Embedded Files
Block Leader: Dr. Natalie Langley
Block Length: 7 weeks
The Basics
The Anatomy block is usually one that inspires a bit of trepidation in M1s. It’s known to be a tough block and a long one - and it is. The good news is that it’s manageable and most of us enjoyed it immensely! The teaching team for this course is FANTASTIC. There’s no other way to put it - they’re just incredible. They make learning the magnitude of information in this block possible. Take advantage of their wisdom and willingness to teach!
The majority of this block is focused on the anatomical structures of the body. There’s a little bit of physiology when it’s required to understand the basic anatomy, but not much. For example, you need to understand the biliary circulation to be able to label the vasculature between the liver and the gallbladder, but you don’t need to know how the liver functions in detoxification during the anatomy course. You’ll be introduced to the majority of the anatomy knowledge in pre-recorded VoiceThread lectures, but you’ll learn how to find it in the body during cadaver dissections. You’ll also dive deeper into clinical correlates in both lecture and lab - the teaching team is circulating at all times to not only help with dissection but also help you make connections to the clinical content covered during the lecture. Definitely take advantage of them and any guest physicians! (PSA: guest physician lectures are a great way to begin connecting with attendings about future opportunities if their work interests you!)
In addition to daily lectures and labs, you’ll have longitudinal radiology and embryology integrations. Radiology will be mostly case-based - you’ll go through imaging with a radiologist in a lecture-format, and then complete daily assignments with your lab team that further solidify the radiology concepts. Embryology is pretty low yield, but do your best to understand as much of it as you can. There will be embryology-content sprinkled throughout the NBME final as well as about 20-30 Embryology-focused questions at the end. Embryology is presented in lecture one or two days each week - you’ll review this content on your own to solidify the concepts. If you focus on any one aspect in particular, make it Cardiac Embryology.
Anatomy is a marathon, not a sprint. Take it day-by-day, but also try to stay on top of the material. The worst thing you can do in this block is to allow yourself to get more than one day behind - there’s very little time built in to catch back up so it’s important to stay on track and review as you go. It’s going to feel overwhelming every time you start a new body region, but it gets easier and you’ll find that you pick up the information faster by the third or fourth week. Don’t get discouraged and know that you are surrounded by supportive teaching staff and peers!
Assessments
At the end of the block, you’ll take both an NBME final and a practical. The NBME has historically carried minimal weight on the final grade - it’s utilized to help you get used to NBME style questions early in your first year. Additionally, there is a radiology portion of the instructor-made examination, again focusing on the clinical correlates that were emphasized throughout the block. Be sure to attend the high-yield TA radiology final review to know how to focus your studying for the instructor-made radiology examination.
There is also a lab practical final in which pins will be placed in the various cadavers for identification. This is a timed exam with rotating stations - you’ll have 3-4 practice rounds throughout the course to get used to both the format and the learning style required for cadaver identification. Do your best to prepare for these practice rounds and take them seriously to judge your grasp of the material. These are great ways to review material as you move through the course.
You will be assigned to a team of 3-4 people that will stay the same during the entire block. You will have one cadaver for your team and will work as a team every day. During our block, we had small group work and lectures for about two hours every morning, and then dissection for the rest of the morning. Most students will leave the lab at 12 PM for lunch. Remember to take lunch breaks! The lab is open for you to return to any time you want, but you don’t want to be the one who faints in the anatomy lab because you forgot to eat/drink.
You will be assigned to a team of 3-4 people that will stay the same during the entire block. You will have one cadaver for your team and will work as a team every day. During our block, we had small group work and lectures for about two hours every morning, and then dissection for the rest of the morning. Most students will leave the lab at 12 PM for lunch. Remember to take lunch breaks! The lab is open for you to return to any time you want, but you don’t want to be the one who faints in the anatomy lab because you forgot to eat/drink.
*High yield resources in red are denoted to help you reduce resource overload and pass the block
Recipes for Success
Lecture - most of the lecture content is pre-recorded and posted to Brightspace as VoiceThreads; true class time is reserved for practice questions and clinical correlate reviews in small groups. Watch the pre-recorded content in advance! Some students preferred to spend several hours over the weekend watching all lectures for the upcoming week to eliminate time spent each night watching for the next day. Others watched the lectures for M-W on the prior Sunday and the Th/F lectures on Wednesday night. The remainder watched the lectures the night before they were covered in class. Find your own rhythm. After watching the lectures, make sure you know the content by doing Anki flashcards or your preferred study method. This way, you’ll be prepared for small groups and dissections.
