How good is YOUR medical school?

[Lulu8]

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Hi friendly med students. As a pre-med, I was wondering if you could share your thoughts about the quality of your medical school - specifically in response to the quote at the bottom from MS4 mike. In my interviews so far I haven't been able to get good answers to his suggested questions - mostly because we meet with only first year students who haven't had the experience of 3rd and 4th year at their school. Thanks!!!!!!

Things that are important

1) What is the 3rd year like and how is it structured?:

I almost never hear any real questions or comment from applicants regarding this topic. In the end this is the only real difference between schools, and probably could be the only real question to ask? more specific questions?

a) How are the rotations structured? What is your role on the wards? Do you have a clear role Do you get your "hands dirty" alot, or is it alot of shadowing? This is very important. You really don't learn much by watching people do stuff and if they work you down to a minimal role you will not gain much experience and will suck for several months into internship.

Now I'm not saying you demand the right to cross clamp the aorta during a CABG, but medicine is not a spectator sport and if the school doesn't have a culture of teaching (i.e. alot of patients are private patients, medical students aren't allowed to do anything) it will be a long, boring 3rd year.


2) Where do 3rd year evaluations come from?

Alot of people go in with this attitude "I am here to learn not to get grades." I agree with this attitude 85%. However, using that attitude indiscriminantly is impractical and can lead to some evaulations that you are not too happy with, it happens

You probably can't please everyone equally. This is especially true on surgery and medicine where there is not enough hours in the day.

Thus, the recommendation I make to everyone is to figure out roughly who writes the evaluation and what they expect and make sure you do a really good job on that. I do not recommend kissing up....However, it is really easy at times to get caught up in "which 5 minute presentation do I spend preparing for tomorrow. " This is why if you know who is grading you you can prioritize which person you pull the NEJM articles out for, and who gets the 15 minute before cram session off up-to-date.

Understand however while this happens at all schools (its how the beast works) not all schools do a reasonable job at making this fair or letting you know who is grading you or what you are supposed to do. Thus you should really make an effort to ask questions such as for every rotation do you have an attending directly responsible for evaluating you, or a preceptor (someone not taking care of patients that you are caring for who evaluates your academic abilities and analytic abilities? ideally your grade should come roughly equally from both.

3) Where do the students end up? If you dont want to do primary care, and 75% of school X does. Guess what, you are signing up for 15 weeks of primary care rotations at that school. Conversely, if you want to do general internal medicine or family medicine....and you come to a school that puts out 25 orthopods and 10 neurosurgeons a year.....you will spend alot of time learning about surgeries that you will never perform in your life.


4) How are medical students protected from scut?

If they cannot give you a real answer to this question expect to learn alot about running bloods to the lab and wheeling patients to the CT scanner and very little about managing an MI.

Some schools do a good job of setting up systems to prevent this, however I have also met interns who told me that they failed the surgery shelf because their school was rampant with scut and they didn't learn anything. I think my school did a very good job at scut control, however I have wheeled my share of patients to CT at 2 am.

5) How receptive is the administation to fixing problems and/or disciplining out of line behavior, espcially from residents?

trust me when you have an ID class where the course director is terrible, you will really appreciate it when a new course director is hired the next year.

6) how is the research opportunities at this school?

If you want to end up at an academic program, there will come a time when you will seek papers and if they are not there to be written then you will understand the meaning of this question. If not then forget I mentioned this.

7) how good is this school at focusing on the bread and butter?

This is especially relevant if you are looking at an academic powerhouse type place. Typically alot of times you will find that big tertiary centers tend to be filled with people who A) study esoteric diseases, B) specialize in highly uncommon or speciallized surgeries or diagnostic tests, or C) only doing big commando surgeries on cases people in the community looked at and said no way im touching that.

This is something you may be interested in as an attending or at the end of your residency. However in medical school most of these areas will not be your field and learning the literature on steroid tapers for patients with the CREST syndrome, the signs and symptoms of spinocerebellar ataxia 8 or how to resect a pseudomyxoma peritonei is probably not the best use of time in your only exposure to the area. Its easy to get caught up in that stuff, however good schools recognize the nature of the academic beast and try to make sure that you leave knowing the stages of active labor, how to read an EKG and how to manage childhood asthma.

And how many slackers are at your school??

 

[Wizard of Oz]

You might be better served to go to the specific allo school threads that you are interested in applying to and asking them. If people from those schools don't use SDN, then SDNer's aren't a good population to ask.

As far as admissions go, the first question my school will ask you is "What is your official state of residence?" If you don't give the correct answer and your MCAT is less than 90th percentile, what you are asking won't matter because you aren't getting in. If you are out-of-state and still make the cut, you should have chosen a better private school or better out-of-state school. Did that sound cynical?

