Hi - I'm new to this thread and have been somewhat-following everything people have been saying, and I finally wanted to ask a question to any of the current students at Pritzker - what do you think makes the curriculum itself unique? I was comparing the curriculum at Pritzker with other schools, and I can see a sort of broad to more specific trend, but I'm not sure if that's what really makes Pritzker's curriculum really stand out? I was hoping to hear first hand experiences, but any other input would be great too 🙂!
To be entirely honest, for the most part a med school curriculum is a med school curriculum. You're going to learn the same material, and with the exception of PBL vs. didactic lecture, schools are only going to differ with respect to the minor details in their curriculi. I would look for the following things when looking at a curriculum:
- Is it pass/fail or traditional grading? (GO WITH PASS/FAIL)
- Is there a research requirement? (If you're interested in research, you might want to go to a school where it's a formal requirement and built into the curriculum)
- Is it PBL or lecture-based? (Totally personal preference)
All that said, there are a couple of things that stand out in my mind as somewhat unique to Pritzker. The first is the Scholarship and Discovery "course," which is the formal research requirement. The course spans all four years (we're having our first class in it today) and helps you choose an area of study and find a mentor for your work. While I wouldn't say this is particularly unique since many schools have research requirements, I don't remember seeing a curriculum where the course was required throughout all of the years.
Another aspect of the curriculum that I found particularly cool was that research is extremely easy to do. You aren't charged for more than 16 quarters (a.k.a. four years) of tuition, so if you want to to take a year to do research, you only have to pay for living expenses (the school actually has fellowships that you apply for that can cover these as well). This also applies if for whatever reason you have to redo a year or any other unusual circumstance.
The final thing that I've found unique/cool is a tool the school uses called TIMESpace. It's essentially a searchable database of all of the lectures (recorded and synced to the PowerPoints the professors used) in your classes and in the years prior. If you interview here and are told that lectures are placed "online," this is the tool that does that. You get access to this tool for all four years, the idea being that if you see something in the hospital during the third/fourth year and need a basic science refresher, you can login to TIMESpace and search for your topic and check out some of the lectures come up. The system will also allow you to do a "cloud search," which basically gives you a list of topics related to what you searched for that might give you the information you want. If you search for heart failure, for example, you might be given links to the anatomy of the heart, cardiac physiology, and pathology of the heart (the topics you would actually see would all be more specific than that, of course). With something as relatively simple as this I would expect every school to have a similar system, but alas I haven't heard about a similar system at any other school. I don't have any real use for it now (other than rewatching the recorded lectures), but I can see how it would be incredibly useful for board studying and as a reference in the later years.
Keep in mind that I'm only going into day 2 of classes so my perspective is pretty limited, but I hope that helps. Good luck!
I am sure you have nothing to worry as you have a strong mcat score.
