What do you like and not like about Drexel?
What is the 3rd year like and how is it structured?
What are the research and community service opportunities?
FYI, I'm a 4th year
1. I don't have time to write out a bunch about what I like or dislike. (I was IFM, btw.) I think Drexel has a pretty solid curriculum that has been in place for years and works well. There are a lot of exams in the first 2 years, but I think they help keep you on your toes and help you prepare for step 1. The faculty and administration care immensely about your success and will work with you if you're having trouble. They are also quite sympathetic to what happens outside of school and how it affects your performance.
If you need to drop to "part time" (as in take 2 years to do year 1 or 2) due to academic difficulty, need to tend to a sick family member, or because you had a baby. If you need a year off, it's possible. Have a kid during third year, then they will help plan your clerkships to make things easier. If your wife is having a kid, they'll even move around your peds rotation so you don't bring any kid germs to your little one.
As far as dislikes, it's just useless courses or abundance of assignments during third year. But, really, it is doable, just annoying.
2. Clerkships are 6 or 12 weeks in duration. Medicine and Surgery are 12 weeks. Medicine is broken up into three 4-week sub rotations: core inpatient at HUH, inpatient at another hospital, and ambulatory medicine. Surgery is done at one site and there are usually 3 subspecialty rotations you can do, but it varies by site (I did anesthesia, IR, and ENT). Peds, OB/Gyn, Psych, and FM are all 6 weeks. Peds will involve inpatient and outpatient experience (my site also had 2 weeks of peds EM). Ob/gyn will include labor and delivery, gyn surgery, outpatient gyn and prenatal care, etc. My psych experience was between in-patient and consult-liason, no out-patient (fine by me). FM includes inpatient, though most is out-patient. Depending where you go, you may do some OB on FM (one classmate got to delivery a baby on FM).
On clerkships, you have to write 1-3 H&P that are usually pass/fail. You have "passports", which are basically documenting that you did certain things under the supervisions of a resident or attend (one of those useless/annoying things). There is a business of healthcare course, which I'm on the fence about, but I think I lean toward it being a good thing. There are webosce's during medicine and surgery (one each, I think). There is a professionalism course, which I didn't care for (get together and discuss your feelings about certain topics related to third year), but I know many liked this course. There is also a practice step 2 CS that everyone has to do toward the end of third year.
Clerkships have lectures integrated, either done by faculty at your site or done at HUH (e.g. ob/gyn). Some sites have more lectures than others.
3. Plenty of research available, there is an office you can go to get info (I didn't do any research, so I'm not much help on this topic.) There is a ton of community service - street side clinic, "eliza shirley", chinatown clinic, etc.
