It is hard to not seem whiney when addressing this issue and each individual student may have differing opinions on what specific behaviors/interactions fit this description.
It is more accurate to say that there is an absence of being treated like a future physician with a small amount of "your ******ed upperclassmen have made obvious mistakes that have permanently caused issues with certain hospitals and we have created a policy that may be condescending because common sense is not common." But they wait until later to discuss the specific actions [like students refusing to be useful in the ED because "that's not my job!" and repeatedly yelling back at attendings].
I think there are somewhat easy solutions, like maybe having a class on "this is hospital hierarchical structure and this is where you rank and what you are expected to do" or "this is how certain types of people will try to screw you over over your career if you don't navigate properly (salty charge nurses, litigious patients, financial planners, work-place relationships, future ex-spouses, etc.). Most of the class studies from Pathoma, Sketchy, and QBanks anyways so working on leadership, research, and the "soft skills" of medicine should probably be the only "mandatory" classes. In seeing UCLA, Touro, SGU, and LMU-DCOM students in psych and surgery rotations, WesternU appears to produce students who doubt themselves a lot more than they should. I think the knowledge level on rotations is average, but I got the impression that the other MD students were used to being asked to actually propose a treatment plan (like exact dosage and administration of meds for how long, what adverse effects to look for, and what needs to happen before discharge). We're also apparently super timid regarding asking for feedback and asking questions to attendings that show that we have read a textbook without looking like we were too lazy to look up simple answers.
I have a fairly decent leadership history in the military so these things didn't bother me much, but for a significant portion of students, it's like... at what point is the school going to address the fact that students are going to go from the scum of the hospital to ultimate authority where competence is REQUIRED and expected within 7-9 years. That transition is abrupt and as I look down the tunnel of time, I can see how little the school is directly helping me to become a desirable residency candidate at the low cost of $50K+ per year. A good thing about the school is that they do adapt with student feedback pretty quickly, but I always wonder why a semi-old school is still "experimenting" with curriculum. Part of it could be that previous classes didn't speak up, or previous admin refused to listen, or that the specific changes are supposed to happen as they are due to demands on training or whatever.
In summary, the school has a default position of trying to herd a huge class of very different students to check all the boxes required to graduate and skimping out on the aspects that are hard to find in Pathoma/Sketchy (semi-joke) like leadership, medicolegal knowledge, and business logistics. If you already know how to fill those deficits and you can self-study while passing classes, this is no problem. But it's hard when you are forced to attend certain things, start doing Anki in the back, then annoy a lecturer with your obvious focus on the computer and they ask the class to close their laptops - or they tell you to do online modules with no speed function and they don't tell you the exact effect it has on your grade, if there even is any.
but no official email or portal update confirming this...starting to think it was a prank call lol
