Warning: There are gifs with swear words in this post. Apologies for my vulgarity. Skipping class is very common. First, you’re not learning that fast, they are teaching that fast. The difference is why so many students stop showing up. Time becomes Precious… and some classes waste it. The dirty secret about medical school is this… not every professor is a great teacher, or even a good one. Many, unfortunately, are used to teaching graduate students in sciences, and waste a lot of that Precious. So one day, fed up and angry because you’re doing poorly or never understand that professor or can read that powerpoint verbatim for yourself, you go home, or to the library. And the next day you’re still mad so you do the same thing all day. And suddenly realize you can get through all the lectures in half the time, clarify what you don’t get using Robbins, Pathoma, First Aid and a couple other board prep books you bought out of desperation… …and still have time to triple speed the lecture to figure out what that weird drawing on slide 74 is. (FYI, It was a joke. No one laughed.) Of course, some professors are sensitive and in retaliation for this at some point start doing stuff to “give away” what’s on the exam to the students at lecture, without indicating on the audio. Thus letting the most gunner-tastic people revel in their secret knowledge. And technically a professor violating your school’s honor code, but nobody in Admin cares. But then, those people who you totally helped to understand that RAAS thing a few weeks ago secretly email you and a few other HBLers (HomeBasedLearners, because slang) those “super secret will be on the test” info. And we BLESS THEM, we bless them with food that we cooked because we were at home in our jammies all day and they went to class. Of course, this system only works if you have a non-gunner who goes to class and likes to help others. I knew several, and we all helped each other out. Because when you help someone, they remember it. They will SMILE during an exam when that question pops up that they get RIGHT because you studied together that one time, or you sent an email saying “Hey, this might make this lecture make more sense” Of course, I didn’t skip all the classes. OMT lectures involve lots of visual stuff and demonstrations, histo and pathology and every other professor who uses a laser pointer require your presence to get it. But there were many classes by very lazy professors (ie: just going to read at you for 60 minutes and you can save questions for office hours thanks) who made it possible for me to be more productive at home. Source
