2015-2016 Oakland University (Beaumont) Application Thread

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Anyone know if they accept a certain number of applicants from each interview date? If so, how many?
 
postit said:
Anyone know if they accept a certain number of applicants from each interview date? If so, how many?
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Every interview group has a unique set of applicants, I would imagine the number they accept varies from group to group with no definite number. Overall, they have a 50-60% acceptance rate post interview, so your chances are pretty good here compared to other schools.
 
They haven't started making calls yet.. I thought forsure they would by 3:30 PM.. for anyone wondering they will tweet when they start making calls on this page: https://twitter.com/ouwbadmissions
They probably reviewed 12/11, 12/17, and some of the next interview day applications after 12/17
 
If they've already reviewed our interview date and we send an update, will they re-review our file?
 
n4229 said:
Does anyone know when they schedule interviews until? And is there a way to get a status update? Complete 9/25 and still waiting 🙁
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I believe interviews run into February and potentially overflow into March if they still want to do some more. According to this there are 48 spots remaining, although I don't know how flexible they may be with that number: http://www.oakland.edu/medicine/admissions/interviews.
 
Hey, so, I don't know if this is impolite to bring up but I was wondering, how are people at OUWB responding to their neighbors in Flint? Flint's like 40 miles from the school, right?
 
mrslandingham said:
You're right, Flint's about 45 minutes away. We actually have been organizing a few things since we've been back, and it's been completely student-organized so far, which is awesome.
  • We're collecting bottled water to donate, though we're hearing that particular need is close to being met through gov't assistance, charities, other donations, etc. We are trying to find local organizations that are in greatest need to donate what we have. For instance, there is a church that is distributing water to undocumented immigrants, who are often hesitant to go to larger charities or government organizations for help.
  • We're hoping to fundraise and donate to a local or national organization that's helping with the crisis. We're trying to set it up officially through the OU and Beaumont administration so that we can collect donations from the university/hospital and get donations from more than just OUWB students. There's a bit of red tape with that, which is taking some time to get through.
  • We have several days planned over the next few months where groups of students will be going up to Flint for the day and volunteering with the Red Cross to help put together water testing kits and go door-to-door to distribute water, assess needs of families, etc.
  • There has also been some talk of putting together some kind of educational handout or program for Flint residents about lead poisoning, water safety, etc. if there is a need. Haven't heard any specific plans for this yet.
I'm not involved with the planning, so that's all I know, but there are a handful of people who have been really active in figuring out how we can help. Many OUWB students have been closely following the issue and a ton have volunteered their time and money to lend a hand wherever possible.
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That is awesome! Also, great question Pageantry!
 
ThinkReallyFast said:
That is awesome! Also, great question Pageantry!
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That is awesome. Good for the students! But I admit I am curious why the administration hasn't gotten more involved, cleared the red tape, etc..? Seems like a perfect opportunity for the school to raise public awareness of its place in the community while doing some good. But I'm sure the reasons are significant too.
 
mrslandingham said:
Based on my limited involvement with the planning, the administration seems to be doing everything they can to support us. I know Dean Grabowski has been helpful in providing some information and ideas to us in the Facebook conversation we've all been having, and students have been working with a few other administrators you all probably haven't met yet. When I say it's taking a while to set up the fundraiser, I just mean it's something we weren't able to do immediately, like we were with collecting water and signing up to volunteer. We have only been back to school for about three weeks and just got these ideas rolling a week or two ago. I don't mean to imply that administrators have been sitting on this for months for no good reason or anything like that.
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Oh thanks, that's good to hear. Would you please keep us posted about this? Someone sent me that terrible New Yorker article about L. Brooks Patterson ("Drop Dead, Detroit!") and it made me nervous that Oakland County in general might not care too much about the poor. The Flint situation is just awful, but it's great to get to see OUWB show what it's really made of.
 
pageantry said:
Oh thanks, that's good to hear. Would you please keep us posted about this? Someone sent me that terrible New Yorker article about L. Brooks Patterson ("Drop Dead, Detroit!") and it made me nervous that Oakland County in general might not care too much about the poor. The Flint situation is just awful, but it's great to get to see OUWB show what it's really made of.
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I pretty much grew up in Michigan, and L. Brooks Patterson is one of the biggest Republicans there is. Oakland County is a very red county in a blue state, Patterson probably one of Snyder's (the Governors) cronies. All the auto executives live in Oakland County, so this is suburbia at its finest. Beaumont Hospital is is Royal Oak, which is more middle class than Rochester, where Oakland University.

