Hi Everyone,
This is a new account created for the sole purpose of responding to threads like these.
I'll be honest; I don't much like SDN. I think the competitiveness and the elitist atmosphere of health professions education combined with both the anonymity afforded by the internet and over-represented obsessive/histrionic/narcissistic tendencies can too easily lead to pettiness and negativity. So if you're reading this, I'd recommend you close your computer and go outside and go for a walk and smell some flowers along the way. I think that's a better way to spend your time, and certainly will result in lower cortisol levels.
I'll just say I'm someone who is intimately in the know with the accreditation process, the inner working of CNUCOM, the financial aspects of the school, the LCME site visits and the LCME findings.
I'd like to encourage everyone reading this thread that in my view the doom-and-gloom perpetrated by individuals like Goro and GynGyn do not reflect my opinions of the reality of CNUCOM's situation and I think are overall unhelpful to the goal each of us should hold: to provide quality medical care to patients.
I think CNUCOM has come a long way since it started. It has recruited talented students who have proven they can perform as well as the rest of the country when it comes to Step 1. We have students who have received research grants and awards from the major professional specialty organizations. We have publications and submissions of research in top-tier journals. We have a clinically-focused curriculum that has prepared students well for clerkships. We have affiliations with professional medical societies in the greater Sacramento and Central Valley areas. We have broad clerkship agreements with Kaiser, Sutter, Mercy, San Joaquin, and various other private clinics scattered throughout Sacramento, the Central Valley, and Los Angeles. We have recruited many faculty in the past three years from UC-Davis, UCSF and other reputable schools. We have an active student body with a full array of interest groups, and various student clinic opportunities in place and in the works.
The response from the first class going through clerkships has been largely positive. I think that will reflect in the next LCME visit, combined with overall school structural improvements and I am optimistic about accreditation prospects.
There are no guarantees except death and taxes, of course. And it is true: the school does not offer federal financial aid. The administration is now transparent about this. Regardless, students are finding ways to fund their education through comparable if not equal loan options. And not all of them have rich mommies and daddies, despite what some here may lead you to believe.
So what I just can't understand is the overwhelming negativity, and the sense of what I can only describe as glee and a genuine desire for the school to fail coming from some in this thread. Why? What is there to gain from such an attitude? California in particular has such a large need for a larger physician work force, with a large migrant population and with many more previously uninsured coming online thanks to the PPACA, why are we rooting for the failure of hardworking students who have shown they can compete with the rest?
So to those students who might come to this thread and think twice about applying or reconsider their acceptance, I hope you choose to message me first. I hope the negativity here won't discourage genuinely good people from their goals of helping treat the ill, and especially those who wish to treat the poor and disenfranchised.
CNU is training doctors at a fraction of the cost to the community to the same standards as other big name schools. I mean no disrespect to UC-Davis when I write this, but just as an example, their new nursing building had a price tag in the hundreds of millions of dollars, they are earth-quake proofing their buildings to the tune of $200+ million, they're building a new hospital wing for $400+ million. That alone is like 12 CNUs. All their buildings are really nice! But I think we need to remember that as doctors we are supposed to be public servants, not royalty. We don't need to work in palaces. We should care for the poor and not refuse to treat the most vulnerable as UC-Davis does by rejecting all Medi-Cal patients. All I'm saying is the model CNU uses is different philosophically, but that's not a bad thing. The cost of training doctors is shifted more to the students themselves rather than resorting to government funding (federal loans are probably the reason tuition prices at higher education institutions have skyrocketed over the last few decades anyway, making all students poorer in the process) or resorting to super-rich mega-donors like Betty Moore. The school might not be flawless, but its administration is trying something different, and from the standardized metrics like the first class's Step 1 scores and my own personal insider perspective on things, it's working. They're proving the concept, they're doing it at a cheaper net-cost, and while we should press them to be more transparent and honest, we should root for success, not failure. The faculty and staff in the COM are not only excellent professionally, they are genuinely good and kind people who are working hard to make the school into something great.
I wish everyone all the best, and I hope if you are a pre-med reading this, you'll consider CNU. I can make no guarantees, but I don't think you'll be disappointed. Feel free to message me with questions.
Thanks.
