Calculating Medical Student Work Hours

When I was in junior college, a classmate estimated that the amount of time we spent studying would fit into a 40-hour work week. I adamantly disagreed. We were studying biomedical engineering, and I was certain that the long nights spent on problem sets and attending early morning lectures would far surpass “just a 9-to-5.” Surely a 40-hour work week could not compare. Then I worked full-time in my gap-year job in consulting and was humbled at how unexpectedly exhausted I was. It made me question how many hours we really put in as students.

We have data on resident hours, but medical student hours are not well documented. I decided to log my hours in med school as an experiment. My goal was to see what kind of work-life balance I could achieve in med school, when I expected to be working harder than I ever had before. I wanted to be intentional with my study time and force myself to fully unplug when I was off the clock. Parkinson’s Law states that work will expand to fill the time allowed. This is especially relevant to med school, which feels like it can consume every waking hour.

Data from my first three years is below (see Figure 1). Turns out the average hours worked was 50 hours per week (M1 was 51, M2 was 49 and M3 was 50). When breaking hours down by organ system in pre-clinicals, we see that renal was the most intensive (for me, it’s nephritic and nephrotic syndromes).

Figure 1: Average hours per week for M1 and M2 pre-clinical years, organized by organ system. Includes time in class, studying and extracurricular time (i.e., interest groups, shadowing, research).

Third-year medical student data (see Figure 2) shows that surgery was the most time-intensive rotation, requiring an average of 57 hours per week. Psychiatry allowed evenings and weekends mostly off, coming in at 42 hours per week.

Figure 2: Average hours per week worked by a third-year medical student on core clerkships. Includes clinical time in addition to self-study time.

The maximum was 74 hours per week while on OB nights. The minimum was 30 hours per week on exam weeks.

Overall, the hours are lower than I expected. But in turn, my work-life balance has been better than I envisioned. I have been able to keep active, go to trivia weekly, see my family and adopt a dog. Many factors contribute to the work-life balance I have been able to maintain. For one, I am growing as an adult and know what it is like to have a poor work-life balance, so this is a priority to me. Additionally, my med school has a good culture of students being physically active and having passions outside of medicine.

The caveat to this data is that n=1. While I am a typical med student, it is only my experience. I wonder what other med students might find if they logged in their hours. Med students who are interested in radiology might be exactly the data-minded type to do this.