The first year of medicine at UNIGE

The first year of medicine at UNIGE is a very dense and intellectually very demanding year. It's a fairly selective entrance exam, because only the top 150 can move up to the second year of human medicine (25 in dental medicine). For the year 2026-2027, there are 803 people enrolled in human medicine and 251 enrolled in dental medicine (see table below). A good portion drop out during the year and you can expect to find roughly 500-560 candidates at the human medicine exam and ~130-150 candidates at the dental medicine exam. So keeping your motivation high throughout the year is crucial. It's as big a challenge as passing the exam!

The programme is made up of about 57% biology (called SMB), 25% fundamental sciences (called SFO) and 18% social sciences (called SMS).

The SMB is divided into two, the first semester where you tackle the foundations of molecular biology and the second semester where you focus more on the systems of the human body. Here is the list of courses, click on them to see their description:

SMB first semester

Click on any course to see its description!

The first semester is already over, well done! 🏆

2nd semester of SMB

Alongside all these courses, you follow two other longitudinal courses on a specific disease to illustrate the different systems you cover. These are the "linking case" on atherosclerosis and the "linking case" on cystic fibrosis:

The SFO is divided into 4 courses. Physics is spread over the whole year with a weekly class. General chemistry and statistics are given weekly in the first semester and organic chemistry is given in the second semester in place of general chemistry.

The SMS is divided into two longitudinal courses that revolve around the theme of biopsychosocial medicine. The PSS (A course divided into different themes. Among them, the organisation of the Swiss healthcare system, an introduction to medical law, the barriers to the doctor's communication, the ethics of medical decision-making and many others…) and the MFE (A course led by a passionate and motivating professor. You'll talk about family medicine and in particular chronic obstructive bronchopneumonia and its management in the context of family medicine. The last courses are moving, get the tissues out in advance! 🥹). These courses are given throughout the year, generally on Thursday evenings, but almost everyone catches up on them at x2 on Sunday late afternoon, when the week is over!

The CMU (university medical centre) is the name of the building where you will do your studies. The library is no longer brand new, but it is well maintained, very quiet and comfortable. I spent my whole first year there, it was the ideal workspace for stringing together long days behind my iPad. The CMU cafeteria is very good and fortunately so, because at the end of November eating good hot meals is an excellent comfort against the greyness and the shortening days.

In addition to the library, there's the atrium (next to the cafeteria) that has just opened to add extra workspaces for those who like to work in groups in nice little rooms.

In Geneva, access to medical studies is by a competitive exam for entry to the second year. The exam takes place over a single week, at the end of May. All the material you will have covered during the year is assessed there proportionally to the number of course hours (~1 question per 2h of course). In medicine, you'll therefore have to change paradigm, because you're no longer assessed against a standard, but against the rest of the cohort. It's an entrance exam and only the top 150 move up to the second year of human medicine. In other words, if a professor sets an easy question in the exam, that's not good news for all that, because everyone will get it right and you won't be able to open up a gap with the others. Questions of medium to high difficulty are the ones that will let you really prove your worth; they are the most discriminating!

Your exam week starts with the SMS exam (~47 MCQs, duration 2h), then comes the SFO exam (~63 MCQs, duration 3h) and finally the biggest exam: the SMB (~146 MCQs, duration 5h)! 🥵 Each MCQ passed is worth one point, each MCQ failed is worth zero points. There are no negative points. The exam consists of 70% type A MCQs (1 correct answer option out of 5) and 30% type K' MCQs (4 answer options and you have to say for each whether it is right or wrong). In 2024, you had to achieve a score of 163 pts/260 pts to move on to the second year of human medicine. This figure varies somewhat from year to year, but you can reasonably expect us to stay in this order of magnitude next year, in 2025. What is a little more complicated to understand is that you can pass your first year of medicine and receive the ECTS credits without having access to the second year (see diagram below).