If you really want a poor, urban environment, I suggest you look at Wayne State University (alas, OOS tuition there is outrageous). Their unwritten motto is practicing first world medicine in a third world environment. Beaumont Hospital has an advertising tag line "do you have a Beaumont Doctor?". The joke in Ann Arbor (one of their biggest competitors) is "Your Beaumont Doctor was trained at U of Michigan". Ann Arbor is pretty affluent too, with the medicaid population is only 13% at U of Michigan, versus 60% in Detroit hospitals. Big re-distribution of reimbursement at the state level to transfer funds from Beaumont/U of Michigan to Detroit to fund the different payor mixes.

The Flint situation is a true embarassment in Michigan (on the front pages of the NYT). It was all money driven by a state appointed emergency manager (with a lot of controversy around the Governor appointed managers). Certainly took the Governor's nationwide ambitions off the table (he is in his second term, so will be term limited). That the Govenor is now throwing some money at the problem, and has expanded medical services for the children effected does earn him some brownie points, but it is too little, way too late.
 
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I've been following all this stuff very closely because I have a lot of friends from Michigan, hence why I applied. But, tbh, hearing that Michiganders elected someone like that (two terms!) and then learning about just how egregious the socioeconomic disparities are across county lines has really made me nervous about going to what otherwise seems like a great school.

Would a doctor who cares about the poor be supported... or scorned, Patterson-style? And can a person feel safe living in a state that does things like that to its impoverished citizens? Can a person in an unaffected county feel confident that their tuition and energy isn't fundamentally supporting a system of egregious inequality? This is why knowing if the school is actively responding is important to me, because it reflects the culture of the administration, and thus the culture of the school in general.

I don't mean to be a buzzkill. I truly appreciate your thoughts on all this, both of you.
 
pageantry said:
I've been following all this stuff very closely because I have a lot of friends from Michigan, hence why I applied. But, tbh, hearing that Michiganders elected someone like that (two terms!) and then learning about just how egregious the socioeconomic disparities are across county lines has really made me nervous about going to what otherwise seems like a great school.

Would a doctor who cares about the poor be supported... or scorned, Patterson-style? And can a person feel safe living in a state that does things like that to its impoverished citizens? Can a person in an unaffected county feel confident that their tuition and energy isn't fundamentally supporting a system of egregious inequality? This is why knowing if the school is actively responding is important to me, because it reflects the culture of the administration, and thus the culture of the school in general.

I don't mean to be a buzzkill. I truly appreciate your thoughts on all this, both of you.
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Well, Rick Snyder is really not that bad for a Republican (and I'm a card carrying Democrat). He sort of got caught on this one by the incompetence of his administration (and the need to help out a lot of communities/school systems and cities that are nearly bankrupt). He inherited a lot of problems. However, that his admin sort of swept the problems under the carpet, for people who are disenfranchised, is his undoing. We had 8 years of Granholm (a Democrat) before Snyder, and she wasn't able to solve some of the systemic problems in Michigan (a previously strong union state with a lot of employee legacy costs at the school/local and state level). Only the car companies were able to shed their legacy costs by going bankrupt. We are not letting our schools/cities do the same thing as the car companies, because the federal government won't back stop it. This problem is decades in the making, and won't be solved any time soon.
 
pageantry said:
I've been following all this stuff very closely because I have a lot of friends from Michigan, hence why I applied. But, tbh, hearing that Michiganders elected someone like that (two terms!) and then learning about just how egregious the socioeconomic disparities are across county lines has really made me nervous about going to what otherwise seems like a great school.

Would a doctor who cares about the poor be supported... or scorned, Patterson-style? And can a person feel safe living in a state that does things like that to its impoverished citizens? Can a person in an unaffected county feel confident that their tuition and energy isn't fundamentally supporting a system of egregious inequality? This is why knowing if the school is actively responding is important to me, because it reflects the culture of the administration, and thus the culture of the school in general.

I don't mean to be a buzzkill. I truly appreciate your thoughts on all this, both of you.
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I sort of chuckle about thinking of Michigan and our inequality as truly different than most other states, but I think Texas is a truly scary state. Some of Texas Republican Policies disenfranchise women, children, immigrants, poor, minorities, etc. Not sure what state doesn't have vast inequalities, unless you count ND or Wy, which have very sparse, homogenous populations. Afraid my politics are showing.
 
Rainbow Zebra said:
Well, Rick Snyder is really not that bad for a Republican (and I'm a card carrying Democrat). He sort of got caught on this one by the incompetence of his administration (and the need to help out a lot of communities/school systems and cities that are nearly bankrupt). He inherited a lot of problems. However, that his admin sort of swept the problems under the carpet, for people who are disenfranchised, is his undoing. We had 8 years of Granholm (a Democrat) before Snyder, and she wasn't able to solve some of the systemic problems in Michigan (a previously strong union state with a lot of employee legacy costs at the school/local and state level). Only the car companies were able to shed their legacy costs by going bankrupt. We are not letting our schools/cities do the same thing as the car companies, because the federal government won't back stop it. This problem is decades in the making, and won't be solved any time soon.
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Do you feel like if you study/practice there you'll have the support you'd want to (learn to) do so in the way you'd want (as a Democrat)?

