Can someone comment on the rotations at LECOM-Bradenton?

[crazyboi1993]

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I have been accepted at LECOM-B, and a bunch of other places, but I really like the price of this school, it has the best average board scores, a good location in florida, but what worries is me the quality of rotations. Can anyone comment on them? And explain to me? During the interview they ddint really do a good job at explaining this, they did say they were changing the way they did things, but I it was unclear, can someone who goes to bradenton or interviwed there please comment on this? I need to make a decision in 3 weeks, and I am torn!!

 

[AlteredScale]

Moving to osteopathic since you'll get a better response for this question there.

 

[deleted564680]

Saving ~ 8-10k/year = ~32-40k over 4 years. That sounds like a lot but in terms of future earnings as a physician...that's not much. Pick the BEST school and don't focus on the tuition. Education is the most important thing and rotations are the most important part of your medical education.
LECOM-Bradenton's best clinical sites are the ones "saved" up north with the Erie and Seton Hill campuses. Florida is saturated with medical schools and the LECOM-Bradenton students are forced to find sites on their own. A minority of the class (~40 or so) will obtain a 1 year clinical site in Florida. The rest....good luck. Lots of them end up shadowing in a doctor's office, leaving at 1 p.m., and not doing much in a hospital until their audition rotations. No students will have 2 year clinical sites like the older DO school and state-sponsored DO school students get. Just FYI, MD students get 2 year sites at academic hospitals. That's why PDs usually see them as superior to DO students.

PM me if you want more info.

 

[latelogger]

I'm a second year there now. There are 80-90 year long Florida spots. 90 spots from Erie that's passed down (New York, New Jersey, PA, Ohio mostly). So that's about 170 for 196 students.

There are a good amount of students who set up their own rotations (if they want to go back home to Texas or GA or whatever) so there's nearly a year long spot for everyone who wants it.

There's definitely more than 40 spots like the above poster said (we were given an exact list of every hospital and # of spots). There are people who do the 1pm and ditch, but from my understanding it's almost entirely when students set up their own rotations (and want it that way). Trust me you aren't going to go to a year long and ditch at 1pm everyday all year.

I do agree about the tuition however. Unless you're paying double what LECOM tuition is, it's not really worth it. There's a lot of students in my class who turned down Nova because their tuition is like 22k more per year. I get that. But anything less than that I'd go with the better fit school.

I like LECOM to be perfectly honest (cue the gasps), and I'm not alone, but it's not anything to write home about. Seems like a pretty average DO school with above average boards with a decent tuition, as a TLDR.

 

[Mehd School]

I can't comment on their rotations, but I had a chance to go there but a mentor strongly warned me of PBL. At the time PBL sounded great. Now that I've had (a very small) taste of it, I couldn't be happier I dodged that bullet.

 

[Henry101]

From what my friends have told me, you only go as far in LECOM as your effort takes you. If you want a year long and fight for it, you'll get it. PBL has its pros and cons and you have to evaluate that yourself. It works great for many, many people. But, it's also a bridge to failure for others. LECOM-B's high board scores prove that it works, though, for better or for worse. This year, however, LECOM-B only had an ~84% pass rate for Step2 because of the poor rotations which is what's prompting the administration to make fast, drastic changes on clinical education.

 

[deleted564680]

PBL = independent study medical school (6 hrs/week meeting in a group of 8 looking through a case is not a curriculum) given the sheer insane amount of free time the students have to study. Anyone could score well on Step 1 with that amount of time (see Carib schools). I wouldn't use that as a defining choice of a school, especially when Step 1 knowledge is a very minor portion of what it means to be a physician.

I didn't have the exact number of year-long spots available because it's all "up in the air" last I heard with some spots closing down and others "maybe" opening up. To even be arguing about whether they have year-long spots is inadequate anyway because ALL medical schools should supply TWO year spots for ALL of their students.