2017-2018 Carle-Illinois College of Medicine

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Sixsuit said:
People tend to worry about the syntax of programming, but that's the easy part. With your background in critical thinking, you'll be in a great spot 🙂 Shoot your shot!
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Apparently I can fly there and back for less than $100 before you count baggage fees. I wonder if I could wear my suit on the plane 😉 Sounds like it might be possible. Still thinking through it, though. I'd have to rent a car. If anyone else is interested in flying into Bloomington on the 17th, let me know!
 
@Catalystik - Does it help to go to an open house like the ones offered here when applying? They mention doing this in lieu of interviews, so I feel like it's almost an unspoken requirement. Would it only help (assuming the person flying in is well adjusted and can easily converse with various personalities)?
 
FinesseLife833 said:
agreed! syntax of programming is honestly very trivial. If you have the critical reasoning required to create programs then you're gucci. Most software engineer interviews are usually in pseudocode from what I've heard b/c they know you can easily learn the syntax of a language in ~2 weeks
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When we interview someone, we ask 1 simple programming question just to make sure they actually have some experience (we let people use any language they want). The rest is more trying to see how they break problems down into logical components, which is 90% of what we do!
 
DBC03 said:
@Catalystik - Does it help to go to an open house like the ones offered here when applying? They mention doing this in lieu of interviews, so I feel like it's almost an unspoken requirement. Would it only help (assuming the person flying in is well adjusted and can easily converse with various personalities)?
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Sorry, DBC03, I have no information on this matter. But I have my ear to the rail, so if I hear anything helpful, I'll come back and post it here. I did see that one is asked to sign up if intending to attend an Open House, which may be the only way that they'd be aware you visited (at least that I've noticed).
 
DBC03 said:
Apparently I can fly there and back for less than $100 before you count baggage fees. I wonder if I could wear my suit on the plane 😉 Sounds like it might be possible. Still thinking through it, though. I'd have to rent a car. If anyone else is interested in flying into Bloomington on the 17th, let me know!
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Flying into Chicago, or Champaign-Urbana?
 
Sixsuit said:
Flying into Chicago, or Champaign-Urbana?
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I can fly into Bloomington for less than $100 through Allegiant (not a fan, but it's super cheap). I should also check Chicago and the other airports. It seems that I'd have less driving to do if i fly into Bloomington.
 
DBC03 said:
I can fly into Bloomington for less than $100 through Allegiant (not a fan, but it's super cheap). I should also check Chicago and the other airports. It seems that I'd have less driving to do if i fly into Bloomington.
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If you fly into Chicago and drive down to Champaign, it's a 2.5 hour drive of corn and flatness.
 
While my stats are not really high but I am interested in matriculating from here and would like to visit the open house. May get to Chicago and then get by car to Champaign. If anybody has any recommendation please let us know. If anybody has attended Oct 21st Open house, would like some feedback as well.
 
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DBC03 said:
Does anyone know what the LOR requirements are? I have a committee packet and would love to assign it here, but I don’t want to jump the gun.


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Hi, I emailed admissions about letters and here is their reply:
"All letters of evaluation and recommendation must be submitted through the AMCAS letter service. We require 3 letters of recommendation (or a premedical committee report or other composite letter of recommendation from the applicant's primary college or university) and will accept a maximum of 4 letters. Individual letters of recommendation should be on official letterhead. Two letters should be from individual professors with whom the applicant has taken classes or participated in research (at least 1 in STEM-science, technology, engineering or mathematics) and 1 letter should be from a non-academic individual (e.g. an advisor, a supervisor from a work or volunteer experience)."

I, of course, did jump the gun and assigned all six of my letters before getting this information. Oopsy. 🙂
 
jazzmetal said:
Hi, I emailed admissions about letters and here is their reply:
"All letters of evaluation and recommendation must be submitted through the AMCAS letter service. We require 3 letters of recommendation (or a premedical committee report or other composite letter of recommendation from the applicant's primary college or university) and will accept a maximum of 4 letters. Individual letters of recommendation should be on official letterhead. Two letters should be from individual professors with whom the applicant has taken classes or participated in research (at least 1 in STEM-science, technology, engineering or mathematics) and 1 letter should be from a non-academic individual (e.g. an advisor, a supervisor from a work or volunteer experience)."

I, of course, did jump the gun and assigned all six of my letters before getting this information. Oopsy. 🙂
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I did the same thing.. all six lol


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Sixsuit said:
When we interview someone, we ask 1 simple programming question just to make sure they actually have some experience (we let people use any language they want). The rest is more trying to see how they break problems down into logical components, which is 90% of what we do!
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Wtf. What kind of software firm do you work for?
 
Sixsuit said:
People tend to worry about the syntax of programming, but that's the easy part. With your background in critical thinking, you'll be in a great spot 🙂 Shoot your shot!
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Strongly disagree. Knowing the in and outs of your frameworks, adhering to coding standards, and maintaining old code bases are crucial.

