Does Anatomy Class Look Good On Med School App

Summary of my own experience and what I've seen from this thread:

- Taking anatomy as an undergrad may help lessen the stress in med school Gross Anatomy, but it won't necessarily make you an anatomy guru, especially if you rest on your laurels and are overconfident about your background in med school

- Anatomy is a unique class in that a lot of memorization is required, but there is an art to being able to translate what you've memorized from the atlas into figuring out what you are looking at on the actual cadavers. Some people get it better than others. For me, there was a steep initial learning curve in terms of understanding the big picture: learning the terminology, figuring out how to memorize the structures and attachment sites, dissect/analyze the cadavers, and put it all together to succeed on practicals--that's the main reason I wanted to take it before med school

- in terms of potential benefits as an MS1 student, taking undergrad full dissection "Gross" Anatomy > model/systems based Anatomy > comparative Anatomy

- Taking anatomy as an undergrad won't help your med school application

- Taking anatomy as an undergrad won't hurt your med school application

This thread interests me since it raises the question of how what if any additional courses one should take above the pre-med prerequisites. The conventional wisdom from med schools is that you only need to take the pre-requisites because medical school will teach you what you need to know and you should expand your horizons by taking other courses. I don't necessarily agree with that. I'm enough of a geek that almost anything is a least somewhat interesting to me. So if I know I want to go to med school, and I'm looking at taking anatomy vs art appreciation, why wouldn't I take anatomy, given that they are both at least somewhat interesting to me?

For sure, you don't want to be a pre-med robot with no life outside of science and on the brink of burnout, but I also think that studying arts or literature in a formal course is overrated in terms of expanding your horizons. From my experience, taking a class on Shakespeare or medieval art managed to suck all of the life out of the subject. I'd rather see a play or go to a museum or read a book or spend a summer abroad then listen to a professor lecture on the subject. It's also a lot easier to learn literature and arts on your own, as opposed to science, where you sort of need a formal course to guide your study. Taking a foreign language i.e. Spanish is somewhat different. It obviously falls outside the sciences, but I would classify that as more med school prep because it can pay later dividends as a physician.

If I were making a list of recommended courses for premeds I'd include (texts): Biochemistry (Lehninger), Physiology (Vander-Sherman), Gross Anatomy (Netter), Genetics (Griffiths), Cell Biology (Alberts), Neuroscience (Kandel), , Microbiology (Baumann), Immunology (Kuby), and Spanish/study abroad until conversational--in about that order or importance. And yes I was reading these off my bookshelf