can pause the video and not worry about missing anything. And for someone like me, who likes to supplement lecture materials with First Aid or additional texts, I can do so during the lecture on the same topic instead of having to sit through all 4 hours before annotating my notes.

A lot of medical school is about learning about how you learn the best; luckily, the majority of our professors and faculty are aware of this, so we are encouraged to experiment with varying studying techniques to see which ones best fit. I did happen to physically step into a lecture hall recently and found that more than half of my fellow med student colleagues have decided that they also studied better when watching lectures remotely. I personally see tons of benefits from doing so, but what would the general public think if they knew that their future doctors are not attending lectures?

During my undergrad years, there was a stigma associated with not attending class. You were viewed as the slacker if you weren't a regular attendee; this was at a time that there were class lecture recording services available. The unfortunate fact is that lectures tend to present materials in a unidimensional manner, and it is difficult to cater to a variety of learning styles this way. I believe that students should be able to learn however they feel is best suited to their needs and making certain lectures non-mandatory is one approach to doing so.

Has this stigma of not attending class changed? Do you go to class? How do you feel about med students not physically attending lectures? I'd love to know what you think!

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Well, at first it depends on the subject, and the lecturer, if both are interesting or not.
Second, not all med schools are aware of the importance of helping people to understand better, quickly and in an efficient way.
In my humble opinion, not attending classes is a good thing for the medical student, depending on :
- The formation provided by the Med School
- If the ''doctor-to-be'' masters auto didacticism, critical reading, and looking for relevant and updated articles/courses/references
- And if the lecturer deserves an attendance or not.
But, nobody is perfect, being a MedStudent is knowing that we know nothing, and we should at least, for some subjects, attend courses to to get some guidelines, and things to look for on internet (whether guided by curiosity or to verify an information).
At last, the general public doesn't need to know whether their physician attended class or not, as we can find in our hospitals good physicians who learnt to love medicine in their last years, and didn't attend classes, as we can find bad physicians who attended every class since their early years.