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How Is Life For Fourth Year Medical Students?

Discussion in 'Medical Students Cafe' started by Dr.Scorpiowoman, Jan 15, 2019.

  1. Dr.Scorpiowoman

    Dr.Scorpiowoman Golden Member

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    This question was originally posted on Quora.com and was answered by Paul Bolin, M.D. (physician)

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    Assuming you are referring to the U.S./Canadian four-year model. Fourth-year medical students are in the final year of their medical school training prior to graduation. Different medical students and graduates will give you different answers if you ask them which year they thought was the hardest or most stressful. Almost uniformly, I would suppose, if you asked them which year was least stressful or “easy”, they would say fourth year. I would agree with this.

    For me, fourth year began after 48 consecutive weeks (minus 2 for Christmas/New Year’s) of intense third-year rotations. By the time I started fourth year, I had passed all my shelf exams and the only thing I had left to do was take USMLE Steps 2 CK (written) and 2 CS (practical). I would say those two things were the most stressful. The other major part of fourth year was residency interviews. This was hardly a problem though. At my school, we were required only to do 32 total weeks of electives, with 8 weeks scheduled for vacation or residency interviews. Even if you couldn’t coordinate your weeks off with your residency interviews, it was pretty easy to get time off for it. Fourth-year electives were a lot less stressful than the core rotations from third year.

    So, I would say life is pretty good. It’s the calm before the storm when residency starts.

    Hope that helps to answer your question,

    Dr. Paul

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