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I graduated from UNECOM this year and here are my reflections on my medical education. All in all, I would say that, given my options for medical school, I would go to UNECOM again. However, I also feel very strongly, as do most of my friends, that my/our successes in entering residency was in spite of our school not because of it. I would say, don’t go to UNE and expect them to make you into something you can’t make yourself into through your own grit, intelligence and determination. You won’t be spoon fed and you won’t have the name of a famous medical school to get you into your dream residency program, but you can still make it happen. After all, UNE did give me the chance to become a doctor and I am entering the specialty of my choice, for that I am very thankful. Here is my long and honest experience at UNECOM for the last for years and everything I would have wanted to know as an applicant:
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In the first year, many students will show up and expect that they are at a medical school like those at a big university, they are not. There is always a lot of frustration and distrust of the education because it will not feel like the large academic education most would expect in medical school. Lectures strange and interactive, there are lots of mistakes, there are only a few professors and most everything is very new and not very refined. There is also a lot of turn over in the basic science and clinical faculty. I would say that the basic science teaching faculty really have a strong desire to teach you and help you learn and I liked a lot of them very much. The curriculum is a little funny in that it is supposed to be one of those “new-age” curriculums where students teach themselves. They will even give you studies to show how much better it is then a traditional lecture format. I personally had a bit of difficulty getting used to it and trusting it but once I did, I liked it a lot better than the more traditional lecture style. I was able to learn on my own, did a lot of googling instead of reading a text books etc.
It will often seem kind of silly and frustrating that the goals of the leadership of the school will be very different than the goals of most students: they want you to be a DO first and foremost and practice primary care in Maine. Whereas most students want to be doctors, they don’t care about the degree (MD vs DO etc.), and have other aspirations for a career (internal medicine, OBGYN, surgery, ED etc.).
In the first year the Anatomy is very good, you will know more anatomy than any other medical school and it will stick with you for a very long time. It’s very helpful in third and fourth year.
There will also be a huge amount of OMT. More than you would like, unless you were specifically there to learn OMT. Again, the goals of UNECOM are different than most medical students who attend. Almost all of the medical faculty are primary care and OMT practitioners so that is what you will be taught. They think that OMT is right up there with the most important parts of your education. Actually, during my first year, most of the students who didn’t make it through failed out because of OMT. They grade it very hard and a single mistake on an exam is a fail for the entire exam, two failed exams and you’re out of the school.. yeah it sounds a little crazy.
That brings up another thing: Students who fail first year. A lot more students fail out of first year at UNECOM than at most medical schools (I think). I am not sure if it is an issue with admitting those students who can’t cut it or if they want to fail out anyone who they decide may not pass the boards or some other reason. It didn’t seem like there was a really method to the madness, some smart people were sent home in the first semester also some not so smart people wern’t... Either way, it’s a major source of strife within the institution and I would say 50-60% of the class at some point fails something and feels like their head is on the chopping block. In my year I believe 8 or 10 students out of 170 didn’t make it to second year. I also hear from classes below me that they are failing out more students in first year than they had previously, so this could be worse now.
The last thing I will say about first and second year is that you will soon realize the school is incredibly disorganized and poor at communicating. It doesn’t sound like a big deal, however, over time you will find out they graded your exam incorrectly and people who failed had been told they passed and people who passed had actually failed, many test questions will have two correct answers, the dean will answer questions about her curriculum incorrectly and then argue with the student body instead about it after, they will lose some sort of important paperwork that you sent them eventually. They will forget to certify you to take the boards on time so that all the best time slots are taken by other DO schools when you sign up. Different OMT faculty will give different answers about what will be on your exams and how to do OMT techniques. They will tell you one thing and do the other and then tell you it’s your fault. Sometimes it feels like it’s part of the test just to deal with the chaos, but you get used to if for the most part. Also, It’s really kind of a small operation, there are only about 2-3 people who run the entire medical school one of them is old and was sick a lot, one is a pretty incompetent OMT fanatic and now the dean, and the others do their best to make it all work. The fact that UNECOM doesn’t have their own hospital means that its awful hard for them to get full time practicing physicians to be faculty except for local primary care and OMT docs who are alumni.
