All the upperclassmen that told me that the second year was going to be better, they are lies. Now, I’m not saying it isn’t interesting. I think what we’re learning in the second year is fascinating compared to the first year, but second-year is just insanely hard. Much, much harder than the first year. I’ll try not to make this rant-y from lack of sleep and stress so just sit back and see the chaos unfold yourself.

Second Year is Worse Than First Year

This year is pretty much a combination of clinical knowledge in addition to everything we learned in the first year. And this may seem like it isn’t too bad, but trust me, the clinical information is already enough to keep us busy as full-time students. And to learn new material in addition to brushing up on older material from last year, compiles to in the insane amount of information for us to 1. understand, 2. memorize, 3. establish mastery of the material so we are capable to answer higher-order questions on the exam.

As if I thought I couldn’t be more stressed from the first year, oh boy, you totally can be.

Fewer Labs Doesn’t Mean More Time to Study

Most medical students would celebrate the fact that we don’t have anatomy lab during our second year, like me. And despite the fact that anatomy lab was an immensely helpful learning experience, I was grateful to learn the fact that I could dedicate more time to studying comfortably in the second year. Right?

WRONG.

If you go into the second year thinking you’ll have more time to spare, you will be in for a nasty surprise. It’s like the school planned to fill up the lab time slot with more information for you to learn. Plus, this is the year where we take our board exams. So, if you have extra time (there’s no way), you should be board prepping or taking care of your health.

Exam Questions are Harder

The questions that we get as second-years are meant to provoke deeper critical thinking, which is similar to board-styled questions. These are not your simple concept check questions. If you know all about the kidneys, they won’t simply ask you what they do. They already expect you to know all about the kidneys, but what will happen to your body if one part is damaged, how would you identify what kind of damage it is, how will that affect your blood pressure, your autonomic system, your ion concentration, etc, etc.

These are what we call higher-ordered questions. You need to know everything about the topic or else you can’t even get close to answering the questions right.

Concepts are Harder

Unfortunately, what they all say is true. This isn’t your undergraduate institution anymore. They expect you to be able to learn, understand, and memorize complex concepts during the second year.

What I mean is, you can’t just memorize your way through these topics. You have to UNDERSTAND the material or else come exam time, you will not be able to solve the questions with just pure memorization.

A lot of my classmates that relied on memorizing and cramming are having a very difficult time right now – because they’re so used to just quickly going through the material. But we can’t now. This is the time to slow down and have deep levels of understanding than memorization. But obviously, there’s a lot of things we still need to simply memorize, like pharmacology (which I hardly know of any med student that actually likes this subject). But what I mean is that now, more than 70% of the material requires an understanding of complex concepts and being able to utilize that understanding to solve the different ways the professors can manipulate the questions around during the exam.

If you can do that, then you’ll be fine during the second year. But keep in mind, this requires an insane amount of time. For one lecture, I would spend at least 2-3 hours studying in my first few passes. I used to spend an hour or less for each lecture during my first year, give or take a couple of minutes. This adds up to a lot of time. I usually would have around 20 lectures per week so if I spent 3 hours max on each lecture, that would mean I spend 60 hours a week just studying.

Welcome to second-year life.

Student Feel Terrible And Act Terrible

I’m not speaking for myself either. With all of the constant stress and mindless studying, it gets to us. It affects some people differently than others but the majority of students just get nasty during the second year. When I was a first-year, I’ve seen second years just being upset all the time. I really can understand what they’ve gone through now. Medical schools are just a place that can provoke these emotions.

Agitation, anger, lashing out at people for something minor, disappointment, frustrations, fear of failing, vulnerability, stress, and all things negative. These are all the things most students feel going into the second year, and we’ve only gone through 3 months.

Feels like an eternality already and everyone wants it to be over.

Board-Prepping Stress

This might just be the single cause in the back of everyone’s minds, the root of all the stress for second years.

We take the first part of our licensing exam as physicians at the end of the second year. And even though we know that we’ll have dedicated time to study before our exam, it still doesn’t hurt to study a little bit to prepare for a hurricane later. Adding that to what we already have on our plates, it’s an overwhelming amount of material and stress.

Everyone has the same thought in mind right now, which is, “when will all of this be over?”

Coping With Burnout

After months of fun-lacking, mundane studying, you just don’t want to study anymore. I find myself just not wanting to wake up in the morning because I know I would have to study. So, I end up waking up late, feeling guilty about wasting most of my morning just sleeping, getting behind on schedule on studying, and feeling terrible. I lost my appetite and motivation to work out. I’m just holed up inside my apartment all the time.

During these times, I tell myself that’s okay if I study as much as I wanted to – every bit of studying is better than no studying at all. We just have to mull through it and just keep treading. Everyone’s going through the same thing and we just have to pull through.

And I keep telling myself that the third year will be better.

Second Year in a Nutshell

The analogy of drinking out of a fire hose is too accurate.

I just hope this can be over soon.