I think your statement really only stands true for college programming where tasks are simple.
 
7331poas said:
Strongly disagree. Knowing the in and outs of your frameworks, adhering to coding standards, and maintaining old code bases are crucial.

I think your statement really only stands true for college programming where tasks are simple.
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I've been a software engineer for 7 years, so I'm pretty sure I have a good idea what I'm talking about.

The idea is that anyone who has good critical thinking skills and can properly deconstruct a task into logical pieces can learn the "ins and outs" of any language on the fly. What does knowing how to write a bubble sort on a whiteboard with no reference materials tell you about the person other than they have memorized how to write a bubble sort? You can disagree with that all you want, but the vast majority of developers will never need to know how to do the kinds of things that are common in whiteboard interviews around the country. The creator of Ruby on Rails himself recently talked about this kind of stuff (Programmers are confessing their coding sins to protest a broken job interview process)

Bottom line, we believe skills and experience in the under-documented or specific particulars of a language don't give any indication about how good someone is at writing software. The ability to properly organize your thoughts and work through a complex problem to arrive at a workable and maintainable solution is more important than passing some arbitrary knowledge check to inflate the egos of the interviewers.
 
Sixsuit said:
I've been a software engineer for 7 years, so I'm pretty sure I have a good idea what I'm talking about.

The idea is that anyone who has good critical thinking skills and can properly deconstruct a task into logical pieces can learn the "ins and outs" of any language on the fly. What does knowing how to write a bubble sort on a whiteboard with no reference materials tell you about the person other than they have memorized how to write a bubble sort? You can disagree with that all you want, but the vast majority of developers will never need to know how to do the kinds of things that are common in whiteboard interviews around the country. The creator of Ruby on Rails himself recently talked about this kind of stuff (Programmers are confessing their coding sins to protest a broken job interview process)

Bottom line, we believe skills and experience in the under-documented or specific particulars of a language don't give any indication about how good someone is at writing software. The ability to properly organize your thoughts and work through a complex problem to arrive at a workable and maintainable solution is more important than passing some arbitrary knowledge check to inflate the egos of the interviewers.
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You can critical think all you want. But when it comes time to code you need to understand how to do it mechanically.

"Critical thinking" is basically a meme at this point in the field of computer science. Experience, understanding coding standards, ability to work in an agile environment, understanding computer architecture; those are more important than some cutesy way to figure out why a manhole cover is round.
 
7331poas said:
You can critical think all you want. But when it comes time to code you need to understand how to do it mechanically.

"Critical thinking" is basically a meme at this point in the field of computer science. Experience, understanding coding standards, ability to work in an agile environment, understanding computer architecture; those are more important than some cutesy way to figure out why a manhole cover is round.
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How much experience do you have in the industry outside of academia?

Coding standards can change between products at the same company and are arbitrarily determined by the developers who decide on them. Not all companies use agile, and almost everyone implements it differently (scrum vs kanban vs lean vs FDD etc). Both can be learned (not sure agile is something you can "learn", but whatever) and picked up over a few days. Why does a developer working on a web app, or using an interpreted language need to understand computer architecture? I have never in 7 years needed to understand what is stored in L2 cache, or what memory address is being used to store something. If you're working on low level embedded systems, yes absolutely you need to know that stuff, but again, the vast majority of developers don't ever even need to worry about them.
 
What are people’s opinions on the curriculum? The lack of summer break, and doing a Family Medicine clerkship while learning endocrinology, reproduction, Ob, heme/onc etc is somehwhay frightening. Step 1 Review is also only 4 weeks (5 if you study through your winter break).
 
bumbleebee said:
What are people’s opinions on the curriculum? The lack of summer break, and doing a Family Medicine clerkship while learning endocrinology, reproduction, Ob, heme/onc etc is somehwhay frightening. Step 1 Review is also only 4 weeks (5 if you study through your winter break).
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Where did you get all that info? From what I've heard their curriculum is really non traditional, which is both exciting and scary tbh.
 
bumbleebee said:
What are people’s opinions on the curriculum? The lack of summer break, and doing a Family Medicine clerkship while learning endocrinology, reproduction, Ob, heme/onc etc is somehwhay frightening. Step 1 Review is also only 4 weeks (5 if you study through your winter break).
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DougStamper said:
Holy hell, is that thing trying to say that they're going to mash pre-clinical years into just 1.5 years instead of two?
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😵😵😵
leaving-now-grandpa-simpsons.gif
 
jazzmetal said:
Hi, I emailed admissions about letters and here is their reply:
"All letters of evaluation and recommendation must be submitted through the AMCAS letter service. We require 3 letters of recommendation (or a premedical committee report or other composite letter of recommendation from the applicant's primary college or university) and will accept a maximum of 4 letters. Individual letters of recommendation should be on official letterhead. Two letters should be from individual professors with whom the applicant has taken classes or participated in research (at least 1 in STEM-science, technology, engineering or mathematics) and 1 letter should be from a non-academic individual (e.g. an advisor, a supervisor from a work or volunteer experience)."