For dental medicine the entrance exam is separate, because you have to make your track choice as soon as you register at the university. The subject matter is the same as for human medicine, but you are only assessed with the type A questions of the exam, i.e. ~183 MCQs. You can reasonably expect to be able to pass if you manage to achieve a score of 120 pts/183 pts. To help you understand all this, we have prepared for you a diagram of the promotion conditions and a history of the grading scales.

Diagram of the promotion conditions

History of the grading scales

*: Until June 2023, you needed a 4 to move up to the 2nd year of dentistry. From June 2024, the promotion requirement to move up to the 2nd year rose to 5, as in human medicine.

In medicine, you'll have to rethink your working method from secondary school, because the organisation of the courses changes radically. There are as many working methods as there are students and you'll have to find yours, because simply following a preset working method very certainly won't suit you. To find yours, you'll be able to draw inspiration from working methods that bore fruit for students in previous years. I advise you to test as many different methods as possible at the start of the year and to keep an open mind about those that don't seem suited to you at first glance. You might well have nice surprises, useful for the rest of your studies. That's why I invite you to discover my working method; you'll be able to test it and draw inspiration from it to establish yours as early as possible in the year.

My study method during the course weeks:
During the course weeks, I used the "D" method. The name of this method is self-explanatory once you understand that "D" means "days". This method lets you structure your revision throughout the course weeks. It trains your brain to stop forgetting concepts, because it spaces out your revision more and more, exponentially! Let me explain:

• At D+0 (the day of the course): You follow the course on Mediaserver taking notes (I made Quizlets) and striving to understand as much of the course as possible (it is not always possible to understand everything at D-0, sometimes you still discover concepts at D-7... Do not worry, it is completely normal!).
• At D+1 (the day after the course): You reread your notes (so I tested myself by going through my own Quizlets a single time) and you try to deepen the notions you had not understood very well at D+0 by going back to the slides or to summaries.
• At D+3: Same as at D+1 (so I redid the same Quizlet again as at D+1). You will see that you have already forgotten a lot. It is completely normal and that is the whole difficulty of the first year: retaining as many details of the courses as possible for the day of the exam... Distressing, I grant you 😰
• At D+7: Same as at D+1 and D+3. Here again, you will realise that other details have slipped through the cracks, but it should be a touch better than at D+3 👏🏼
• At D+15: Same as at D+1, D+3 and D+7. You should normally have understood all the concepts of the course and retained at least 95% of the course. Now it is the big leap into the void for your brain: you no longer review this course until the next weeks of revision! Even more distressing, but you have to let go of the D's at some point, otherwise you will not have time for the new courses coming and rushing them is not an option! 🥵

You notice the exponential law I announced earlier: you first leave 1 day before reviewing the material, then 2 days, then 4 days and finally 8 days (well, I only left 7 days, since I did a D+14 instead of D+15, because it distributes the material more evenly over the different days of the week). You will quickly realise that Thursday and Friday are very loaded with "D" and that weekends are much lighter. That is the skeleton of my study method 😊

I quickly chose to study by writing my own "flashcards" on Quizlet (If you want to revise with the Quizlets I created during my first year, it's right here: link to my Quizlet class), because it let me stay focused and active during the lectures, but you could just as well choose to write your own summaries to keep your brain awake during the lectures. The other advantage of writing Quizlets is that during my "D"s, I could revise actively by quizzing myself rather than passively reading a summary. In my opinion, that makes all the difference on exam day, because your brain has been trained all year to recall information on demand. Thanks to this active learning, you know where to dig into your memory! 🎯

It's neither to scare you nor to show off, but my weekdays began at 8:10 in the library and ended on average at 19:30 (between 17:00 and 22:00 depending on the day's workload). Now that that's said, I can explain how I filled my weekdays:

In the morning I woke up at 6:45 and took the bus for 25 minutes, then walked for 10 minutes. At the start of the year I worked on the bus both ways, but I quickly realised it wasn't working. Not only was my work not very effective, but it stressed me more than anything, and at home in the evening I kept obsessively thinking about the courses. Not great for sleeping! I quickly stopped revising on the bus, and that gave me a few moments for myself at the start and end of the day — it did me a world of good! As soon as I arrived at the CMU in the morning, I started my "D"s instead of watching the lectures right away, and I didn't start the lectures until I had finished my "D"s. It was sometimes tempting to rush my "D"s a bit, especially at the end of the week when there were many, but I made an effort to do quality work, even if it meant finishing late. As soon as my "D"s were done (usually between 11am and 1pm, rarely until 3pm), I rushed off to eat at the CMU cafeteria with a few study buddies and tried not to exceed a 1-hour lunch break. Back in the library, I watched the recorded lectures on Mediaserver. I started listening at 1.5x, then quickly switched to 2x — a significant time saving and, above all, a more sustained pace that kept my brain awake during the post-lunch digestion. Once you get a taste for 2x, you can't do without it. At each new element of the lecture, I paused to write a new flashcard on Quizlets. Until I had finished watching the lectures, I didn't leave the library (unless it went past 10pm, but that didn't happen often, as I normally finished the lectures around 5:30pm). Then I did as many SMB MCQs as possible, and if I still had energy after that I did SFO exercise sets too, but honestly I often went home before starting SFO, because it was already late.

To reassure you, I would just like to add that this typical day objectively represents my average day from the fourth week of lectures onward, because it took me time to find the working method that suited me best and to get into the right rhythm. Incidentally, when starting medicine, such a day would have scared me, but you will see that you get into the rhythm quite easily, so don't worry! The first few weeks, I left the library every day at 5 p.m. feeling guilty, but in hindsight, you shouldn't. As soon as the working day is finished and you don't have much left to work on, go home and rest, especially at the beginning of the year when the days are naturally lighter!

On weekends, the days are still a bit shorter, don't worry! For one, the library is open for less time (9am-6pm instead of 8am-10pm), so you can sleep a little more, which feels good. Even though some people choose to get up earlier to work 1 hour from home before going to the library on weekends, I don't recommend it, because that brief change of pace is good for morale and the library hours are more than enough to pass your year. So I went there at 9am and, as always, started with my "D"s. Once those were done, I moved on to SFO exercise sets and as many SMB MCQs as possible, depending on my mood and my remaining gaps. I tried to leave at library closing time (6pm), but on Sundays I often left the library at 5pm.

So during the holidays (holidays = revision periods 😬), you have to be disciplined in your work and that's where the whole difficulty lies. Since the days are no longer paced by new lectures to watch, you can lose your rhythm and end up with gaps that are too big as soon as classes resume. That's why I strongly advise you to follow a realistic or even slightly demanding revision schedule to keep a certain positive pressure on your shoulders. Besides, I offer an example of a slightly demanding revision schedule on the UpMed.ch Instagram page before every holiday period! During the holidays, I generally had slightly shorter days. I arrived at the library at the same time as during class weeks, but I finished roughly 1h to 1h30 earlier. Once I had finished the list of subjects to revise that were on my revision schedule, I did as many MCQs as possible! Revision weeks are great for practising MCQs, because you have time to do about a hundred a day. It lets you target your gaps better and understand how to answer MCQs. And believe me, you're never prepared enough for it!

The answer will depend on you and how you feel. You'll have to analyse yourself as objectively as possible and ask yourself whether you need it. You need one or two days of rest if you can't take any more or if you know you won't hold out over the coming weeks without taking this little break. But if you sincerely feel that everything is fine, that your morale is good and that you feel up to not taking rest days, make the most of this little bonus to do MCQs galore, it can only do you good!