Small Groups - you’ll be assigned to a lab group before the course begins, and you’ll get to know these classmates better than any others! This will be your small group for any anatomy projects, radiology assignments, dissection, and often studying too. Be sure to communicate with each other. You’ll spend so much time together that it can be easy to allow stress to alter the group dynamic. Be upfront about days that you’re feeling burnt out or overwhelmed - it’ll keep the group more functional and happy as a whole. Try to do fun things outside of class together and learn how to be good team members. It’s great if each person can take on a role and contribute to the team - for example, someone good at scheduling can coordinate dissection times (if you aren’t all dissecting together), someone interested in radiology can take charge of radiology assignments, and someone can be in charge of quizzing the team while dissecting so you all keep up with reviewing past material. Remember, the opportunity to dissect and learn together is unique, and many of us found connecting and working with our teams to be incredibly enriching and rewarding!
Dissection - BE PREPARED. Watch or read the dissection guide before you get to the lab. The rest of your team is counting on you to be efficient when dissecting, and you can’t do that if you’re unfamiliar with the dissection technique for the day. It’s also very helpful if you’re familiar with the anatomy and clinical correlates for that region before you begin dissecting. If you are, you can quiz yourself as you’re dissecting, drastically reducing the amount of review you need to come back to the lab to do later. Some people find it hard to absorb the material from lectures/videos and find that dissection is really where they learn best. Even if you fall into this category, you should still do all the pre-reading/watching ahead of time as it will make everything go more smoothly! If you still have difficulty during dissection, whether it be remembering parts of the body or understanding their functions, schedule time with a teaching team member. Dr. Langley and Dr. Carey are always willing to meet with you and run through concepts you are not grasping. The TAs have all taken anatomy and can provide tips and tricks to doing well in anatomy. You have access to a fantastic teaching team; their goal is to ensure you understand anatomy, so don’t be afraid to reach out to them
Prosection - Sometimes there are prosection days where the professors will do the dissection ahead of time and you just come to the lab to observe the structures. For this, just make sure you preview your word lists and are ready to learn from the cadavers. If you have the chance to start memorizing the structures ahead of time, quizzing yourself during prosection with the help of an instructor is a fantastic way to learn. Also, if you have time, take a look at each of the prosected cadavers. You never know which one will be chosen for the lab practical, so you should be familiar with all the cadavers.
Group Presentation - The anatomy “first patient” presentation is a brief presentation that should include your team’s observations and reflections on the donor’s health and lifestyle before death. You may also include images from the Dissector Table using 3D-reconstructions of your donor’s scans that may be useful for visualizing unique findings. This is due at the end of the course, but you should try to submit it early so you can focus on studying for the final. You will find it helpful to keep a shared google doc or notebook that each teammate updates with notable features on the donor’s anatomic status. Additionally, you might want to have a similar system to document the progress of your dissection so the next teammate that follows you knows exactly what has been done and what needs to be done next (if you all are not dissecting together).
Optional Quizzes - You will have optional quizzes on Brightspace covering anatomy and radiology that are extremely helpful. They are not part of your grade but will help your learning and also your performance on the final exam. There will also be practice lab practicals - don’t stress about these, use them to guide your learning and improvement. Do your best to take them as they are released. You may not feel ready, but this is another great opportunity for you to remember to keep reviewing and see how much you remember from earlier weeks.
Final Exams - The final exam review session is a great overview of high-yield topics for the course. To succeed on the NBME final, spend time each week doing Gray’s Anatomy questions that correspond with what you’re learning each day. They’re challenging, but representative of the NBME difficulty level. It can be difficult to start doing these questions, so try doing questions with your team or set aside two hours every weekend to only do practice questions. As you practice, you start to pick up on key phrases that clue you in on common question-types. In order to succeed on the professor-made exam, just do all of the practice quizzes again, review clinical correlates from the lab, and do any other practice questions.
Lab Final - you cannot do well on this final without spending additional time in the lab. For some people, that extra time was just a few hours the week of the exam; for others, it was a few hours every night. Regardless of which category you fall into, try to avoid getting behind in one section because there’s little time to play catchup before the final. It’s a good idea to get a group of 2-3 people together that study in similar ways and go into the lab in the evenings/weekends at least 1x per week to review the structures from the previous week or any weak points you have. As the course progresses, try to occasionally revisit previous structures to maintain that knowledge. If there’s something that is especially difficult for you, schedule time with a TA to go over a few word lists or ask the TA to “pimp” you to make sure you know all the salient points. If you go into the lab consistently and spend a little time each week, you won’t have to spend all day before the exam re-learning 20 or more word lists.