The boards: what the first two years of medical school come down to are level 1 and or step 1. If you know anything about medical school, you should know your grades don’t matter in year 1 and 2 (unless you fail a class). The board exams are basically the way residencies will determine how well you learned in your first two years and will be the #1 way a program ranks candidates for an interview. For DOs there are different boards than MDs. The DOs take COMLEX level 1 and the MDs take the USMLE step 1. If you’re a DO and you want to compete with MDs for a residency position, you usually take both exams (USMLE1 AND COMLEX1). Now that is an over simplification, there are plenty of examples of DOs who don’t take USMLE and do just fine applying for positions in PM&R, IM, Peds, anesthesia etc. there are also DO residency programs and a whole separate match from DOs who only take the COMLEX that excludes the MDs entirely (this is going away in 2020 in the GME merger but that’s another story). If you want to be a bad ass, you will probably want to take two board exams. about 50-70% of our class at UNECOM took both exams. When you go to study for the USMLE, you will soon realize, UNECOM will not help you take the USMLE, they will not provide any education that is focused on the USMLE and they don’t have any interest in recording your USMLE score or supporting students who have an interest in excelling in an MD world or competing for positions that aren’t primary care in Maine. In any event, I and most of my friends taught ourselves the necessary USMLE material and plenty of us did will on the exam (well above the average MD student) Then again I do hear about plenty who got murdered by the USMLE and the COMLEX. When I was in second year, we didn’t have to go to class, and all winter and spring everyone stayed home to study for boards. You will find that board review materials can teach you in 20 minutes what takes a UNECOM professor 4 hours to teach. When I stopped going to class my test grades went up and I was still spending most of my time studding biochem and micro bio instead of our test topics because those topics were largely which was omitted in the first year. If I had not had January onwards of my second year to study, I would not have done nearly as well on the boards because I had a lot to catch up on that just wasn’t covered by our school for the USMLE. However, now, I hear they are requiring students to attend lecture. If true, that would be pretty upsetting it will make it a lot harder for you to study 8-10 hours a day to make up for the material on the USMLE. I would also say that that is the one thing that might be a deal breaker for me to do it all over again, and if other schools like NYCOM, PCOM etc. have optional classes in second year I may choose those schools over UNE. There is certainly a desire to focus on passing, not excelling, on the boards. Part of this may be because the goal is producing family med / OMT docs or maybe because the school only reports pass rates not averages, but UNECOM won’t really care how well you do on the boards so long as you pass. You really have to be a self-motivator if you want to get yourself into the higher percentiles and get a good residency position. I was once told by one of the OMT faculty not to study for the boards so much, as long as I passed I was fine: this is not the case if you want to do something more exciting than family med for your life.
Third and fourth year: I would say that the third and fourth year has a lot more positive aspects than the first two years. Many think that because of UNE's location they will rotate in Boston or Portland; you wont. The school had a big ugly fight with Maine Medical Center many years back over DO / political stuff and so either 4 or 0 students rotate there. Maine medical center is now a primary and exclusive teaching site for Tufts Medical School. You will likely do third year in a medium sized community hospital, and there is every year a struggle to find enough spots, thats just the nature of the beast. So, UNECOM doesn’t own an academic hospital like most medical schools.This means a few things: the training sites are always changing, not all the attending’s you work with have much experience training medical students, there are rare cases where not everyone gets a third year site (happened to 6 people in my class), your education is more dependent on your own self education than it would be at a big established med school, you will not find attending’s who can give you the great advice you could get at an academic medical center (there is no program director in internal medicine who can advise you on residency apps) but attending’s will be very, very helpful, you will get autonomy (I delivered 12 babies in my first month of third year, some of them without the attending’s putting gloves on), you won’t have residents taking patients and procedures away from you, you will learn through a preceptorship model rather than the academic model of following a team with residents and attending’s. I found some great mentors in my third year, people who let me do more than most junior residents get to do in the ICU /ED / OR. There is little or no curriculum for formal teaching. Some attending’s would organize teaching sessions but it wasn’t like what I experienced on away rotations forth year at larger medical schools. Often, if students went home mid day, nobody would know or care, so you really get out of it what you put in. But, if you’re always around, study and are a good person to work with, you’ll have attending’s call you at home to come in and do procedures on the weekends or at night and they will teach you how to read an EKG / fetal monitors when they have time etc etc. It is pretty cool to get to hang out with a doc who has been doing it for 30+ years, something you don’t usually get to do until later in residency.
