For any WSU med students scoping this thread, can y'all tell us about your experience at WSU? the things you like/dislike?
Current M1 here at Wayne. Watch this town hall video given by Dean Sobel to get a full understanding of what is being changed at Wayne to better improve the school:
.
The experience here: we are revamping our preclinical curriculum in several ways, listed below.
Do note that this is for the class of 2020, and the talk is that class of 2021 will be moving to a 1.5 year curriculum, where summer vacation is cut short by 2 months, systems based curriculum, and less important material being cut out or being moved to independent study during rotation. 1.5 year curriculum means you take Step/ start rotations in January or February of second instead of June of second year.
About curriculum reform and various thinsgs
What I like:
1. 20% of the lectures from the past were removed for the M1's this year. The 20% of lectures that were removed were irrelevant material that involved PhD professors talking about their own very specific research that had nothing to do with the foundations for medicine. Our curriculum is thus now trying to align itself to be geared towards material geared towards Step I- The outlines from the timeless classic review books like First Aid, BRS Physio, etc are being used to map out our curriculum. M2's are handed a 1 year subscription to UWorld Qbank and First Aid.
2. Lectures and professor run review sessions are streamed. Thus the scheduled 4 hours of lecture a day can be cut down by speeding up lecture- many of our professors talk very slowly or the material is easy enough to be sped up faster. After anatomy and histology labs are over, there are very few required events. Course notes are compiled into a big file that we call "the coursepack". Coursepack is loaded online as a pdf, and also handed out in black and white print to us. It's very well known that to pass classes or even do well, you simply memorize "the coursepacks" by reading them twice, and streaming the lectures once.
3. M1's have finished gross anatomy and histology/embryology so far. Most M1's have said histology/embryology to be an overwhelmingly positive experience, because of how organized the histology coursepack is, how our histology course director spends a lot of time running very effective review sessions almost 2x a week, and doing a review of what is on the exam a few days before the actual exam. Thus if we had a bad lecturer for a certain topic, we go back to the coursepack and we stream the weekly review sessions (they are sometimes better than the lecturer).
4. M1's are on physiology and biochemistry now. We don't have to show up on campus for the many anatomy/histology labs now that anatomy/histology are over.
5. As
@theseeker4 has mentioned the clinical training when you get to rotations year is great and that is what medical school should be all about.
6. Cheap instate tuition/high
LizzyM scholarships. If you are a state resident as defined by where your parents are residents of or by high school status or you worked a year in Michigan and paid taxes, then the low tuition beats going to a midtier private school. Having less debt is liberating, especially with the brutally high interest rate and no subidization policy for professional students. Besides having a rigorous clinical training that will prepare you for residency, low tuition is second most or maybe the most important factor in choosing a US MD school- a reason why top 20 schools give lots of scholarship money to compete against the state schools; otherwise smart kids would always choose their state school for the same type of education. I noticed from threads in the past that high LizzyM scorers might even be in for a full 4 year tuition scholarship at Wayne and that does make the decision hard for them to choose between going to Wayne for 0 tuition as an instate resident and a higher rank school, normally U of Michigan for 120k, debt factored in 170k. Again 0 debt is liberating, when so many specialties like anesthesia and radiology are complaining about "the sky is falling", reimbursements decreasing, and the residency match system becomes rougher every year with higher step scores and more US MDs for the same number of seats. And for instaters, besides the cheap tuition, don't underestimate the advantage of being close to home for medical school- med school is a tough time to transition (it's not residency, but still....), having your family, friends, and significant others to turn to for support is huge. I know of someone who had lived in a state his whole life went very far out of state for medical school, but after 10 weeks of being far from home and being loaded with high volumes of material + struggling with depression, took a yearlong leave of absence to go back home to where friends and family were to eventually decide if he wanted to return to school or not. A certain adcom on this forum has mentioned how a school can lose its students through home sickness.
7. Free clinic/outreach opportunities. You learn a lot at the free clinic as an M1, how to interview a patient, how to present a patient case to an attending, physical exam skills. The more experienced M2, M3, M4, residents at these clinics are awesome and do a good job in helping M1's learn.
8. Many student organizations and lots of free food at their meetings. You learn something new from the guest speakers at these student meetings, and you get a free lunch (pizza, salad, sandwiches, wraps) as a med student so its wonderful.
9. Many specialty departments with associated residencies- for the high lizzyM gunners, who might probably end up with high Steps to pass the automated screening filters and end up shooting for surgical subs, top 30 IM, certain competitive locations, we have residencies for them, and you can rotate with them and possibly get started on research with them. However, it is your job alone, with little aid from the school, to reach out to these departments, build connections early on for research, and to schedule rotations with them.
10. Our students are really nice people and down to earth. Or at least I haven't seen the bad personalities.
11. Clinical rotation sites are close to the med school campus. The worst thing that can happen is you get sent to Oakwood for rotations, which is 20 minutes away. Other schools often have multiple campus sites all over the place.
