opt schools sharing curriculum with other doctoring professions?

[gsinccom]

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Which opt schools have classes combined with medical, dental, or pharm students? I've heard of UAB. Any others?

 

[Opii]

Which opt schools have classes combined with medical, dental, or pharm students? I've heard of UAB. Any others?

NOVA

 

[gsinccom]

any idea on Houston, SCCO, SCO, or Pacific?

 

[xmattODx]

Pacific?

No

 

[Kristene9]

any idea on Houston, SCCO, SCO, or Pacific?

No for Houston and SCO too, I think

 

[Hines302]

MCO shares some courses with pharmacy

 

[gsinccom]

any thoughts on pros/cons of offering classes with other doctoring programs? Is Pacific for sure a no?...I know they've got quite a few health professions programs there....

 

[xmattODx]

Is Pacific for sure a no?...I know they've got quite a few health professions programs there....

Unless something has changed in the last year, for sure no. I don't really see any benefit in sharing classes. Same material would be taught just to more people.

 

[sco1styear]

Definate no for SCO! 🙂

 

[cpw]

definite no for UHCO too

 

[gsinccom]

I am wondering if Pacific will start to do so as they are adding a Pharmacy program???? personally I think a school that focuses its classes to ODs only will better train the OD...
Houston doesn't...is that for sure?

 

[xmattODx]

I am wondering if Pacific will start to do so as they are adding a Pharmacy program???? personally I think a school that focuses its classes to ODs only will better train the OD...
Houston doesn't...is that for sure?

Not sure but the dean of the pharmacy program is a PharmD, O.D. and used to teach in the Opt. program. I think that the programs won't even be sharing a building (in fact will be in two close but distinct cities) until 2010 but I may be wrong.

 

[gsinccom]

I know about the Hillsboro campus being developed and that may affect me as I'm still 20 months away and I won't be starting till August 2007. Hopefully they don't combine pharn and OD classes while I'm there...pretty sure I won't like it.
houston doesn't for sure? I know they've got a lot of other health profession programs...

 

[UABopt]

any thoughts on pros/cons of offering classes with other doctoring programs? Is Pacific for sure a no?...I know they've got quite a few health professions programs there....

I can try to offer a little bit of insight as to what it is like to share classes with students outside of the optometry school. Here at UAB we call all of our basic science classes “Volker Hall” classes as they are taught outside of the school of optometry. For the most part half of the classes that you take the first two years at UAB will be these “Volker Hall” classes. Like everything else in life there are benefits and drawbacks to such a system.

The main benefits to being part of an integrated medical system are VASTLY expanded resources. Being part of such a large research university means that you have direct access to its libraries, research, professors and labs. We for example are one of the few optometry schools that has its students do first hand dissections of cadavers (I have even heard that some medical schools are starting to do away with this).

Most of our “Volker Hall” classes are with dental students, which means that there are about 100 people in the lecture hall at a time (60 dental, 40 optometry). The classes are taught by experts in their respective fields. When I say that these basic science classes are taught by experts I mean that for any given class, say Microbiology, Physiology, Pharmacology etc. is taught by at least 10 or so lecturers most of which also teach the medical students. Each of which is either an MD, PhD, OD, DDS, DVM, and knows their area of lecture material very, very well. It also means that if one of your lecturers is terrible you don’t have to worry about it because chances are he or she won’t be lecturing again.

Now to the drawbacks…because these classes are taught by so many different professors, and each of them believes that their material is the most important, some classes tend to lack cohesiveness. That being said though the better the coursemaster the more cohesive the course tends to be. Such courses also tend to be extremely in depth, so much so that sometimes there does not seem to be direct relevance to either optometry or dentistry. In fact often times we have noticed that a lecturer will use the exact same powerpoint to lecture from as they did to lecture the medical students with a few slides tacked in on the ocular and oral implications of the respective topic. Sometimes I am left wondering if other optometry schools have two hours of lecture dedicated to the genetics of Orthomyxoviruses.

All in all I think that UABSO is a great school, even if it does mean that we have to study a ton, and learn some things that are not 100% relevant to our field. Perhaps, in the end, we will be better and more well rounded because of it.