Look it as 1 semester at a time. This is the best way to get through med school.

If you are in the US and planning to attend a US med school, I suggest starting your research at the Association of American Medical Colleges at www.aamc.org

Some schools allow transfering of Medical Credits on a TWO FOR ONE BASIS to Graduate School to apply against both the Masters and Doctorial program.

Thus 20 Credits of MEdical school Work can be transferred (school permitting) as 40 hours of Post Graduate Science Course. Which won’t help you in an English or Math major, but if you want to swtich to BioChemistry it will help a lot.

The first two years is a lot of Biochemistry and other related course, plus seminars and laboratory rounds and even clinical rounds.

It’s about 60% classroom and 40% lab and rounds.

The second two years is advaced studies, usually for a indepenent and group project and clinical and laboratory rounds. About 25% class time and the rest at labs and hospitals and clinics.

A lot depends on if you are taking Research Medicine Clinical Medicine.

In any event you have to do a Research Medicine project. That means you get attached, often in 1st or 2nd year, but certainly by 3rd year to a Research Team doing scutt work.

As an example I talked exentsively with someone invovled in a project at the Veterans Hospital in Westwood that was run by a UCLA Medical School Research scienctist on learning more about why Air Force pilots black out in climbs and even in general.

They designed special flight suits with sensors, wired this up to “black box” recording devices which they put togther (from ready to run sources or even custom made ones) and then the Pilots would fly and they’d analyze the results.

One of the things the were exploring was the effects of jet fuel on the pilots.

There were about 12-15 people on this including Post Doctorate fellows in Research Medicine, pre-doctorate candidates, Medical School students and the main researcher who got the Grant and the Assignment from the Air Force.

They EACH wrote white papers on various aspects as indepdent projects (for their gradaute work) and then there was the master paper with all of them listed. These were published in various journals.

The papers included aspects of how the suit was designed, how the data was collected, how it was anaylized. Then there was the overall view of what they found.

This project took 3 years. So some people got their PH Ds or D.M.s while the project was in operation.

Some used their papers are their Dissertations.

This becomes part of your graduate docket.

Most Medical School students are expected to publish at least one scholarly paper, which is done through an advisor or mentor who helps guide you and helps you get the paper into shape and even helps place it.

As a Medical School student you can be forgiven for missing classes or for leaving clincial rounds for periods of time to participate in active work at the Research Project, but ideally you are supposed to schedule your time, but that isn’t always possible.

You get a fellow student to give you note or even record a class or maybe you get permission to sit in on the class at another time if it’s given more than once.

In the case of this project, someone may have to drive from the UCLA campus in Westwood all way out to where the space shuttle lands, which is like 75 miles. Then you drive back.

Other times it’s to the VA hospital which is only a 35 minute walk from UCLA or a 5 minute car ride.

Other times is just from the main hospital to the chemistry building which is a 10 minute walk.

All of this comprises what you need to graduate Medical School.

It’s not just classes. It’s indepedent studies, lab rounds (not just you and some girl in the Chem lab doing litmus paper test, but in the lab where they do all the hospital blood testing or in the Bio-Chemistry building working with some reserach professor showing you what they are doing with $100,000 in grant money.

It’s also clinical rounds and lots of ER room work.

You sit in on exams and everyone gets tell the guy to COUGH as they try and feel what the doctor expects them to feel on a Inguinal Hernia.

That’s the price patients pay for going to a Teaching Hospital.

The poor guy may face two female medical school students and there is no getting out of it like happened 60 years ago.