UPDATE: A student at WesternU had their CAR STOLEN from the apartment complex next to school (@Helix where they live)
Sorry to whoever it was.... Wish I could help.....
Additions to my previous comments:
Yes, there are some great ISAC students!!!!
Some teachers are excellent- get to know them if you can!
Yes, there are a lot of happy students here. Please read the many responses defending this school..... The facebook page was full of them too. Open mic was great tonight, thanks to those that helped out. I look forward to the next one
Many of you responded to this post and were soooooo helpful and willing to help out a stranger in need. Sorry I couldn't get back to everyone that offered help. Keep helping each other out. Some of us really need it.... Things are going a little better now thanks... Class of 2016, WE ARE AWESOME
Lets make this school a better place. Keep hammering these major issues with the administration. They can't ignore us forever. Hopefully this post pissed off enough people to make some major changes at our school. WesternU has potential to be make great improvements and help out its students more.... Lets get er done y'all......
There are lots of other awesome Colleges of Osteopathic Medicine Schools out there. Find out if one is right for you and if Osteopathic Medicine is what you really want to do. Find out all the disadvantages and advantages of each school and career path. Take what each school tells you with a grain of salt. They are presenting biased information. Ask students if they really like it there instead of just using the tourguides that present biased info as well. Ask around....
There are many other awesome medical fields out there too....... Check them out!!!
In the end, do your own research before making the huge decision of what school to attend. SDN is full of rumors- many are false (What I presented could be accurate for a WesternU student) Some students did finally end up getting tutors although 6/10ths through a course is way too long to wait to assign help to those in need. Figure it out LEAD. It's unfortunate that many second year students are busy with their own classes and board studies (by the way, you OMS-2's rock!!!! Keep in touch with your COMPANIONS. Maybe I could be one of yours that could use a little help, check in with me whoever you are!!!!
Other schools:::::: watch out for us confused, sleep deprived first years and help us through this first year crap!!!!!
You can read about the many similar problems at other DO schools in the following posts and other threads. This is a laundry list of many of
WesternU's. I wanted to let everyone know of these problems I have had/put together from classmates having. Yes, these are many of ours but not all (how about supporting Apple products too?? grrrrrrrrr......) Every school has its own advantages and disadvantages!!!!!
FIND OUT FOR YOURSELF IF WESTERNU.EDU IS THE RIGHT SCHOOL FOR YOU.
PS: Check out this satirical post about our President's letter explaining the gun shots in two of our windows hahahaaa.............. Funny thing is that many of them are true. Lets make some changes with security folks...
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I am a female DO student at Western University of Health Sciences in Pomona, CA class 2016. I would like perspective students to be aware of numerous problems that the school won't be upfront about. You need to be aware of these before you make a decision to attend.
About the classes:
· We are largely on our own for learning here (lack of access to teachers, limited tutors, disorganized labs, confusing lectures, and overall disordered resources). They tell us to find a study group with other students (which doesnt help all that much because they are trying to learn the material as well).
· We hardly have access to the professors. We are told to ask questions online but quite a few dont get answered. Most teachers do not have office hours but some are willing to meet if they are around their office or maybe with an appointment.
· Some of our classes are televised from our satellite campus in Lebanon, Oregon (presumably to cut the schools costs). One teacher we had was bad. They sent us study guides that had incorrect information and misspellings (such as mixing up sympathetic and parasympathetic- kind of a BIG difference!). Many students downloaded other teachers lectures about the same topics because it was so bad. It was frustrating to figure out what we needed to know about this topic.
· Many students spend more time trying to figure out what we need to know and deciding the most efficient way to learn it than actually learning the material itself. The disorganized material is time consuming to sort through.
· Much of what we learn in anatomy lab is from first year students that took an intensive summer anatomy course where they had to get 80% or higher in the course to instruct us. By the time they are our instructors, much of this info has been forgotten or not concrete.