In reality MS 3 and 4 are relatively subjective, and the residents you work with change every year. What you get to do typically depends more on the attending or team you are working with than the actual school. You're just going to have to roll the dice. I don't think that you are going to be missing out on any learning opportunities at any accredited school.

I don't think that anybody is going to admit that their faculty intentionally screw the students over, and from a student perspective, well, we've only been to one school.

Usually where students match has more to do with the prestige of the school than the selectives available to them. A lot of folks in the midwest do family med, but they are not limited to it because the school forces them to take family clerkships. It's either because that's what they want to do or they had fewer options because they were poor students. Again, it's in the control of the student, not the school.

Research opportunities? All of us have them. Research generates money for the school, so no research equals no money equals no school.

Slackers? Anybody who chooses to be a slacker is a slacker. You might even want to be in a class with slackers because slackers will improve your class ranking.

Don't go by any statistic they give you about what percentage of their grads matched in their top three choices. Actually look at the matches if they'll let you. If you get in at a place that matches 10 neurosurgeons and 25 orthopods, choose that school if you can afford it. It will create doors for you even if you don't want to walk through them.

Better (objective) questions to ask:

How much emphasis is placed on Problem-Based Learning, and how do you provide it?

What is the note-taking or sharing service like?

How much class attendance is required?

What kind of clinical exposure do you have as MS 1/2?

How do you grade? Determine AOA status?

There are plenty more, but these are things that I wish I would have considered more fully.

 

[Lulu8]

Thanks - that info is really helpful 👍 Luckily or unluckily, most med students don't seem to get a lot of acceptances so the decision process will probably end up being easier that we would have thought.

 

[zimmie256]

You might be better served to go to the specific allo school threads that you are interested in applying to and asking them. If people from those schools don't use SDN, then SDNer's aren't a good population to ask.

As far as admissions go, the first question my school will ask you is "What is your official state of residence?" If you don't give the correct answer and your MCAT is less than 90th percentile, what you are asking won't matter because you aren't getting in. If you are out-of-state and still make the cut, you should have chosen a better private school or better out-of-state school. Did that sound cynical?

In reality MS 3 and 4 are relatively subjective, and the residents you work with change every year. What you get to do typically depends more on the attending or team you are working with than the actual school. You're just going to have to roll the dice. I don't think that you are going to be missing out on any learning opportunities at any accredited school.

I don't think that anybody is going to admit that their faculty intentionally screw the students over, and from a student perspective, well, we've only been to one school.

Usually where students match has more to do with the prestige of the school than the selectives available to them. A lot of folks in the midwest do family med, but they are not limited to it because the school forces them to take family clerkships. It's either because that's what they want to do or they had fewer options because they were poor students. Again, it's in the control of the student, not the school.

Research opportunities? All of us have them. Research generates money for the school, so no research equals no money equals no school.

Slackers? Anybody who chooses to be a slacker is a slacker. You might even want to be in a class with slackers because slackers will improve your class ranking.

Don't go by any statistic they give you about what percentage of their grads matched in their top three choices. Actually look at the matches if they'll let you. If you get in at a place that matches 10 neurosurgeons and 25 orthopods, choose that school if you can afford it. It will create doors for you even if you don't want to walk through them.

Better (objective) questions to ask:

How much emphasis is placed on Problem-Based Learning, and how do you provide it?

What is the note-taking or sharing service like?

How much class attendance is required?

What kind of clinical exposure do you have as MS 1/2?

How do you grade? Determine AOA status?

There are plenty more, but these are things that I wish I would have considered more fully.

Hi Wizard, thanks for the response. I assume that the questions you suggest (except possibly grading and PBL) are questions that you would ask students. Is there anything you think is particularly important to ask faculty members during interviews to get a better picture of the school?

 

[Wizard of Oz]

Hi Wizard, thanks for the response. I assume that the questions you suggest (except possibly grading and PBL) are questions that you would ask students. Is there anything you think is particularly important to ask faculty members during interviews to get a better picture of the school?

Well a lot of the interviewing doctors are not actually faculty at most of the places I've been. There are a lot of doctors who come from the community to help out on the admissions committee. In those cases, I am not sure that there is a lot you can ask them--maybe why did they choose to move to the area if they are not from there? It might give you some insight about the community.

One thing that might come up is how long the current curriculum style has been in place. A lot of schools are switching over to PBL, and several places are turning classes into guinea pigs for new curricula. This can be both good and bad.

Um, I'm coming up a little bit blank on other things to ask faculty. Fortunately with the Internet, the MSAR, USN/WR rankings, and sites like this, there isn't a whole lot that you can't find out before going for the interview. Some people also get a lot out of mdapplicants.com or studentsofmedicine.com. I think that the main thing, if indeed you do get offers at a lot of places, is to just look around you and see what the school is like when you are there for the interview.