Learner Profile
Stella Goeschl

School

Medical University of Vienna, Austria

HMX Course

Pharmacology

Stella Goeschl recently completed her first year of medical school at the Medical University of Vienna in Austria. Looking for a head start on her second-year curriculum, Stella took HMX Fundamentals Pharmacology during her summer vacation to prepare for an upcoming class in pharmacology – a topic she had not previously studied.

It was challenging in the sense that it was new, but I didn’t think it was too hard. I feel that it was really well-explained with the diagrams, and I thought the format of drawing the lectures like it was a whiteboard was a really nice way to make it feel like you’re actually sitting in a classroom and getting everything explained. I didn’t think it was too challenging – I thought it met my standards of knowledge and my expectations – but it was challenging enough so that you have to go through the material again and study it. I thought it was a good introductory class.

I thought it was really natural … it felt like it was very much a classroom setting, and I think that this created a good learning environment. I thought it was nice in the sense that it went over the material again, and it summarized things in the end. I felt it was very natural as compared to how [the learning experience] is in medical school.

I think the clinical application video on anesthesia, where the instructor was shown in the operating room, was actually my favorite part of the whole course, because it was really an added bonus to the classroom setting. It was something that you don’t get to see early on in medical school. Being a medical student, I’m interested in the clinical aspects and not just the theory, so I thought that was a very good element. It really complemented the course I think, because at the end of a more theoretical lecture, you would still get this real-life application of it.

Definitely. Everybody’s curriculum is different, but I think it’s certainly helpful for when you’re starting out. And especially if there’s something you have never covered before – I’d never studied pharmacology before this course – it’s really good as an introduction to understand what the basics are, what you need to know, and what you need to study more. It gives you a nice overview. I think it’s perfect early on in medical school when you’re still new to it all and you need to get a first glance at a subject.