Back from my hiatus to comment on a thread I started.
As a current first year as well, I felt the need to give some input. I won't agree/disagree with
@Steele because they are at Ipswich. So those are their personal opinions. I can only comment on St. Lucia.
I was told to avoid Ipswich like the plague. That they had limited resources in terms of lecturers and anatomy. So I chose St. Lucia. Perhaps I was lucky in who I knew in the program beforehand.
It is disorganised here in St. Lucia. But it's a functional disorganised. If you are self-motivated, then you will succeed here.
Some of the problems encountered are physiology of the kidney for example being taught after we've been forced to learn it on our own. This led to some lectures feeling a bit pointless or repetitive. It was frustrating as it didn't seem to follow a logical order. I agree pathology can be taught much better and I hate learning it all online. The flipped classroom is stupid. But some people don't mind it. Gives you more free time to study for the USMLE, which is a huge advantage.
With some weird order of lectures and some stupid lectures (on chest x-rays), I found that at the end of semester 1, UQ medicine gave me a good knowledge base and education despite being slightly disorganised. Don't take my statement on the order of lectures too strongly, for the most part all the lectures were nicely organised and put together in logical order. I hear that Ipswich students lectures are terribly organised and there is a poor fellow on our facebook group who often asks every week almost for our lecture schedule to organise his lectures. I feel sorry for the Ipswich students, I'm not sure why they don't have the same order of lectures or access to materials we have. It is unfair completely.
It's weird that
@Steele comments that they recently found out about the campus closing after this year because I knew about it just from general gossip and my friend at Ipswich many months ago. That same friend has already moved and found a house in Brisbane. So you might hear some different perspectives.
So in terms of St. Lucia, to summarise. I like it here. It feels disorganised at times but medicine is huge subject to teach. CBL is great, my group learns so much. I had a crap tutor last semester but still learned a lot. This semester, I have an excellent CBL tutor, he makes each session a golden opportunity to learn. I realised from all the disarray order came in terms of knowledge and I think it was well worth it. But this was my experience at St. Lucia. The only thing that made me unhappy really was learning pathology online. It is a vital subject and trying to teach it online is futuristic and all but it's dumb. Our USMLE tutors here in St. Lucia were excellent (except for a few) and I really have learned a lot from them. I admire their effort they put in to teach us, so again I feel sorry for Ipswich students that have suffered on this point. Another point I didn't like, is that the exams were hard to gauge in terms of what they wanted us to know. If you studied everything you were find. But if you focused too much on physiology, you were screwed. This isn't like exams from undergraduate, they are comprehensive in terms of knowledge which is good. You have to know specific receptors to what vitamin is deficient in certain disease states for example.
Let me know if you have any further questions. If you are debating on applying, figure out if you are a self-motivated learner. If not, it is not the right fit for you. Then again, no one will hold your hand in medical school. At the end of the day, it is up to YOU to learn the knowledge, no one can put it there for you. They can only give you the resources to learn. I would apply here again, no questions asked because it gave me the opportunity to become a doctor. Yes, I would have loved to go to medical school in the US but I didn't get in. So this ended up being my second choice. I do not regret coming here and recommend it to those who really want to become doctors. You will have to put in a lot of work and sometimes it will feel like you're teaching yourself from google and wikipedia. Which you will be. But the lectures and key learning issues and labs are all there to give you a framework to work around. CBL helps bring into real life perspective and is pure gold. Clinical practice is amazing and I learn so much in terms of how to examine patients.
So yeah. I like it.