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med school curriculum vs. pa


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Any Yale med student will tell you the PA program curriculum is infinitely harder than the medical program curriculum. It comes up all the time and I have never once heard a medical student object. However, that is just my experience from one school.

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There are some studly 4th year med students out there that I've run in to that would put most PA and junior med students to shame, but that would be limited to a handful.

 

FWIW.

 

yea...when i did my internal medicine rotation as a student, we had a sub-I who was a beast. she was absolutely amazing - probably operating at an upper-level resident level

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yea...when i did my internal medicine rotation as a student, we had a sub-I who was a beast. she was absolutely amazing - probably operating at an upper-level resident level

I was impressed with lots of residents. can't say any medstudents ever struck me as brighter than a typical pa student.

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he must mean pace...as that is true of essentially any school that has both an md and pa program. our classes were 8-5 and the md's did 8-3. they had summers off. we worked straight through.

 

I'm impressed the med students at your program even went til 3. Ours generally were done by 12, sometimes 1-3 if they had a lab or something keeping them around.

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HLReed...

 

For Clarity:

 

Are you saying its the "curriculum" content that is harder...or do you mean that its the "pace" of the content that's harder...???

 

THe pace makes everything harder. There were times that we only took the courses with the med students and had no additional courses... I didn't know what to do with all of my free time. Imagine having 4 less lectures and 4 extra hours to get things done. These times were few and far between, but I would study, cook a good meal, go to the gym, watch episodes of something online, sit twiddling my thumbs, etc. because I had no idea what to do with myself.

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I suppose "pace" might be a better word, though it's not exactly what I meant. I guess I consider curriculum to be material, facilitation and evaluation. Our exams are much harder in that they are actual exams. Medical students' exams are far less frequent, are "open-book" (taken online while at home) and sometimes "open-professor" etc. So not just the pace, but that also plays a big role. (We have many of the same lecturers so the material itself is fairly uniform.)

 

The overall expectations of PA students at Yale are also much higher for things like attendance. There is actually a fundraiser during which medical school professors pay their MD students (money goes to charity) for one day of 100% attendance. A real treat...

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