I have lived, in my life, in California, Canada, and NYC, which all have their problems, but are all decidedly populist. I really have no idea how living in all that red would affect training in the practice of medicine, but it feels like it would have to? I just don't know how.

Granted, I do hear that all of us do-gooders end up going into plastic surgery in Miami in the end, so maybe it's a moot point.
 
pageantry said:
Do you feel like if you study/practice there you'll have the support you'd want to (learn to) do so in the way you'd want (as a Democrat)?

I have lived, in my life, in California, Canada, and NYC, which all have their problems, but are all decidedly populist. I really have no idea how living in all that red would affect training in the practice of medicine, but it feels like it would have to? I just don't know how.

Granted, I do hear that all of us do-gooders end up going into plastic surgery in Miami in the end, so maybe it's a moot point.
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I think people who work in hospitals and actually treat the poor have a different attitude than the people living in the affluent areas (which are self segregated).
However, I'm not too sure about the diversity of the faculty. I was born in California, and when I moved to Michigan at age 6, my mom reminds me that I said there were a lot of white people in MIchigan in my first week here (I'm 1/2 asian). You won't get the diversity of the coasts in the Michigan suburbs, which you will notice if you come from a more racially diverse community.
 
Followwwww the moneyyyyy! 😉

I'm really glad to hear that about the community service, tho. I know when I interviewed there, my biggest questions of both my interviewers were about diversity and care for the poor, and they impressed me with their own interests in addressing that question. One interviewer and I started brainstorming about how to outfit a van with mobile ultrasound unit to drive across Africa. He might have been pulling my leg, in retrospect. (Or maybe I was pulling HIS! Ha!) But, the nice thing was, I really felt like me in my liberal hippie weirdness was wanted.

Caring for people who don't have the support or resources to care for themselves is challenging and can lead to burnout pretty fast, so I can also see it going in the other direction. Training at a hospital full of people with great insurance and good jobs, educations, etc, might open a lot of learning opportunities where an underfunded hospital would not. That could be useful going forward anywhere.

Aghhhh I'm so on the fence about this whole red county thing and what it could mean for four years of training. I don't knoooooow! Why does fiscal conservativism have to be so effectiiiiiiive for the fewwwww? *whines*
 
I really appreciate your candor, @mrslandingham . I understand, as a new school, OUWB wants to carefully build a polished image, but sometimes I think the students go a little too far in trying to paint an unrealistically rosy picture, when we all know that there are real problems everywhere you go. Speaking honestly here raises my esteem for the school a lot. It's about integrity, not perfection, you know?

And, anyway, the proof is in the pudding. That match list! Whoo whoo!
 
So a brief change of topic, II today scheduled for 02/12. Complete early September (though at this point I don't think it matters anymore) with a LizzyM~ 62/63. Beyond excited to visit the school! For those wondering, the last available date to schedule was 03/04.
 
OUWB student here.

some personal reflections on the Dean's letter:

Community is BIG here - . Our class wants to help in the most effective and efficient way we can. High impact stuff, and not to get our "ouwb" name out there. That means boots on the ground, passing out water filtration kits with the Red Cross, going door to door handing out pamphlets, etc. As an institution, it's most important that the leaders and people of Flint know that we have their backs, but it's what we're doing as a group of individuals that speaks volumes about the kind of student body we have here.

Will also report back after my first shift in the free clinic! Obviously this is just the beginning, as the program works out the kinks I expect the clinic to grow and expand.

btw medball was awesome
 
What a wonderful couple of posts to wake up to! Thanks for the reports, guys.
 
I just received an II.

The two interview dates available are Feb. 19 and March 4. @childofmercy

Edit: Feb 12 just opened up too.
Edit: Complete 9/1/2015 @CAN007
 
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Has anyone who interviewed on 1/8/16 heard back today?
 
TurknJDandJD said:
Are people hearing back already? The twitter page has not updated stating they are making calls
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From my experience, there's like a several hour delay until their tweets become "visible"... E.g. 2 weeks ago, I didn't see their tweets posted around 3 pm until 6 pm.. And I was refreshing every hour.
 
swaggyp_ said:
From my experience, there's like a several hour delay until their tweets become "visible"... E.g. 2 weeks ago, I didn't see their tweets posted around 3 pm until 6 pm.. And I was refreshing every hour.
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I think it shows PST time no matter where you are viewing from or where it is posted.
 
