first couple of days of medical school

I just finished my second day of med school. It's been weird. There are 2 curriculums at Drexel. The standard one that everyone goes to by default and a majority stay in is called IFM. There you get lectures and notes given to you and all you have to do is memorize/understand those notes and you succeed.

The other curriculum is called PIL, program for integrated learning. In this program, you work in small groups of 5-8 people w/ one facilitator, who is faculty. Their job is to steer you in the right direction should you go into a specific topic and it is irrelevant to the case at hand. So in these small groups, you work on case files, which are patients who have problems. The whole case has been broken down into 8-9 pages of stuff. The first page may be the initial consultation. The second page may be history and physical exams. What we do in small group is explore the case in a clinical way (to get a diagnosis) and a basic science way (understand the science behind what's going on). We create learning issues that we go home and research and study and present during the next small group session. Then we discuss and learn (hopefully). We also repeat previously studied/discussed topics in future cases (hence integrated learning) so ideally you reinforce yourself throughout the year. You still get lectures, but they're minimal and usually cater towards the learning issues we've formed. So I'm in this group. We end in April and then we get to do a Primary Care Practicum, where you work along side a primary care provider and try to reinforce what you've learned throughout the year.

So that's that. I'm dissecting a cadaver tomorrow, we're going to open up the back, take out the major back muscles (traps, lats, splenius, rhomboids, semispinalis, erector spinae) and examine each one, what they do, how they do it, examine the spinal cord and vertebrae.

It's been a long day, I have mixed feelings about PIL, but I think I like it! We'll see how the year goes.