Hi guys, I'm a rising M3 at OUWB and just wanted to make myself available to answer your questions if you have any! Feel free to post here or PM me. I do want to stay as anonymous as possible so I can speak freely and not worry about classmates/administrators figuring out who I am. There are a couple other current students who drop by the application thread occasionally as well. Good luck with your applications!
ETA: A couple FAQs that have come up in the threads over the years...I'll preface this by saying that we have a new admissions director as of the end of the 2016-2017 academic year, so things may be changing!
Here is the
FAQ on the OUWB website that will answer a lot of logistical questions about the application process and the school.
Should I answer the optional secondary question?
Per the admissions committee Twitter account: only for special circumstances.
When will OUWB start making interview offers / when will I hear back about my decision after my interview / when does OUWB make scholarship offers?
I am personally not involved in the admissions process so I can't answer these for you. However, OUWB's admissions office runs a
Twitter account that posts about this kind of information - when interviews might be going out, when the adcom is reviewing the applicants who interviewed on a certain date, and when phone calls with scholarship offers are being made. Note: whoever runs the Twitter account tends to keep close tabs on this thread and they will occasionally respond to questions they see asked here.
What is interview day like?
Long, but informative! This is how they have traditionally gone in the past:
- Breakfast / talk from admissions office
- Mock TBL - not evaluated or anything and no preparation required, just helps you see what some of your class sessions will be like if you come to OUWB
- Bus to Beaumont-Royal Oak hospital, where you will have:
- Lunch with M3s/M4s
- A tour of the hospital
- Your interviews
- Two one-on-one 30-minute interviews with OUWB faculty or Beaumont doctor (there may also be an M4 interviewing you along with the faculty/doctor)
- Generally, very casual and conversational! They genuinely want to get to know you to see if you are a good fit at OUWB. There are a couple interviewers who tend to ask ethical questions related to your activities, but most won't.
- Bus back to OU campus
- Optional: tour of med school facilities at OU (classrooms, student lounge, med library, anatomy lab, etc.). This is truly optional and nobody will fault you for leaving, but I recommend going if you can!
Does OUWB have a student hosting program?
Yes! Here is the
website. You should be contacted by the students in charge of the hosting program sometime after you get your interview invitation and can submit a request at that time. If you don't hear back shortly, I'd recommend booking a backup hotel with a refundable cancellation policy just in case - some weeks, it's tough to find a host if both the M1s and M2s have exams coming up or something like that.
I do highly recommend student hosting if it will not significantly disrupt your sleep - it's great to get to know the student body a bit, and it's free! Plus, talking to your host about their experiences at OUWB and on interview day can help ease your nerves a bit and help you come up with better questions to ask at your interview.
If you'd rather stay in a hotel, that's fine! If you'd still like to talk with a current student before your interview day, a group of M1s/M2s traditionally meet up with interviewing students for dinner at a restaurant across from campus the night before the interviews. Just ask your student host about it if you are staying with one, or contact the student hosting coordinators directly.
Which airport should I fly into? How do I get to/from OUWB and the airport?
I'd recommend flying into DTW, which is 45-60 minutes south of Rochester. Public transportation is not great in the Detroit area, so your best bet would be to take an Uber/Lyft or a cab. Split with other interviewees if you can. Also please note that there is construction on various parts of 75-south for the next god knows how long, so between that and rush hour traffic, to be safe I think you should allow yourself at least 1.5-2 hours to get to the airport at the end of interview day.
How does the post-interview decision process work?
The adcom meets every other week to review the files of interviewed applicants. Usually, the admissions Twitter account will post what interview dates are being reviewed at a particular adcom meeting. They will review the applicants and you will get one of four responses: acceptance (usually phone call), rejection (email), third tier wait list (email), or silence. Silence means that they have not made a final decision on your application yet. THIS IS NOT BAD NEWS. You are still in the running! OUWB is pretty fair about rejecting people they know they don't want in a timely manner, so you still have a good shot at getting in. At the next adcom meeting, they will review the subsequent interview dates
and re-review applicants from previous interview dates who did not receive a decision. So if you get silence, you are getting reviewed every 2 weeks and could receive a decision after any subsequent adcom meeting. At the end of April, they will do a final review of all the remaining interviewees, and you will receive a decision of accept, first tier waitlist, second tier waitlist, or reject. Historically, the school has accepted about 40-50 people from the first tier waitlist.
When do scholarship offers go out?
Last year, it seems that some scholarship offers went out with admissions offers, and others went out separately on random dates via phone call.
What is the grading system? What's the attendance policy?
M1/M2: most classes are honors/pass/fail.
- Honors = >90% in class/exams + >70% attendance at class sessions.
- Pass = >70% in class/exams, no attendance requirement other than mandatory sessions.
This is
not curved - theoretically everybody in the class could get honors if they scored well enough.
M2/M3: Honors/high pass/pass.
- Honors = exceeds expectations on clinical performance in rotations and >80th percentile nationally on standardized shelf exam.
- High pass = exceeds expectations on clinical performance or >80th percentile nationally on standardized shelf exam, but not both.
- Pass = meets expectations on clinical performance and pass shelf exam
Ranking: We do not know where we stand in the class throughout medical school (but you get a pretty good idea based on your exam scores compared to class averages, etc.). However, every single medical school, regardless of grading scheme or whether they say it's unranked, is required to submit a dean's letter (called the MSPE) as part of your residency application, part of which discusses your performance in comparison to your classmates. To meet this requirement, the school assigns us rankings based on our grades (certain amount of points for honors, less points for high pass, less points for pass), which we do not see. What goes into the MSPE, then, is our quartile - e.g. the letter will say you are in the top quarter of bottom quarter of the class. So bottom line: every school has to rank one way or another, OUWB minimizes it as much as they are allowed to do.
