what is the early clinical experience like for you? There is this "Clinical Performance Development" course for four years, but I cannot find any details about it. I wonder when you get to practice taking H&P, take mock exam on standardized patients, and when you can examine real patients and/or attend the rounds in the morning? Early clinical experience is very important to me (though many have said it's just a sales pitch), so I wish to know how it is like under the new curriculum. Thank you!
Keep in mind that we've only been in school for 4 weeks, and we don't know much about the curriculum yet to come. Since CPD is another brand new course, they're only releasing the syllabus one week at a time, so we don't really know what's to come.
But, we have been working on patient interviewing. Last week (week 3), we had standardized patients come in and we did a group interview with them (with three students interviewing at a time). This past week (week 4), we learned how to take blood pressures on each other, and determine BMI. This next week (week 5), we get to go into the hospital to interview patients. According to the syllabus, we're just going to watch our mentors interview, but my mentor told us that we'd be partnering up and interviewing that way, so I'm not really sure what we'll be doing. We don't need our opthalmascopes until next semester, so I imagine we won't be getting too in depth with the physical before that. As I understand, it matches up with the rest of the curriculum, so we'll be learning much of the physical exam stuff as we're going through each of the system.
We get patient interviews in class each week. This past week, we had a kid with cystic fibrosis come in. Next week is hemophilia. As a part of Cells to Society (that's the first class you take), we did group interviews of diabetic patients. I'm doing SIM (Social Issues in Medicine) this semester, and part of my assignment is shadowing at the Children's Fitness Clinic.
So we do get a lot of patient interaction early on, and you can certainly find a doc to shadow if you want more (one of our CPD mentors is an ER doc, and he apparently loves to have med students shadow him). You don't get to actually participate in morning rounds until third year, though.
16% of the grade for MCM is a pretty significant portion especially if you dont think you are going to get 100% on all the exams.
Of course, I make the assumption that you're not going to skip out on all the mandatory classes... I imagine everyone will go to the labs and the small group things whether they want to or not, because it would suck to leave your group members doing work without you. Many of the ones we've had so far have points for taking some sort of quiz (though it looks like they might be moving away from that), or for doing something else prior to class (like that nutrition one... they gave points if you logged in for the module).
You can always be like my roommate. She'll go to the library in the morning and study, then actually show up for class when it's mandatory. Personally, I work on the learning objectives as the lecture is going on, so I tune out most of what they say anyway.