Best Resources
Lectures - These are ALL you need to learn course content. Watch the lectures before class (where you’ll have practice questions on the material), re-watch the ones that don’t stick the first time around, and don’t search too far outside of that for additional content - you won’t need it for the exams. Many students found ANKI decks to be helpful in maintaining their knowledge throughout the block. The in-house deck corresponds well with Dr. Langley’s lectures, but feel free to make/suspend cards as you go. There is also the UMichigan deck that includes Image Occlusion style cadaver images that some students found helpful. Others also found it helpful to take notes on the VoiceThread PowerPoints and review their notes for spaced repetition. Choose whichever method you find the most helpful, as long as you have an understanding of the lecture material. Remember to give yourself grace as you study anatomy. If one method of learning the content doesn’t work for you, don’t be afraid to try a different way.
Lab Dissection Videos - These are separate from Grant’s Anatomy Dissection Guide you’re told to follow for lab dissections. Instead, these are pre-recorded by the instructors to show you a completed dissection with the labeling of every structure you need to know. These are extremely useful before you go into the lab as it gives you an idea of what you’re working towards, and is helpful to watch before the lab practicals as well.
Bone Box - Each group receives its own bone box on the first day of anatomy. This box contains the skeletal components you will be required to know over the course. It’s difficult to see the bones of the donors during dissection, so the bone box is a great visual tool. Don’t neglect osteology when reviewing material; sometimes, knowing how muscles attach to bones can help understand their functions.
Complete Anatomy - If you’re a visual learner, buy it on DAY ONE and get it on your iPad/tablet/computer/etc. Use this as a way to understand regional anatomical relationships and to quiz yourself on identification before going to dissection the next day. 10/10 recommended resource. Pro-tip: talk to your group and see if they want to split a subscription! On the other hand, if you don’t want to pay for a subscription, you can still use an anatomy atlas to understand the anatomy and succeed just as well. You can find Netter’s Atlas or Gray’s Anatomy textbooks in the library. This resource comes highly recommended, but it doesn’t replace studying from actual cadavers for the lab practical. Apparently, veins aren’t labeled in a nice blue color in the real human body…
Gray’s Anatomy Questions - These can be really helpful to review content as you’re learning it! Most students did a portion of the questions assigned to each day (you’ll get a list of which question corresponds to which lecture), and then left the rest from each section as a review for the final exam. They’re challenging and occasionally an answer choice is wrong in the key, but it’s a fantastic resource. You can find it in the library (several copies). It’s hard to be motivated to do questions every day, so a fun way is to get a group of 2-4 students, meet up every night/once a week for an hour to do as many questions as you can do within that hour. This will keep you all on track together. There are also so many questions that you likely won’t finish them, and that’s okay! Remember the goal isn’t for you to get all the questions correct, because you probably won’t - it is to learn from the mistakes and understand what to expect of future exam questions.
Other Websites
University of Michigan Medical School - This is a great resource to nail down the basics. They have video lectures, practice cadaver labeled questions, and practice quiz questions that are based on clinical correlates. Many students used this website to study for the lab practical if the cadaver lab was closed or if they couldn’t go in. This resource uses actual cadaver images, so you get a little bit of practice with looking at a real body. You can also use this website to reinforce your knowledge after you watch Voice Threads on the relevant class topics with the quiz questions. The quizzes aren’t that long, so if you don’t have time for a Gray’s Anatomy question set, you can go through a UMich deck quickly.
YouTube Channels - Ninja Nerd Anatomy or The Noted Anatomist - great for visual learners to be used as supplemental material if needed. Also highly recommend YouTubing videos for the pelvic anatomy as it helps to see someone move the pelvis bone around and point to different aspects.
Student-Made Resources - There are multiple study guides made by previous students. The following resources were created by the Class of 2024 and might be useful! Also, if you find yourself struggling, reach out to the teaching team and ask for one-on-one tutoring from the TAs. This can be conducted in the lab as a cadaver review or even outside the lab for conceptual help or help on practice questions.
Megan Campany Complete Embryology Study Guide - adapted from “The Only Embryology Guide You’ll Ever Need”
Anatomy Thriving Guide (written by the class of 2021) - use it to read up on tips and tricks as you start a new anatomical structure in the class (will be provided in Brightspace by professors).
Mikey203 Anatomy Correlates Anki Deck (written by Michael Cirelli)
2023 Schedule
Last updated in November 2023 by Annika Hiredesai
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