How do your junior and senior rotations work, without a veterinary hospital on campus? Also, how much of your coursework is in the PBL format, and how is grading done (pass/fail, curves or not, etc.)?
During your third year, you do rotations at clinics near the campus. Western has set up partnerships with a bunch of clinics near here, and everybody goes through each one. I'm not sure how long each rotation is. Then, you basically plan your fourth year based on what you want to do (with the help of the faculty). You can pretty much go wherever you want (here in LA, other places in the US, overseas) and do whatever you want (choose SA, LA, exotics, etc). This is pretty cool for a couple of reasons - 1.)You get to travel and see new places 2.)You get to meet lots of people and make connections 3.)If you are interested in doing an internship/residency, you can do a rotation at the place you are interested in to see if it'd be a good fit 4.)Many veterinary teaching hospitals are referral only, this means that you only see cases that are progressed/severe/rare. That is cool because you get to see a lot of medicine and surgery, however, you kind of miss out on the every-day stuff. With the rotations set up the way they are, you can rotate through general clinics, referral clinics, emergency clinics, and see all of that stuff.
As for the coursework section.. Pretty much all of it is PBL. Occasionally we'll get a lecture (I use this term loosely, lots of times it's a Q&A session that we requested, or the professor will show us some stuff related to our current case), but you yourself are in charge of learning the basic sciences. It's a really scary concept at first, but we are beginning to get accustomed to it, and the more it happens the more I like it. As for the grading, you have to get a certain percentage in each of the basic sciences to pass, in addition to passing your other classes (clinical skills, ethics, etc). I don't think there are any curves. I think that one class is pass/fail. We are actually coming up on our first exam session so I'm not 100% sure about everything yet. Oh yeah, and for tests, you don't have random tests throughout the semester, where one class tests you whenever they want and it isn't coordinated with the other classes.. You go 8 weeks with no exams, then you have all the tests for all the classes all in one week. That is the week after next.
I hope that answers the questions you asked, if you have any more, please ask. I'll try to be unbiased for you, but really, there isn't much I don't like about Western. I'm really happy here, the faculty is awesome, and they do a great job of picking students, everybody here seems pretty cool.