4th year and Residency apps: You’re on your own, notice a theme here? The office of clinical education is probably the best organized and most disciplined part of UNECOM, but they are made up of 6 people for 175 students at 13 different third year sits and an unlimited number of fourth year sights. You will set up your entire forth year on your own. You will apply / call / beg people to take you for a month at a time to get your third year education. In some ways this is good, you can spend a month with a family friend working 3 days a week during step 2 of the boards or during your residency interviews, you can live at home if you find a doc nearby who will take you in etc. In other ways it’s hard to justify $50,000 in tuition for the school to do next to nothing in educating you. If you need advice, again, you’re pretty much on your own, the office of clinical education has some great people who will help you to the best of their abilities, but they don’t have faculty who are program directors at residency programs, they are way overworked. for instance, if you want to do radiology, UNE doesn’t employ any radiologists, never mind any who are familiar with the current residency application process and climate. Thus, you do get every year, those students who apply to specialties they are not competitive for and there is no one there to tell them they won’t get into Orthopedics with a below average board score. The clinical education office really works hard to communicate well with you and they bend over backwards to help you. They will try to find you people to advise you in the specialty your applying to if you need help and they are building a strong alumni database of recent grads to give advice to students.
All in all, our 2017 match was what you’d expect: a mixed bag. Some very very good matches to Ivy league programs, one in ACGME interventional radiology, also ACGME vascular surgery, and general surgery & strong ACGME Internal medicine programs, several AOA orthopedic programs, one in AOA neurosurgery, strong ACGME academic pediatric, ED, and OBGYN matches, etc. But also a lot of family medicine, and traditional rotating years / preliminary years of people who didn’t land where they wanted. Some family med programs that are excellent and are exactly what people have dreamed of doing since being little kids too! I don’t mean to be negative about any specialty but the number of DOs going into family medicine isn’t because for some reason DOs love family medicine more than MDs. All in all we probably lost about 20 people from our class of 170 over the last 4 years that didn't make it to graduation, thats too high for my liking. I would also say that given a DO and MD with equivalent applications in every other way, most programs are going to pick the MD over the DO, so you have to be above average for the specialty you’re applying to, to get a good spot, but its doable.
Every year there are lots of students at UNECOM who do very very well on their boards and are excellent clinicians who get great residency spots. If I could do it all over again I would still attend UNE, unless they make second year classes mandatory, then I’d consider my other options. The step one score in second year determines your destiny for ever after. If I had the chance to go to a more established MD program more in line with my goals (Which don’t include being a PCP in Maine) I would have taken that opportunity. Reputation wise, I think UNECOM is one of the best DO programs out there and is also far superior to going abroad for medical school. You can go there and do most things in medicine afterwards if you have the grit, intelligence and drive to make UNECOM a success.
Sorry about any typos, don't have all day to proofread this novel I just wrote.
Best of luck to all you premeds out there. It only gets harder, but is also a lot more fun, from where you are now!
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In the first year, many students will show up and expect that they are at a medical school like those at a big university, they are not. There is always a lot of frustration and distrust of the education because it will not feel like the large academic education most would expect in medical school. Lectures strange and interactive, there are lots of mistakes, there are only a few professors and most everything is very new and not very refined. There is also a lot of turn over in the basic science and clinical faculty. I would say that the basic science teaching faculty really have a strong desire to teach you and help you learn and I liked a lot of them very much. The curriculum is a little funny in that it is supposed to be one of those “new-age” curriculums where students teach themselves. They will even give you studies to show how much better it is then a traditional lecture format. I personally had a bit of difficulty getting used to it and trusting it but once I did, I liked it a lot better than the more traditional lecture style. I was able to learn on my own, did a lot of googling instead of reading a text books etc.
It will often seem kind of silly and frustrating that the goals of the leadership of the school will be very different than the goals of most students: they want you to be a DO first and foremost and practice primary care in Maine. Whereas most students want to be doctors, they don’t care about the degree (MD vs DO etc.), and have other aspirations for a career (internal medicine, OBGYN, surgery, ED etc.).
In the first year the Anatomy is very good, you will know more anatomy than any other medical school and it will stick with you for a very long time. It’s very helpful in third and fourth year.
There will also be a huge amount of OMT. More than you would like, unless you were specifically there to learn OMT. Again, the goals of UNECOM are different than most medical students who attend. Almost all of the medical faculty are primary care and OMT practitioners so that is what you will be taught. They think that OMT is right up there with the most important parts of your education. Actually, during my first year, most of the students who didn’t make it through failed out because of OMT. They grade it very hard and a single mistake on an exam is a fail for the entire exam, two failed exams and you’re out of the school.. yeah it sounds a little crazy.