Does OUWB only give out acceptances after these meetings? What about waitlists or rejections? I was going to withdraw my app post-interview, but I was curious what they would decide even though I know this school isn't a good fit for me.
 
fhexhockey said:
Does OUWB only give out acceptances after these meetings? What about waitlists or rejections? I was going to withdraw my app post-interview, but I was curious what they would decide even though I know this school isn't a good fit for me.
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Haven't seen any waitlists or rejections yet. They say you're still in the running if you haven't received a decision yet, but I find it hard to believe that they have waitlisted zero people at this point in the cycle.

Maybe just sour grapes, but I find it pretty un-transparent of them to not let people know they've been waitlisted after so long. I understand that they may be unsure of how to stack applicants into tiers without interviewing everyone, but it seems contrary to their admissions mantra to string applicants along and tell them they're still in the running when they've clearly been waitlisted or rejected.

/2 cents
 
It is just really frustrating! I have other acceptances and OUWB is one of my top choices. But after not hearing for ~3 months post-interview, it makes me think that I interviewed bad at this particular school. On the contrary I feel that it was my best interview yet! I feel like if you did not really want me then why did you extend me an interview invite?
 
MatthewDamon said:
Haven't seen any waitlists or rejections yet. They say you're still in the running if you haven't received a decision yet, but I find it hard to believe that they have waitlisted zero people at this point in the cycle.

Maybe just sour grapes, but I find it pretty un-transparent of them to not let people know they've been waitlisted after so long. I understand that they may be unsure of how to stack applicants into tiers without interviewing everyone, but it seems contrary to their admissions mantra to string applicants along and tell them they're still in the running when they've clearly been waitlisted or rejected.

/2 cents
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There have been plenty of rejections, including a few on this page alone. The waitlist is not formulated until March or so, so it makes sense that nobody has been waitlisted yet. The admissions folks definitely mention this multiple times at interview days (I know they did for mine when they were talking about letters of intent and app updates). I think it's a pretty fair system, and I don't really see how that's stringing people along. If they have no interest, then they reject you. If not, you're still in the running. Once they formulate the waitlist, they will tell you what tier you are in.

How is it any different from other schools, other than the fact that some schools have a continual waitlist? I would argue that you have just as little of an idea of where you stand when being waitlisted at school X, because you have no idea if you actually have a real shot at getting off the waitlist or not. OUWB (or any other school, really) has nothing to gain by telling you that you're in the running when in fact you're not. Which is why they (and pretty much every other school out there) will send out a rejection if you are no longer being considered. If not, you still have a shot.
 
TheThirdLevel said:
There have been plenty of rejections, including a few on this page alone. The waitlist is not formulated until March or so, so it makes sense that nobody has been waitlisted yet. The admissions folks definitely mention this multiple times at interview days (I know they did for mine when they were talking about letters of intent and app updates). I think it's a pretty fair system, and I don't really see how that's stringing people along. If they have no interest, then they reject you. If not, you're still in the running. Once they formulate the waitlist, they will tell you what tier you are in.

How is it any different from other schools, other than the fact that some schools have a continual waitlist? I would argue that you have just as little of an idea of where you stand when being waitlisted at school X, because you have no idea if you actually have a real shot at getting off the waitlist or not. OUWB (or any other school, really) has nothing to gain by telling you that you're in the running when in fact you're not. Which is why they (and pretty much every other school out there) will send out a rejection if you are no longer being considered. If not, you still have a shot.
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I meant rejections post-interview. I haven't seen any of those. I understand there's been rejections pre-II.

And from what I understood, on interview day, they said they'd notify you immediately if they reached any kind of decision, whether it's an acceptance, waitlist, or rejection. Not sure if I completely misunderstood that, but if they wait until March to form a waitlist that seems a little drawn out too. It's hard to believe that they don't have some idea of who they chose to put on a waitlist after each adcom meeting.

I personally think being put on a rolling waitlist does provide you with a better idea of where you stand. If what you heard is true, all of the interviewees who have no answer yet, including those applicants who interviewed way back in August/September/October and haven't heard back yet, are still in the mindset that they could either receive an acceptance at any given time. But actually if they were to accept you, they would have done it from the get-go. This is a tough scenario particularly for applicants who need to consider alternate plans at this point, because hearing that you "might still be accepted" is completely different from "you've been waitlisted and there's usually x amount of movement on the waitlist".

Again just my two cents. I'm not going to argue past this post. I hope I'm wrong and hopefully we do see some of those applicants who haven't heard back in a while get accepted.
 
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Got the acceptance call from Dean Grabowski yesterday! Interviewed on 01/08. I'm so happy right now I think I'm gonna just skip work. JK. I need money. Good luck to all who are still waiting! Hang in there.

Edit: OOS. LizzyM 70-73. Completed late July.
 
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Hello! My supplementary application portal seems to no longer be accessible today. Has anyone encountered this problem before? Or could this imply a rejection?
 
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