I work as a Medical Education Learning Specialist (MELS) at a large medical school in the US. My job is to take the science of learning and apply it to a very specific educational environment: undergraduate medical education. While a fair bit of that involves breaking down the science of learning, it also requires understanding the context in which the learning is taking place. In this post I want to explain the basic structure of medical school and licensing exams. This may be of interest to any incoming or aspiring medical students (particularly within the US since I will focus on the US medical school system), MELS colleagues, or anyone who knows someone in medical school and is curious about what it’s like.
Medical school, as a pre-professional school that trains students for the responsibility of patient care, presents some unique challenges. Medical students are future physicians, and are expected to be knowledgeable in both a wide array of medical knowledge as well as clinical best practices. Training medical students becomes more challenging each year as the amount of medical knowledge only ever increases. Upon graduation, a medical doctor is a generalist – they must possess a broad skill set, ready to enter into a number of specialties. Medical schools can vary widely in how they approach the education and…
Source: The Learning Scientists — Read the full article on the original site ↗