That brings up another thing: Students who fail first year. A lot more students fail out of first year at UNECOM than at most medical schools (I think). I am not sure if it is an issue with admitting those students who can’t cut it or if they want to fail out anyone who they decide may not pass the boards or some other reason. It didn’t seem like there was a really method to the madness, some smart people were sent home in the first semester also some not so smart people wern’t... Either way, it’s a major source of strife within the institution and I would say 50-60% of the class at some point fails something and feels like their head is on the chopping block. In my year I believe 8 or 10 students out of 170 didn’t make it to second year. I also hear from classes below me that they are failing out more students in first year than they had previously, so this could be worse now.
The last thing I will say about first and second year is that you will soon realize the school is incredibly disorganized and poor at communicating. It doesn’t sound like a big deal, however, over time you will find out they graded your exam incorrectly and people who failed had been told they passed and people who passed had actually failed, many test questions will have two correct answers, the dean will answer questions about her curriculum incorrectly and then argue with the student body instead about it after, they will lose some sort of important paperwork that you sent them eventually. They will forget to certify you to take the boards on time so that all the best time slots are taken by other DO schools when you sign up. Different OMT faculty will give different answers about what will be on your exams and how to do OMT techniques. They will tell you one thing and do the other and then tell you it’s your fault. Sometimes it feels like it’s part of the test just to deal with the chaos, but you get used to if for the most part. Also, It’s really kind of a small operation, there are only about 2-3 people who run the entire medical school one of them is old and was sick a lot, one is a pretty incompetent OMT fanatic and now the dean, and the others do their best to make it all work. The fact that UNECOM doesn’t have their own hospital means that its awful hard for them to get full time practicing physicians to be faculty except for local primary care and OMT docs who are alumni.
The boards: what the first two years of medical school come down to are level 1 and or step 1. If you know anything about medical school, you should know your grades don’t matter in year 1 and 2 (unless you fail a class). The board exams are basically the way residencies will determine how well you learned in your first two years and will be the #1 way a program ranks candidates for an interview. For DOs there are different boards than MDs. The DOs take COMLEX level 1 and the MDs take the USMLE step 1. If you’re a DO and you want to compete with MDs for a residency position, you usually take both exams (USMLE1 AND COMLEX1). Now that is an over simplification, there are plenty of examples of DOs who don’t take USMLE and do just fine applying for positions in PM&R, IM, Peds, anesthesia etc. there are also DO residency programs and a whole separate match from DOs who only take the COMLEX that excludes the MDs entirely (this is going away in 2020 in the GME merger but that’s another story). If you want to be a bad ass, you will probably want to take two board exams. about 50-70% of our class at UNECOM took both exams. When you go to study for the USMLE, you will soon realize, UNECOM will not help you take the USMLE, they will not provide any education that is focused on the USMLE and they don’t have any interest in recording your USMLE score or supporting students who have an interest in excelling in an MD world or competing for positions that aren’t primary care in Maine. In any event, I and most of my friends taught ourselves the necessary USMLE material and plenty of us did will on the exam (well above the average MD student) Then again I do hear about plenty who got murdered by the USMLE and the COMLEX. When I was in second year, we didn’t have to go to class, and all winter and spring everyone stayed home to study for boards. You will find that board review materials can teach you in 20 minutes what takes a UNECOM professor 4 hours to teach. When I stopped going to class my test grades went up and I was still spending most of my time studding biochem and micro bio instead of our test topics because those topics were largely which was omitted in the first year. If I had not had January onwards of my second year to study, I would not have done nearly as well on the boards because I had a lot to catch up on that just wasn’t covered by our school for the USMLE. However, now, I hear they are requiring students to attend lecture. If true, that would be pretty upsetting it will make it a lot harder for you to study 8-10 hours a day to make up for the material on the USMLE. I would also say that that is the one thing that might be a deal breaker for me to do it all over again, and if other schools like NYCOM, PCOM etc. have optional classes in second year I may choose those schools over UNE. There is certainly a desire to focus on passing, not excelling, on the boards. Part of this may be because the goal is producing family med / OMT docs or maybe because the school only reports pass rates not averages, but UNECOM won’t really care how well you do on the boards so long as you pass. You really have to be a self-motivator if you want to get yourself into the higher percentiles and get a good residency position. I was once told by one of the OMT faculty not to study for the boards so much, as long as I passed I was fine: this is not the case if you want to do something more exciting than family med for your life.
