☀️How to Summer Smarter 😎 Part 4- Enjoy your summer! But if you do have to study...
This will likely be the countdown to one of the last few summer vacations you will ever have; life as a graduate student and as a working adult is rough. Spend time with friends; go on a vacation, if you can afford it; enjoy life.
But if you do have to study, don't buy anything just yet; get a copy of First Aid, Guyton & Hall's Physiology, Board Review Physiology, or Robbins Pathology from your local library if they have one, or any other medical textbook. Ensure that you've got just some basics down (such as glucose metabolism, what each cell type is and its general properties, the basics of embryology and histology...), and then trust that your school's curriculum will teach you everything you need to know. It was actually surprisingly difficult to come up with a list of things that are universally applicable to the human body, which is part of what makes studying before medical school difficult. That, combined with how each school organizes their curriculum differently, makes it difficult to give universal advice about what to studying or for you to receive it; if I tell you that you should learn microbiology but your curriculum doesn't cover it until the second semester and then sprinkles it in throughout the rest of the year, then you might forget most things by the time it comes back up.
Studying before medical school can help out, but it's hard to explain just how much of a shock it is to go from studying for college or the MCAT to studying for medical school. Unless you've been regimented about your studying and have dedicated at least 40 hours per week to studying, it'll be information overload for a while until you figure out what to do. There's so much material and it comes at you so quickly that it's quite like drinking water from a firehose - but again, you've earned the privilege to attend your school. Take it day by day, and you'll find success before you know it.
If you've reached the end here, congratulations! That was a lot to get through, but it'll definitely help throughout your journey. If you have any questions, let me know in the comments below!
Best of luck going forward :)