12. Big scene for emergency medicine here. With what seems to be like 4 associated EM residency programs Detroit Receiving/Sinai Grace/HFH/St John, its no surprise that theres a huge number of students here going for EM. EM got a little more competitive too, but at Wayne, you won't have a problem matching into it as long as you check the boxes.
What I don't like
1. As theseeker4 has said, the bureaucracy/administration is a complete failure. They are good people, but maybe they are strained since we are the biggest single campus with 1200 medical students. Most schools have between 400-650 students, and as logistics go, doubling the number of students makes it more than twice as hard to manage. Thus, students are sometimes thrown under the bus to make scheduling a little easier.
Examples of the failures that we see are mainly scheduling and events: A few days before exams, the M1's were required to do a 3-4 hour BLS training session. BLS has nothing to do with our exams, and these exams aren't simply things where you can just study the night before or a few hours a day like in undergrad and succeed. They are rigorous, and that means a few days of completely focused reviewing to memorize every detail in the coursepack, with minimal distractions. More tragic was that there are days after our exams where the schedule is free and empty, and BLS could have been scheduled on one of those days instead. Another thing was a "required research readiness survey": Some researchers at Central Michigan needed a population to take a survey for their research. The school thus required M1's to show up for that survey and take the online survey in the computer lab, on a day where nothing else like a lab was scheduled. Many students commute to school, and making them commute to simply take an online survey for someone else's research paper angered a lot of people. Last thing, required clinical medicine training small group for M1s. A group's clincian preceptor suddenly couldn't make it that day due to emergency, the group shows up and is informed of that issue, and is transferred to another small group that starts later. However, that small group ends later, and the group that transferred in has other plans that involve simple things like going home, getting sleep, studying etc, and thus can't stay the whole time. Substitute preceptor lets them leave, and reports them to administration for leaving early, in the name of giving a pop quiz in "professionalism". Students who left before the later end time because of their busy schedules and not really their own fault, since they weren't given advance notice about delays, were threatened with blame, hilarity ensues. (yes, M1's are busy, and this isn't M3 year where you gotta show up early, stay late, and take 36 hours of call to impress on your clinical eval to get your desired residency). And this is all in just a few months of M1 year. The M2, 3, and 4's have countless stories of administrative failures. All med students here have a special term and its called "getting #wayned or #waynestated". Despite all the bureacratic failures, as theseeker4 has said, these aren't good reasons to turn down a great clinical training environment, instate tuition if you are a resident, and being close to family and friends as an instater. Also, the new admins have talked of working to improve logistics.
2. Anatomy, full body dissection: I hated the full body dissection. This meant everyone in a group of 6, had to be present at all dissection labs- attendance recorded. Dissection labs ran 3 days a week, 3 hours a day from August to Mid November. No one teaches you dissection, you follow a rinky dink book- Grant's dissector and attempt to take apart an entire human body from head to toe. Many schools like MSU CHM/COM, UCSF, UCLA, CWRU are totally prossection based (everything dissected in advance), and this doesnt mean 200 kids crowding around 5 prossections. MSU is said to have 40 cadavers fully prossected. Other places like UC Irvine or U of M do a rotating dissector system, where only 2 members of a group of 6 have to dissect at a time, and so everyone gets to dissect, but isn't forced to be there 3 days a week. The goal of anatomy is to learn the concepts, not learn how to pick through fat, fascia, and destroy structures. Head and neck dissection- everything was a wreck. Overall many would agree that dissection was a pure waste of time. Maybe the 1/3rd of the class who did the dissecting learned something out of it. And you aren't graded on how well you can dissect. You are graded, by way of multiple choice exams, on how well you understand the anatomical concepts, and ability to recognize a structure, its function, and what its relationship to an organ system- these are things that prossections can do better, and not waste time. Class rank goes up as you get more multiple choice questions right, which simply involves using time to memorize the coursepack and recognizing what the structures look like . We do however, have a few prossections, and those were useful. 1.5 year curriculum, systems based might mean that you will do 1 dissection lab a week for the whole 9 months. Our anatomy course organization was pretty poor overall, with the coursepack varying in organization and quality every section. However, anatomy seems to be poorly organized at many other places too. Most do end up passing though, and our anatomy raw average historically, and this year is an 80%.
3. Our clinical med course for M1's. This course is called P3 or Patient Physician Population. The administration seems to take pride in this course, since this is the first year it is being run. I'm not sure what's its goal (goes to show how disorganized this course is), but I think goal is to teach us patient interviewing, physical exams, clinical skills, the basics of clinical research like certain statistical measures, ethics stuff, and public health basics. We get online quizzes and worksheets every week or 2, and are handed a self study coursepack, but the coursepack is so useless, that we end up googling better resources to do these quizzes and worksheets. And as former premeds, we know a lot about ethics, since we all probably read up on it before going into an interview. So ethics related quiz questions don't even involve the coursepack. Small group sessions are P3 are a wash, and we don't really get much out of them so far. We practice interviewing on each other and overall, learn much less compared to just signing up for the free clinics like Cass or Student Run Free Clinic to volunteer. But then, this is only M1 year, and we still don't have any of the knowledge of pathophysiology, pathology etc, to even understand clin med. Some veteran SDNers have said that simulations aren't the best way to learn clinical medicine, and that through a single week on their first rotation, they learn more about the fundamentals clinical medicine than they ever had through simulations. I still wish that we had more standardized patients to practice the essential, and really basic patient interview and H/P. We have only had one standardized patient so far and only 2 of 12 people got to practice. But maybe as time goes on in M1, we will get more practice. M2's seem to have a lot of that though.
