The Beginning of the End of the First Year [Perspectives on Graduate Life]

The fifth course of my medical school curriculum was “Integrated Human Physiology” (IHP). This involved learning pulmonary, cardiovascular, renal, gastrointestinal, and endocrine physiology. Each of these systems had a dedicated week in the course, and the final week integrated all topics to finish this six-week course. As you can imagine, learning the physiology of an entire system in a week was very intense and exhausting. Each Monday began the new physiologic system and culminated with a quiz on Friday, which is what made the course so fast paced and the most difficult course of the first year.