· For anatomy lab, the instructors assign complicated directions such as assigning certain pages out of a book and giving us a supplemental handout with what we should do instead and what they dont want us to do. Many students watch videos form other medical schools to try to figure out what is going on. There have been students that have asked about recording our own instructors demonstrating what they want us to do for lab and what structures they want us to know but the administration is NOT willing to do this. Extremely frustrating and a waste of time for many.
· We DO NOT have enough teacher assistants or tutors. Many students who are failing anatomy asked for a tutor right away and still have not been given one or assigned to a group even after 5 weeks of the 10 week anatomy course. Even students with a documented disabilities have not had access to tutors they were told they could have before school started. A lack of tutors and instructors has been a known problem in the past with this school and we can only hope this changes. In the meantime, we make friends with smart friends or pay for tutors (like 50K a year isnt enough!).
· The school didnt want to assign tutors until after the first anatomy exam (after 2 weeks of the 10 week block). This put those who knew they needed help at a huge disadvantage. This brings up the whole ethical question of allowing access to important information only if you do poorly enough on an exam.
· Many students took anatomy courses in undergrad or other graduate school and are at a huge advantage in this course. In the end, anatomy gets curved at ~66% is passing in order to only make 8 or so students fail anatomy out of a class of 220 (they have to retake it the next summer).
· There are many students that pay other students for anatomy tutoring because of the lack of resources the school provides.
· The school enjoys letting you sort through all their information to find the useful things (instead of providing direction). For example, an instructor in Oregon uploaded videos of dissections that would have helped us in Pomona but the did not inform us of this information until half way through anatomy (they sent out an email after 4 weeks but they screwed up sending it to the class in Pomona of 2016).
· Some teachers dont bother uploading their powerpoint presentation until AFTER they are done lecturing which makes taking notes on them much more difficult.
· Some classes are a waste of time. We have been told to watch prerecorded lectures then in class they go over almost all of that information anyways in the next class. Unfortunately in this class, we are not able to have electronics out where we could study for other classes.
· The exams we take have been very poorly written thus far. We have numerous grammar problems and confusing questions. How about you have someone proof read your poorly written exam???
· Some teachers are really bad about answering emails (even really important ones).
· The DO classes communicate on our facebook page where we can try to figure out what we are suppose to do for classes and better resources to learn from.
· There are many students that realize that much of what we go over in classes is not that important to doing well on the boards (board exam scores are MUCH IMPORTANT THAN GRADES in classes). Therefore, just pass all of your classes and spend the rest of your time studying for the board exams!!! No joke!
· There is not much research that is performed on campus. They do not get much (if any) government grants to fund research.
· We still do not have a locker room to change clothes for cadaver lab or a shower on campus to use after.
· We do not have a workout facility on campus, they supplement our cost to be a member at a local gym.
About the institution:
· Crime on and near campus is big problem. Pomona has a 13.2% unemployment rate and a high crime rate.
· Being a female on this campus can especially be scary at times. We find locals passing through campus picking through our garbage for recyclables. Who knows what happens at night! Not all that many people stay around after dark.
· Honestly, we had two bullets that big windows in the HEC on 9/23 around 10 pm at night. We are in arguments with the administration because they are not doing enough to protect their students.
· The buildings do not have swipe passes on them (so anyone can walk into our buildings and steal stuff).
· We do not have an emergency text message system set up in case the school is in a lock down (we get sent a email if they bother sending it out (we didnt get an email from the school about the windows being shot until ~10 hours later).
· A few weeks ago, one students father got held up at gun point in a parking lot next to campus (again no immediate email from the school because it was just off campus. It was sent the next day).
· Parking on campus is $480 a year because the school leases the lots from the city. Cars in these lots are broken into on a regular basis.
· Tuition is $47,555 a year with an annual indebtedness of $203,430. This is the 5th highest graduation debt of ALL MEDICAL SCHOOLS
I am not writing this to scare anyone away from Western U but I believe that everyone should be aware of these problems in order to help you make an educated decision if WesternU is the right school for you.
Please feel free to clarify these topics during your interviews on campus or directly email the administration on the Pomona Campus
sooooo many sad but true points!
I was just thinking that