Third and fourth year: I would say that the third and fourth year has a lot more positive aspects than the first two years. Many think that because of UNE's location they will rotate in Boston or Portland; you wont. The school had a big ugly fight with Maine Medical Center many years back over DO / political stuff and so either 4 or 0 students rotate there. Maine medical center is now a primary and exclusive teaching site for Tufts Medical School. You will likely do third year in a medium sized community hospital, and there is every year a struggle to find enough spots, thats just the nature of the beast. So, UNECOM doesn’t own an academic hospital like most medical schools.This means a few things: the training sites are always changing, not all the attending’s you work with have much experience training medical students, there are rare cases where not everyone gets a third year site (happened to 6 people in my class), your education is more dependent on your own self education than it would be at a big established med school, you will not find attending’s who can give you the great advice you could get at an academic medical center (there is no program director in internal medicine who can advise you on residency apps) but attending’s will be very, very helpful, you will get autonomy (I delivered 12 babies in my first month of third year, some of them without the attending’s putting gloves on), you won’t have residents taking patients and procedures away from you, you will learn through a preceptorship model rather than the academic model of following a team with residents and attending’s. I found some great mentors in my third year, people who let me do more than most junior residents get to do in the ICU /ED / OR. There is little or no curriculum for formal teaching. Some attending’s would organize teaching sessions but it wasn’t like what I experienced on away rotations forth year at larger medical schools. Often, if students went home mid day, nobody would know or care, so you really get out of it what you put in. But, if you’re always around, study and are a good person to work with, you’ll have attending’s call you at home to come in and do procedures on the weekends or at night and they will teach you how to read an EKG / fetal monitors when they have time etc etc. It is pretty cool to get to hang out with a doc who has been doing it for 30+ years, something you don’t usually get to do until later in residency.
4th year and Residency apps: You’re on your own, notice a theme here? The office of clinical education is probably the best organized and most disciplined part of UNECOM, but they are made up of 6 people for 175 students at 13 different third year sits and an unlimited number of fourth year sights. You will set up your entire forth year on your own. You will apply / call / beg people to take you for a month at a time to get your third year education. In some ways this is good, you can spend a month with a family friend working 3 days a week during step 2 of the boards or during your residency interviews, you can live at home if you find a doc nearby who will take you in etc. In other ways it’s hard to justify $50,000 in tuition for the school to do next to nothing in educating you. If you need advice, again, you’re pretty much on your own, the office of clinical education has some great people who will help you to the best of their abilities, but they don’t have faculty who are program directors at residency programs, they are way overworked. for instance, if you want to do radiology, UNE doesn’t employ any radiologists, never mind any who are familiar with the current residency application process and climate. Thus, you do get every year, those students who apply to specialties they are not competitive for and there is no one there to tell them they won’t get into Orthopedics with a below average board score. The clinical education office really works hard to communicate well with you and they bend over backwards to help you. They will try to find you people to advise you in the specialty your applying to if you need help and they are building a strong alumni database of recent grads to give advice to students.
All in all, our 2017 match was what you’d expect: a mixed bag. Some very very good matches to Ivy league programs, one in ACGME interventional radiology, also ACGME vascular surgery, and general surgery & strong ACGME Internal medicine programs, several AOA orthopedic programs, one in AOA neurosurgery, strong ACGME academic pediatric, ED, and OBGYN matches, etc. But also a lot of family medicine, and traditional rotating years / preliminary years of people who didn’t land where they wanted. Some family med programs that are excellent and are exactly what people have dreamed of doing since being little kids too! I don’t mean to be negative about any specialty but the number of DOs going into family medicine isn’t because for some reason DOs love family medicine more than MDs. All in all we probably lost about 20 people from our class of 170 over the last 4 years that didn't make it to graduation, thats too high for my liking. I would also say that given a DO and MD with equivalent applications in every other way, most programs are going to pick the MD over the DO, so you have to be above average for the specialty you’re applying to, to get a good spot, but its doable.
Every year there are lots of students at UNECOM who do very very well on their boards and are excellent clinicians who get great residency spots. If I could do it all over again I would still attend UNE, unless they make second year classes mandatory, then I’d consider my other options. The step one score in second year determines your destiny for ever after. If I had the chance to go to a more established MD program more in line with my goals (Which don’t include being a PCP in Maine) I would have taken that opportunity. Reputation wise, I think UNECOM is one of the best DO programs out there and is also far superior to going abroad for medical school. You can go there and do most things in medicine afterwards if you have the grit, intelligence and drive to make UNECOM a success.
Sorry about any typos, don't have all day to proofread this novel I just wrote.
Best of luck to all you premeds out there. It only gets harder, but is also a lot more fun, from where you are now!
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