• Keep a few weekly treats that you look forward to and that give your weeks a rhythm.
• Remember as often as possible your dream of becoming a doctor. I passed by the dental clinic every morning and it gave me a lot of strength to get through my day.
• Eat something good and if possible balanced at noon (it sounds like I'm 50 saying this, but it's genuinely important to be able to last over time)
• Eat something as soon as you feel a drop in the quality of your work. A drop in blood sugar is catastrophic for the quality of work. (I have never eaten as much chocolate as in the first year of medicine and on top of that it's good for morale 😋)
• Getting enough sleep, and regularly, is essential!
• Work in a group and maintain a good group atmosphere, to support each other in difficult times (yes, there will be some! 😬)
• Try not to fall behind under any pretext. I say try, because sometimes the days are too short, but ideally you should have caught it up by the very next day. If you're up to date on the programme, it keeps your motivation up, whereas if you're behind, it demotivates you and it's even harder to catch up.

For me, the three most difficult courses of the year were:

• DNA-prot lecture 3 by Prof. Andrey (if you did biochemistry in high school it should greatly help your understanding, but as that was not my case, I was completely lost following this lecture and it dented my morale right at the start of the year 😳)
• Prof. König's lecture on muscle tissues… So many small details to learn by heart 😱
• Prof. Bertrand's innate immunity lecture at the end of the year… Such a hardcore lecture right when you're accumulating all the fatigue of the year… On the plus side though, it's great to understand how immunity works, so it's already a little easier 😇

Now, the three courses that put the most stars in my eyes: 🤩

• DNA-prot lecture 1 by Prof. Garcin (him again). One of the first lectures that really touches on biological mechanisms and a passionate and fascinating professor! I keep a particularly nostalgic memory of it…
• Introduction and principles of the organisation of the nervous system by Professor Jabaudon. This course isn't too complicated and the professor is top. On top of that, it's the first course on a system, it brings a breath of fresh air to finally reach the systems. Especially since around early December, fatigue sets in and this little accomplishment gives you a huge motivation boost for the whole nervous system, you'll see! 🔥
• Prof. Montessuit's cardiac function lecture. This lecture makes you dive through the general mechanics of the heart. It gives a lot of pleasure to lift the great mysteries of the human body! The professor goes quite far into the details while remaining very understandable and pedagogical. A gem that motivated me for the rest of the week on the cardiac system

So in the first year, there's no mandatory equipment yet. You can choose to write everything on paper if you're technophobic, but everyone uses a small laptop or a tablet to take notes. Personally, I recommend having a touchscreen tablet, because the computing power is more than enough to study medicine and it will be super useful for drawing all the diagrams you'll need to make throughout the systems and in organic chemistry. If you go for a tablet, I strongly recommend getting a stylus and a keyboard.

I'm not an Apple addict, but if you haven't yet bought the computer you'll use next year, I advise you to go for an iPad, because at uni almost everyone uses airdrop and it's very handy for sharing documents between students.

Here is the setup I had during my first year:

• IPad pro 11', 64gb, apple pencil et smart keyboard

After the experience I had with it, I can say I was very satisfied. I do advise you, however, to have at least 128gb or 256gb of memory, because I was a bit tight by the end of the year.

Otherwise you basically don't need anything else. You might need during the year noise-cancelling headphones to maximise your concentration in the library or a skeleton at the end of the year, but I advise you to wait until the time comes before making this type of purchase, because the need is very personal.

• Discover how the human body works, with quite a nice level of detail all the same
• The satisfaction of understanding complicated biological mechanisms 🤯
• Being in the same boat as the mates who work hard with me in the library 🥵
• Leaving exhausted from a day's work, with the tangible impression of having got closer to your goal! 😍

• In my family, everyone asked me health questions to which I didn't yet know the answers. Frustrating, when you spend your days studying the field!
• The stress of being sick on exam day 🤒
• The stress that the rest of the cohort is better prepared than me
• The long working days of November, when it's dark arriving at the library and dark returning home in the evening 🌙

I would keep one sports session a week instead of stopping completely, because to have a fresh brain, it's important to have a good lifestyle and the few hours lost doing sport will be more than compensated for by the freshness of your brain.