To those fortunate individuals currently at AECOM:
I've been wondering about the academic environment there. The first two years are pass/fail (right?), so I would imagine that things aren't too cut-throat. Do students study together? Share study notes? What are the study aides? (Online video/audio recordings, comprehensive syllabi, do you actually need textbooks?). How many of the students regularly go to class? What is the breakdown of large lectures and smaller groups? Are the tests staggered or in blocks? What (if any) prep does the school offer before USMLE1? What else would you comment on, good or bad?
Sorry, I know it's a lot, but whatever you can throw me would be much appreciated. Thanks!!
You're correct, first and second year are P/F. Students are generally pretty tight and often will email out notes and charts that they made. There's a pretty good online resource (aecommunity.com) where the best notes haev been uploaded.
I'd say around 60-70% of students generally go to lecture. this is a complete guestimate, but I think it's pretty ballpark. Pretty much every class will have case conferences with around 15-20 students each led by a faculty member. Exams are in blocks (anywhere from 2-4 exams per block). The school doesn't offer any Step 1 prep courses, but usually sometime during second year, a representative from Kaplan will come by with some decent deal packages.
As far as other things to comment on. My take: I regret my decision to come here. The neighborhood is lousy; there's nothing to do around campus, and it's not as safe as they make it out to be (we just got a notice today warning parents to watch their kids because there's a kidnapper on the loose). Manhattan is a good 45 minutes away by public transportation, which doesn't run frequently enough late at night. Waiting for 2 hrs for a bus in the middle of the night in the Bronx is not fun. The apartments are cheap-- but you get what you pay for. I know someone whose toilet was broken for a year. They never got around to fixing it despite numerous maintenance requests.
The administration really doesn't give a **** about students. They forced about 10 kids in my class to 'decelerate' -- basically take an extra year to finish the first 2 years. They are completely unresponsive to student needs. Even basic things, like printouts of lecture notes, seems to come late every block, and they're invariably of poor quality. They *finally* got around to computerizing grades this year-- until then, they posted an excel spreadsheet of everyone's grades outside someone's office. The rest of Einstein is still trying to catch up to 1994.
Despite the fact that Einstein sits on "hospital row" with 4 large hospitals in walking distance, for the most part to get to your 3rd year clerkships, you need to either take a shuttle or a taxi.... to places as far away as Flushing or Long Island. You don't really have much of a choice about where you end up, either (there's a lottery, but remember that you'll have to compete with 179 other people who don't want to take a cab to Long Island every day).
Oh, and the best thing about Einstein, something that they don't tell you on the tour or in any brochure-- the exam results are "sequestered." What does that mean? You'll never get back any exam that you take. You never know what you got right or didn't. The only way to see an exam after you take it is if you fail-- and then you get 1 hour, supervised, during which you can look over the exam, but you're not allowed to write anything or look up any notes to see what the correct info is. It's the ****tiest thing, and something they don't mention to you until well after orientation.
On the bright side, it seems like a lot of changes are coming around. We just got a new dean, and he's slowly replacing a lot of the old timers. In particular, the dean of students is the biggest ***** imaginable (he makes George Bush look like a MENSA member) and he just got fired. Hopefully with his replacement, things will get better.... but I wouldn't cross my fingers.
