.That would be my pleasure, anything in particular that you wanted to know? We are pass fail unranked during pre-clinicals.. The unranked part is the most important part, as a lot of schools say they are pass fail but have an internal system of rankings. Our system is not about slacking off and just breezing by, everyone works hard and the average grades have not changed since before the system was instituted. What it does is take as much of the anxiety out of medical education as possible and gives you the confidence to take advantage of the free time that is naturally built into the pre-clinical curriculum. So you can do volunteering, do fun things, do research, do shadowing, or just figure out what you want to do with yourself after medical school without a nagging voice in the back of your head eating away at you because you are terrified of getting a 99 and not a 100. Pre-clinical grades and rankings are ultimately not highly valued by residency directors, so you arent losing out on anything when compared to the confidence to build your resume in other ways.
..Columbia is well known for it's emphasis on outside activities, many of which are overseen by the P&S club. The P&S club is an umbrella organization that is formally run by the university with full time staff that work to maintain it and assist student groups. This is assisted by the fact that we have the oldest and largest alumni association of any medical school. This year alone weve had about 55 million dollars in donations, some of which goes towards funding the P&S club. The Alumni Association also buys every first year a Litmann III stethoscope and pay for an annual book signing gala with Dr. Eric Kandel (he invented memory essentially and won a nobel prize. He is also one of our professors in neuroscience). As far as organizations go, we have a wide number of clubs. For fun, we have the ultrasounds, our a capella group. We also have bard hall players, which I mentioned before, and the musicians guild. This group forms our pit for BHP musicals and also hosts a musical event every month known as Musical Mondays. We also have Bacchus, our wine tasting club. We also have the less formal Beerchus, Vodkus, and Whiskus. We have the squash club and the rugby team known as the Orthopedics. I find this funny because of the fact that the ortho department essentially donates a few thousand dollars to them and gets a million dollars in business from broken bones. We also have two student clinics known as COSMO and champ. COSMO focuses on the uninsured while CHHMP focuses on the homeless. Cosmo is whenever you want to sign up where as CHHMP is a steady commitment for all four years with the same patient set. This allows you a more longitudinal look at health care than one can usually get in medical school. We also have a great interest groups who have great activities within them. The Whipple Society, our surgery interest group, has the transplant pager program. Basically, when the intern is too tired to go you get called up and hop and a plane to go assist a organ harvest. You arent being handed the scalpel and being told to hack away, but you do get to be a part of the team and do something that you very likely wont ever do again unless you go into surgery for residency. You can go do acute stroke workups with the neuro interest group, learn blood drawing and suturing with the ER interest group, literally catch babies with the OB/GYN interest group, and learn to read magazines really well with the anesthesiology interest group. There are plenty of others, so go to the P and S club website (search P and S club Columbia) for a full list. The bottom line is, because of our deemphasized grading system during the pre-clinical year and a half you will have the confidence to take advantage of these groups for fun and for academic development. The idea is that medical school should be a university experience as well. For example, you are allowed to take up to 2 free classes per semester at any school or department on campus..
. Housing is guaranteed to all medical students, but is Dorm style for the first year followed by apartment style for as long as you care to stay on campus. On campus housing is not required but it is convenient. About 80% students stay on campus for the first year and then maybe 60% stay on after that. There are optional meals served 3 nights a week that are all you can eat and allow you to take leftovers. They were 5 dollars a day this year I think. There are a number of places to eat around campus, especially if you are prone to exploration like I am. Yeshiva University is a little north of us, and they have a number of eating and drinking establishments nearby. The undergraduate campus is a 5-10 minute subway ride away (or a free intercampus shuttle ride), with a very large college district around and to the south of it. It's 20 minutes to Columbus Circle (59th street), 25 to the west village, and about 30 minutes to the east village by subway. JFK is further away, but you can take a direct subway ride up to Columbia for those who are interviewing in the future. It is possible to take public transport for NYLG, but it is kind of a pain to navigate if you are new to the area.
Today is a great day to ask me q's if you have them, I got the day off from surgery.