4. Housing: Surprisingly, there is a shortage of viable/affordable housing options within walking distance to the school campus aka Midtown Detroit. There's places like Studio One, Cathedral towers, Sheridan Apartments, University Towers, etc. Living close to school is a huge benefit since its easier to show up to the required anatomy/histology labs and exam days without traffic. The housing options are either cheap, dingy and gross, or really nice and really expensive.
5. Probably won't apply to new students as c/o 2021 will be going on a 1.5 year curriculum- the 2 year curriculum. When so many comparable schools like Saint Louis University turning to 1.5 year curriculum, being on the 2 year curriculum is a pain. Having a long M1 summer for research isn't as helpful- I might do research in competitive stuff like ortho or ENT, but if I end up with a lousy step score, that research was pointless. With 1.5 year, after I get my step score, I can schedule my extra elective time to do research and rotations to prepare for the specialty that I am both interested in and am eligible for. Also having a understanding of all the preclinical material helps you better understand research compared to just knowing a few basic foundations that don't even relate to pathology.
6. The out of state tuition. If you are out of state, you pay out of state for 4 years- you do not get the same instate after a year like you do in Ohio, Connecticut, California, or Texas. 70k a year for 4 years unless you manage to get a deferral to work full time and establish residency for a year, which probably won't be allowed by the administrations. You need both the fed direct at 5% and gradplus at 7 or 8% interest if you are thinking of using federal loans. That's 280k principle, and if you even manage to pay it off in 10 years after graduating from med school, thats 500k total after interest for tuition alone. For many out of staters, particularly Californians, this was their only option for medical school. Ouch. For the premeds hoping to make lots of money in medicine in this scenario, there are better paths out there. One of them is called CRNA. Another is NP/PA. The third route, military HPSP, is starting to look pretty good in this case with its free tuition, free cost of living, and low tax decent salary during the 4 year active duty requirement, despite the various strings attached like limited specialties feasibly available, from a former HPSP anesthesiologist who posts on the physician forums here. Fourth route is a route that would get a lot of flame from SDNers. There is a Californian in the class who did get one of the full instate tuition scholarships mentioned earlier, and that does help him out a lot. He is one of the ultra high LizzyMs who had just missed the mark for a top 40 NIH funded school.
Things I'm neutral about
1. Preclinical Grading system: Our preclinical years are pass fail honors- we scrapped the old z score system, and 70% overall in a class is needed to pass. The passing threshold will only be lowered if necessary and not raised- I think for histology the passing threshold was a 68 and anatomy was a 67. However, we are ranked into 4 groups despite the P/F/H system. top 5% honor, and to be in the top 5% the average percent of all of your classes for a single year must be 92%- They might lower the cutoff percent for honoring though, so it might not be at 92. But for now on paper it is. Next 55% are put into the "outstanding" range, next 20% are put into the "excellent" range, and the final 20% are put into the "good" category. Of course clinical year, or M3 grades, like all other schools should be a well stratified grading system so I don't mind it. Being completely pass fail means your Step scores and 3rd year grades will be the entire things you depend on and that makes things more stressful. Being ranked preclinically adds stress during preclinical years, but these preclinical grades can help alleviate some of the stress of everything being on year 3 and step. Do realize that clinical evals and Steps are still always more important than preclinical grades if at this point in time, you want to vie for competitive residencies like surgical subs, top 30 fellowship track IM, certain locations- if you aren't, then don't worry and just don't fail a class.
2. First patient project- also a new self directed learning thing put into the curriculum. It involves taking a pathological finding from the group cadaver such as heart disease, and learning more about that finding and writing about it. Kind of a hassle. But kind of interesting
3. The shaky relationship between DMC and WSU. It's always been a shaky relationship for many years. It probably won't change much for better or for worse.
Overall comment:
For instaters who will be the majority of students, its an established in state med school, with instate tuition, is close to home, has strong clinical training, with many physicians, and a diverse variety of specialties. It has its own annoying failings, but those are minor compared to the benefits. And at an established US MD, med school is what you make of it- the opportunities and paths are endless and depend mostly on you. You can study really hard to get that high step, get high clinical evals by impressing attendings with your knowledge and by doing well on the NBME shelves, do research and land that desirable surgical sub residency and become an academic physician/subspecialist just for the sake of it, you can live an easy life by passing and being average everything and become the primary care doc who gets 30 recruiting emails every day with a high incentive package attached, you can be someone who is really altruistic and works in an underserved area to be able to help a population who really needs it most.
