Technically, yes. Realistically, it depends far more on which year you're in and what kind of work you're talking about than on any rule standing in your way.
This question comes up a lot, usually from candidates budgeting ahead or already-enrolled students looking to offset costs. There's no blanket rule against it, but the honest answer has more nuance than a simple yes.
What the course load actually allows, year by year
The first two years are mostly lecture-based, with a schedule that, while demanding, still leaves stretches of time you control yourself. That's when part-time work is most realistic. Once clinical rotations start, your hours are no longer fully your own. You're expected on the wards or in labs at set times, exam blocks cluster tightly, and the unpredictability of clinical scheduling makes committing to a fixed weekly shift much harder to sustain without something else giving way.
The trade-off nobody frames honestly
Working part-time doesn't just cost hours, it costs the buffer you'd otherwise have for the exam that runs long, the topic that needs a second pass, or the week you get sick. Medical school in Italy already runs on tightly packed exam sessions, and thin margins are where a part-time job usually shows up as damage, not immediately, but by exam session three or four, when a rough patch has nowhere to absorb it.
What kind of work actually fits
Flexibility matters more than the specific job. Tutoring, whether local students or other IMAT candidates further back in their own prep, tends to fit well because you set the hours yourself. Remote or freelance work with a schedule you control does too. Fixed-shift retail or hospitality work is the hardest to sustain once clinical years start, since your own schedule stops being predictable enough to commit reliably to someone else's.
When it's worth waiting
If the goal is meaningfully offsetting cost of living, it's usually worth building that into your first-year budget rather than assuming you'll pick up work once you're settled. If it's more about having some independent income on the side, the first two years are genuinely the more forgiving window to start, and it's easier to scale down once clinical demands pick up than to add a job on top of a schedule that's already full.
Still weighing whether the day-to-day workload and cost of a specific program actually fits your situation? The Lounge is a free IMAT score predictor - answer a few questions and see exactly where you'd realistically land, and which universities that score would clear.
Try the free Score PredictorIt's allowed, and plenty of students manage it. Just go in knowing which years actually leave room for it, and which ones don't.