I, of course, did jump the gun and assigned all six of my letters before getting this information. Oopsy. 🙂
Click to expand...

Update: I wrote back to say which four letters (of the six I assigned) I'd prefer they look at and they said no problem, they'll look at those four. I am liking the good vibes!

Also - everyone will get a secondary:
"We will not be screening before sending secondary applications. In an effort to support greater equity and access, we will invite everyone who applies to complete our (free) secondary application. Every application will then be given full consideration under our holistic review. Applicants can expect to receive secondary applications by the end of the month." (I got this email today, so I'm assuming that "end of month" means end of November.)
 
jazzmetal said:
Update: I wrote back to say which four letters (of the six I assigned) I'd prefer they look at and they said no problem, they'll look at those four. I am liking the good vibes!

Also - everyone will get a secondary:
"We will not be screening before sending secondary applications. In an effort to support greater equity and access, we will invite everyone who applies to complete our (free) secondary application. Every application will then be given full consideration under our holistic review. Applicants can expect to receive secondary applications by the end of the month." (I got this email today, so I'm assuming that "end of month" means end of November.)
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Sounds good! I don’t have time to do secondaries at this point in the semester, so I’m hoping this is true!


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Still a bit worried by the combination of basic sciences and family med clerkship...both are sort of full time roles. Well we'll see
 
Duke puts all preclinical courses into first year which is different than doing preclinical simultaneously with a (prolonged) core clerkship that a lot of folks recommend to take right before Step 2. I applaud the approach to take an extended FM before Step 1 along with preclinical courses and engineering stuff. Nevertheless this type of front-loading is pretty packed, though ripe for clinical integration.
 
I also just applied recently. It seems like an interesting, interdisciplinary program. I really hope they consider factors beyond just MCAT scores (e.g. work history, projects, etc...).
 
DBC03 said:
@Catalystik - Does it help to go to an open house like the ones offered here when applying? They mention doing this in lieu of interviews, so I feel like it's almost an unspoken requirement. Would it only help (assuming the person flying in is well adjusted and can easily converse with various personalities)?
Click to expand...
Catalystik said:
I have my ear to the rail, so if I hear anything helpful, I'll come back and post it here.
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"The benefit of attending an open house is to acquaint oneself with the facilities, faculty, curriculum, and teaching methods. Absolutely no evaluation of applicants will take place at these events and attendance is completely voluntary. "
 
Wait, this school isn't offering interviews? So it's all based on the primary/secondary?
 
I think the video recording portion of the secondary is what they will use instead of interviews
 
Has anyone who submitted primary app end of Oct heard anything yet?
 
Driving down to Carle's showcase on Saturday. Anyone else?
 
biochemgrl said:
Driving down to Carle's showcase on Saturday. Anyone else?
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I so wish I could attend. I'm way far away, plus I have something immutable on my schedule this weekend. I can't remember - do they have another open house in December?

@biochemgrl - please let us know what you think afterward!
 
biochemgrl said:
Driving down to Carle's showcase on Saturday. Anyone else?
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Decided against attending because they filled up the online sign up before I could add my name. Plus, flights were expensive or I had to miss school. Keep us posted on your impressions!!


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Here's a rationale for an engineering-based/oriented MD curriculum: "Device makers need to work with doctors directly... in order to usher in a newly holistic approach to the creation of medical IoT gear. Have them help you identify points of your product that, if it should fail, would result in patient harm, not just a compromise of their medical health information."
Docs should help design medical IoT

Thoughts?
 
They have an open house Dec 9 in Chicago. As for future showcases, they're planning to host more in the spring for accepted students only.

Carle Application Timeline 2017-2018:
Send out more details about the secondary this week. (So I won't talk too much about it here)
Send out secondaries at the end of the month to everyone.
Secondaries deadline: Feb 1st (approx)
Holistic Review. Will update applicants on exactly when our application is being evaluated.
Collective decisions sent out in March (acceptance, waitlist, reject)
Then rolling admissions
They won't be over-sending their acceptances in the first round, but then it is rolling.

No preference over IS or OOS
Courses start July 2, 2018 (Their explanation to why they can start Family Med after 1.5yrs instead of 2yrs)

No interviews because of their current timeline, winter in Chicago is annoying for flying, lower cost for applicants, and stats on how interviews don't really make a huge difference.

They definitely emphasized innovation. They won't be making students learn engineering while studying medicine but rather be able to understand how to use technology to solve the problems we face. The courses are created in collaboration with the engineering department and other departments. They showed us their 3D printing lab. They plan to give every student a VR headset to practice CPR, anatomy, etc along with the usual cadaver labs. They plan to have a PBL and system-based learning. 32 students will split into 4 groups of 8. The opportunity is amazing in my opinion and the staff are very personable.

Hope this helps!

Don't think I have a chance with my GPA/MCAT, but still applying anyways, hoping their holistic review will help.
 
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