valuemd (Admin) Three entry points per year sounds like a great perk for flexibility, but it also means your classmates may be four months behind you, four months ahead of you, or somewhere in the middle of a completely different module. We want to hear from people who have actually lived this. Did you find your people? Did study groups even form? Did you ever feel like you were just studying completely alone without a shared timeline to hold onto? Did the rolling system make the curriculum feel fragmented?
liamwalker (Alumni) i started in the may intake last year and i want to be honest because i wished someone had told me this before i enrolled. the rolling intake thing sounds really convenient when you are reading the website but when you actually get in, the first thing you notice is that there is no shared starting point with anyone. like there is no orientation week where everyone is equally lost together. i joined a general whatsapp group someone had made and half the people in it were already in their second semester. it made me feel like i had walked into a party two hours late and everyone else already knew each other.
simonegrant1187 (Aspiring student) lakshmi this is so accurate. i started in september and the same thing happened to me. the whatsapp group i found had people at like 5 different stages and conversations were always fragmented. someone would ask about a module i had not gotten to yet and someone else would answer in a way that spoiled things i had not read yet. i ended up muting the group and just going through the material alone. which was fine academically but it felt kind of isolating compared to what i imagined med school community would feel like. i think if you go in expecting a traditional cohort experience you will be disappointed. if you go in treating it like a self directed program where community is a bonus and not a given, it is a lot easier to cope with.
alanapeters8890 (Student) i actually want to offer a slightly different experience here because i think it depends a lot on what program you are in and how proactively you look for people. i am in the health administration track and i started in january. i specifically looked for people who had also started in january and i found maybe four or five of us. we made our own small group chat that was only january starters and that honestly worked really well. we were doing the same readings at the same time, we could complain about the same assignments, and two of those people are now people i would genuinely call friends even though we have never met in person. so it is possible to build community but you have to be intentional about it. the system will not build it for you.
lilyb441 (Student) @alanapeters8890 (Student) can i ask how you found those january starters? was there a forum or did you just post in the general group asking who started in january? i am enrolling in september and i am already thinking about this.
