Medical School: How To Understand ' Gap Year' for Doctors-To-Be

Premedical school can be either tough or exciting depending on your perceptions and anticipations for Medical School. If it is a mixed emotion on your part, it would be better to balance it by taking the best of the "Gap Year" to prepare yourself for a higher level of challenges and excitement.

UC San Diego School of Medicine (UCSDSM) challenges medical students to "drink from a fire-hose without drowning". It can be really hard to enter medical school immediately after your pre-med school. You need to make sure that you have formulated study strategies before enrolling, thus there is a need to maximize the gap year for this. How to yield to such strategies is the question though. UCSDSM simply answers this by active learning and not passive reading.

USNews featured the pros and cons of the gap year before med school and these were far from the advice mentioned above. It says in the article that during the one year rest before med school, you have to take the opportunity to pursue other interests, reflect on your reasons for taking up med school, and save for your financial needs. On the other hand, the cons mentioned were that you have a shorter medical career (as if one year is so much), a year of a physician's salary (but this surely makes sense), and the ambiguity that you have to face from a year of siesta to a year of drowning from the fire-hose.

A study says that the key to effective learning involves three actions: "Test Yourself, Learn Actively, and Repeat in Intervals". The Gap year is essential for some people while others can always go directly from pre-med school to medical school. It really depends on the person. If you are choosing to take a gap year, you need to attain a great balance by resting your mind, body, and soul along with setting your study strategies. Med school is hard. No dream is too easy.