How was accepted students day? Was there anything important they talked about?
I enjoyed it, but I think there was a lot of stuff that was either repeated from the interview day or was stuff I already knew from general research. However, there was a good hunk of information that I thought was extremely informative, especially when Dr. Dubin (the new dean) spoke. Of everything we heard these were the major highlights for me:
1.
The core curriculum is changing, kind of. It will still be completely systems based, but instead of covering some systems in year 1 and finishing the rest in year 2, we will be covering every system in both years. Year 1 will cover all the systems with heavy emphasis on the anatomy/physiology of each system. Year 2 will then cover all of the systems again, in a different order, and will focus on pathologies that occur in the systems. This will allow students to better understand how systems interact with each other and how various pathologies, drugs, etc. can affect multiple systems. The way he described it was that the new curriculum will fix the biggest flaw of the systems based approach. So the core curriculum sounds like it will actually be even better than it already is.
2. There will be
2 new tracks available for our class, a global health track and a military medicine track. The milmed track will benefit those students pursuing the HPSP or just careers in the military in general. The global medicine track is an honors program designed for students who want to become involved with Doctors Without Borders or other international organizations. They said this track would focus on working with people of other cultures and identifying medical needs within those societies. We will have to apply to a track if interested sometime towards the middle/end of our first semester and will have to be in the top 1/3 of the class to be considered for the global med track. Personally, I'm incredibly excited about the global medicine track, so you all will have to forgive me if I come across as a gunner for the first few weeks...
3.
New facilities! Most of us know they are doing construction on the auditorium and adding 2 big classrooms to the building. What we just learned Fridays is that they are building a new 30,000 sq ft simulation lab which they will start construction on during the summer of 2015. Our lab will be the second facility in the country to have a new type of 'cut' dummy which we will actually be able to practice surgeries on. Supposedly this is the closest thing any student can get to performing an actual surgery without using a living human as the subject as the dummies are meant to be cut with a scalpel, bleed, react to mistakes, and are anatomically accurate. Dr. Dubin also said that Harvard and Yale med have purchased these dummies and will be integrating them into their curriculum as well. The catch is that he never said when the facility would be finished, only that we would still be here to see it. He hinted that we may get to use it to practice during our third or fourth years (class of 2018), but that is obviously dependent on when the construction is completed.
4.
Score 2. Apparently this will basically be the same thing as the Score 1 program, but instead of working with kids it will focus on giving medical care to geriatric patients.
5. Though it will not be required for our class,
future classes will be required to take both DO and MD boards (COMLEX and USMLE). Even though Dr. Dubin said our class would not be required to take the USMLE, he said that he is going to strongly recommend that we all take them both. He said this is because by 2020 all DOs and MDs will be accredited by the same institution and many residencies now want to see both sets of board scores (even osteopathic residencies). Side note: apparently this means that in the future MDs will be required to have some knowledge of OMM, which I thought was interesting and somewhat ironic...
6. They are
not adding any new core rotation sites in the next 5 years. I know I was kind of hoping they would consider adding a site in the northern IL area, but they were very adamant in this point. They said that in the next few years they are going to be focusing on improving their current rotation sites and increasing the amount of resources available to our students at those sites. I'm not sure what 'resources' they will be adding or how the current sites will be improved, but the bottom line is that they will not add or remove any rotation sites while we will be attending.
7. Dr. Dubin stated that
"it is very likely that we will be doing away with mandatory attendance in the near future". He said that lectures are not only a terrible way for most people to learn material, but that there was no reason a student should have to go to a lecture where a professor reads off a powerpoint when the student can just study it on their own or download the lecture and watch it at 2x the speed. He said that since technology has led us to the point where we have access to almost any information we could need, there's no need to attend a session that will just be "lecture karaoke". That being said, he wants future lectures to focus less on the actual material and focus more on letting us know what material is actually relevant. He also hopes to incorporate more of the type of questions we will encounter on board exams into the actual lectures so we will have a better chance to dominate our boards.
I know there were a lot of other things that were discussed, but these were the major things that I took away from the event. Overall, almost everything I heard was positive and I'm more excited than ever to get down to KC next semester. I hope this was helpful to all those that didn't make it to the event and that it answers some of the questions about the school that were brought up in previous posts.
