Re: AOA
Just to clarify for other people that might not be familiar with what we're talking about, Dean Wing if I remember correctly felt that AOA was unnecessary, creates competition, and didn't embrace the "Brown Spirit," though I can't find the news article where I read that so I might be mistaken. Dean of Medicine and Biological Sciences Eli Adashi reactivated AOA. It looks like he arrived at Brown in 2004, reactivated AOA in 2006, and then stepped down from Dean in 2008, and so he made a potentially major change against student opinion and yet was Dean for less time than it takes PLMEs to get their undergrad degree. That sort of action was what concerned me about turnover in general.
http://www.browndailyherald.com/2006/03/03/possible-med-school-honors-society-sparks-student-outcry/
For me personally, it seems like AOA is great for the people who get it, hurts substantially the people in the top 25% who don't make the AOA cutoff, and is irrelevant to people not in the so-called top 25%.
Does Brown rank like that? The concern is irrelevant if they don't. (Note - question answered by aloepathic. Thanks!)
Dean Wing is a fantastic human being and a great leader. He really has helped advance our medical school to its current standing.
While I was on the residency interview trail I noticed that a lot of students were concerned that a department was about to undergo a change in chairman. When I looked at all the different departments that had recent replacements of chairman (usually due to retirment of the former chair) I found that the departments were continuing to flourish and in some cases do even better than before. I think that some parallels can be drawn in the replacement of our dean as well. Dean Wing did some amazing things for Brown, but he did replace someone else and I am sure people were concerned about that replacement as well. I don't think that there is anything to be worried about AT ALL!!! The people who get to these leadership positions are very driven and accomplished. I only see our school moving up in the world🙂
The AOA thing is a bit more iffy. Many students wanted to keep things the way they are and many students wanted AOA inductions to be made before the residency Match. If you are applying for a competitive specialty then having AOA on your record can be VERY helpful. Sometimes not having AOA and applying to Plastics/ENT/Ortho/Optho, for whatever reason, can hurt your application. So it is a mixed bag (i.e. good if you are going into something competitive but not so good if you are doing something else).
Thank you for offering your perspective
🙂 I'm pretty sure it'll turn out for the better - the AOA example just, for me, called to question the influence people can have. There's also the fact that Stanford/Harvard kids don't have AOA at all, and residency directors, realizing their schools don't have AOA, presumably don't penalize them for it. I guess residency apps don't have a checkbox for "my school doesn't have AOA," though...
H/P/F and AOA are definitely good things. For the preclinical years H/P/F is basically a joke, as AMS students don't really seem to care, theoretically the entire class could get honors (above a 90 on the test) and, as I had multiple program directors tell me, residencies don't really care about preclinical grades because they can use Step 1 to tell them all they need to know about how well you learned the material (plus classroom /= clinic). It's still in place because it can't hurt you, but in some limited cases it can help you. The example they give is if you have a bad showing on Step 1 but are really interested in Neurology, your Dean's letter can mention that although your Step 1 wasn't optimal you did honor the Neuro block so you definitely knew that info well.
In the clinical years you definitely want to go to a school that gives something other than P/F because you need to give program directors enough information to assess you accurately. It is *extremely* important in competitive fields that you honor the relevant rotations, and schools that don't have anything other than P/F get treated in variable (and frankly in some cases unfair) ways that usually result in the PD choosing a different aspect of your application to use as a surrogate (which may or not be something you'd like them to evaluate you on, aka how many times does your "work ethic" get mentioned in your written evals). Even noncompetitive fields use those (Harvard programs pretty much don't interview you for IM if you didn't honor your medicine clerkship), and if you look nationally there are only a handful of schools that truly use a P/F for the clinical years.
Brown doesn't rank. Period. We don't do quartiles, 'special adjectives' (aka this student is Exceptional vs Excellent vs Good vs Qualified), or anything else. There is nothing to tell anyone where you stand in the class.
AOA is not really a big thing here because it doesn't come out until after residency interviews are basically done (we found out 3 weeks ago). If you get it you can update programs for a late boost. If you don't, programs have pretty much already made up their mind anyway. I've never heard of it being controversial besides a few students who wanted to move up the deadline so it's before residency apps go in (the deadline stayed the same).
That's a great point about the uses of H/P/F to counter Step 1 missteps. You've definitely convinced me with regards to clinicals grading. No ranking = awesome - I've been to some "True P/F!" schools that then rank their students into quintiles. Uh, okay.
That sounds like a great way to do AOA - hopefully the residency programs recognize that fact, and people aren't penalized about it. I imagine eventually the "moving it up" will win over somebody (a Dean, for example) and it'll play out that way.
It'll be fun to see, though
🙂 Thank you for all the perspectives! Really cleared up some things for me. I wish second-look was earlier!
9 Days! My mind was lost waiting for the MCATs, now I'm just losing hair. I wonder how many of us SDNers are waiting?
Is that the last announcement day? Good luck everyone
🙂
So, I'm on the waitlist. Does anyone have any advice on what I could do now to present a strong case come May?
PM'd.
congrats!
