4th Year of Med School: To go all out or coast to the end? 

4th Year of Med School: To go all out or coast to the end?

By #LifeofaMedStudent

In most U.S. medical schools the fourth year of med school is full of elective time for students to mold their schedule into whatever they want. Years 1 and 2 were full of grinding book work and study marathons. Year 3 introduced you to basic clinical rotations, where the hours were often long and you still had to study for the dreaded shelf exams. But year 4? Year 4 can be whatever you want it to be. Which begs the question – do you push yourself for tough electives in hopes of better preparing yourself for the intern year? Or do you coast through on easy electives knowing that intern year is a bear that cannot be prepared for, only experienced?

Team Gunner:

You always wanted to score the highest, study the most, doctor the hardest. You aren’t going to stop now. Filling your schedule with brutal electives such as ICU, surgery, cardiology, infectious disease – you want to maximize every minute of education and show up intern year ready to show the upper-level residents how the real doctoring is done!

Team Slacker:

You’ve made it through medical school with one motto, P=MD, baby! Happy with every pass, and unhappy with the fact you have to actually try in medical school (unlike undergrad), you aren’t going out of your way for extra work. You fill your electives up for minimal work. You take Path TA.. twice, computers in medicine, maybe an anesthesia month (you know you’ll rarely be there late), and any other elective known for many days off and light on work. Intern year will be tough sure, but there’s nothing you can do about that!

So who here is correct? Well like most things in life, the truth is in the middle. Intern year is brutal. But its brutal for its hours. It’s brutal for its never-ending list of things to do. You aren’t really a doctor, more a patient’s general manager. The real doctors make all the decisions, you just give them information and schedule what they want to be done. Yes, you need to know some medicine. But unfortunately that med school ICU month or cardiology month, likely made you smarter, but NOT a better intern.

A good intern isn’t the smartest – but is the most organized. The most efficient. The best at communicating with family to attending back to the family. The best at coordinating care between multiple physicians. Unfortunately, all things you tend to not do on a med school rotation – because the intern frantically does them while you are trying to learn actual medicine. Does it help to do hard electives in medical school? Probably, at least if they focus less on teaching and more on treating you like an intern. But does it make a real difference in how hard intern year is? Probably not.

What did I do? Well, I was much closer to team slacker. I scored decently on the USMLE, especially doing well on Step 2. Mostly passed with the occasional high pass my first two years of book work. Then mostly high pass and honors my third clinical year, including the very rare double honor in medicine and medicine sub-I. But the fourth year? I took the easy street. I scheduled all the required courses early in the year, knocked out my anesthesia sub-I, then did an extra elective in anesthesia. Then from December until graduating in May – never. saw. a. single. patient. I even took a couple of electives you didn’t even have to go on campus, just submit papers at the end of the month. I vacationed, I relaxed, and I loved every minute of 4th-year.

How’d that turn out for me? I was probably among the best interns in our transitional year program. I continue to be one of the better residents in our anesthesia program. Why? Not because I’m the smartest, but because I do all that other stuff very well. I work hard, am efficient, organized, I get things done and you rarely have to tell or teach me something more than once. And I didn’t need some 4th-year med school elective to teach me all that.

Should you take a Team Slacker 4th year? No academic advisor will ever say you should. But look how you did in your medicine rotations, especially the medicine sub-I. That’s the closest to intern you get. If you did well, and feel you do well with the efficiency and managing part, then I think you’ll be fine with a lighter 4th year. If not, those extra electives could be useful to hone your skills prior to the big day.

What do you think about the 4th year? Is it your last chance to learn before the pressure of being a doctor? Or is it your last year of freedom to enjoy before real life begins? Hit your thoughts in the comments below!

Update – Early 2017:

There is now a study out (Fourth-Year Medical School Coarse Load and Success as a Medical Intern) suggesting that doing more rigorous courses during 4th year leads to better evaluations as an intern. I question a bit of the study because the “sub internships” they considered rigorous could be from courses and specialties not generally considered difficult (i.e. my own specialty, anesthesia – rare to have long hours, even as a sub-I, but would have counted).

They also looked at internal med residents only – which are more likely to have taken sub-Is in medicine or critical care rotations as the fourth year that would have “counted” for the study. But the results are what they are – and I’d be remiss not to mention this interesting study – even if it goes against my general experience with 4-year.  

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