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- Jan 6, 2016
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I have decided to relay my experience with USF CoP to potential students and list reasons for not going to this institution.
1.) Projects that have nothing to do with clinical decisions. Most of these projects include making ridiculously themed videos that have maybe 10 seconds of valuable education in them, but we do also get the occasional make up a fake drug and market it assignment.
2.) Pharmacy longitudinal research project. This is a 2 year project that is required to graduate that we are given no heads up about until the second year. Very few schools require something like this project and most have it listed in their curriculum. I did not choose a professional program to do research the school needs to be upfront about what is involved.
3.) Pharmacy was an after-thought for USF. We do not have a building and most of the time administration struggles to find us classrooms. Our school over accepts students and so we are frequently moved into buildings on other parts of campus to sit 8 hours a day in cramped undergrad style auditoriums with desk that are only large enough for a single sheet of paper. And as the years progressed class was canceled many times due to no classrooms available.
4.) The course series Pharmacy Skills. This is a six course series on how to use medical devices and handle patient counseling, sounds great at first. Truth is there is enough useful information to fill 2 courses at most so a lot of time is spent on fluff. This course is a 4 credit course that many weeks you will attend 12 hours to do activities such as building lego items with nurses for team building, or trying to accurately recreate a series of Mr. Potato heads in a short time with other health students to simulate how med errors can happen, evaluating patients with med students except the med students aren't required to attend so you are left alone with half of the information and can't handle the case, and of course making videos.
5.) We can't keep faculty. It's a revolving door even one of the department heads told us it's their job to learn material the day before they teach us because the people that specialize in those materials quit.
6.) End of semester and End of year exams. At the end of each semester there is a comprehensive exam that covers all courses you took that term. Failure results in remediation, I actually would agree with this to reinforce knowledge if this didn't have courses that were not always lecture based on the exam. If you fail a few of these exams over the course of school you can be made to repeat a year regardless of GPA, I do not agree with this. A good example of non-lecture based would be IPPE which is a rotation in a pharmacy, the school will ask questions they feel you should know for IPPE but didn’t include in the syllabus as a learning objective and preceptors may not cover it. The End of Year is a semi practical exam where some of it is patient counseling and some of it is written this is exam is actually pretty close to the way it should be.
7.) Lack of rotation sites. USF didn't plan ahead to secure sites before accepting large numbers of students every semester there is a struggle to find a place to put everyone. The thought of accepting less people never seem to cross their mind. Instead let’s get 20k per person and hope it works seems to be the thought process.
8.) Some instructors feel the need to post majority of their lectures online and require attendance to do “activities” in class. These can vary in levels of usefulness. Sometimes they are patient interviews other times they are crossword puzzles or bingo.
9.) There is often a lack of professionalism among faculty. A strong example is an assignment where we were instructed to take a “selfie” at a pharmacy with the most effective form of contraceptive and STD prevention. That is something I would expect in high school. Other examples include in group case discussions if a group of students is unaware of an answer to a follow up question certain faculty members will belittle the students.
10.) We use a free to play MMORPG with programed npc’s to do mock patient counseling. They can only respond to particular wordings and don’t even come close to emulating real life.
11.) The school schedules 2 mandatory seminars a semester called the Dean’s Bull Pen. These happen outside of class, this wouldn’t be a big deal if they actual related to health care at all. Sometimes we have a business man or a sports coach talk to us about their success. The worst of these events wasn’t actually relating to the event itself though. It was scheduled at a time that interfered with some of the class schedule for students having to go to our downtown simulation building. Our class as a whole was chastised, even though it only applied to 10% of us, for not bringing it to the attention of the faculty that they aren’t capable of making a schedule without conflicts. It is also interesting how few times the dean actually sticks around for the seminars with his title on them.
12.) During fourth year there is a course called professional forum that will give mock patient cases and projects to do in addition to working on your rotations. This strongly penalizes students with rotations with higher expectations or those that spend 3 hours a day driving to site (I know the drive sounds bad but this part happens at most schools and it is not the majority of students). The contents of the course were useful towards the end but during the beginning of the year before we had concise material to review for the course it was nothing but a burden.
1.) Projects that have nothing to do with clinical decisions. Most of these projects include making ridiculously themed videos that have maybe 10 seconds of valuable education in them, but we do also get the occasional make up a fake drug and market it assignment.
2.) Pharmacy longitudinal research project. This is a 2 year project that is required to graduate that we are given no heads up about until the second year. Very few schools require something like this project and most have it listed in their curriculum. I did not choose a professional program to do research the school needs to be upfront about what is involved.
3.) Pharmacy was an after-thought for USF. We do not have a building and most of the time administration struggles to find us classrooms. Our school over accepts students and so we are frequently moved into buildings on other parts of campus to sit 8 hours a day in cramped undergrad style auditoriums with desk that are only large enough for a single sheet of paper. And as the years progressed class was canceled many times due to no classrooms available.
4.) The course series Pharmacy Skills. This is a six course series on how to use medical devices and handle patient counseling, sounds great at first. Truth is there is enough useful information to fill 2 courses at most so a lot of time is spent on fluff. This course is a 4 credit course that many weeks you will attend 12 hours to do activities such as building lego items with nurses for team building, or trying to accurately recreate a series of Mr. Potato heads in a short time with other health students to simulate how med errors can happen, evaluating patients with med students except the med students aren't required to attend so you are left alone with half of the information and can't handle the case, and of course making videos.
5.) We can't keep faculty. It's a revolving door even one of the department heads told us it's their job to learn material the day before they teach us because the people that specialize in those materials quit.
6.) End of semester and End of year exams. At the end of each semester there is a comprehensive exam that covers all courses you took that term. Failure results in remediation, I actually would agree with this to reinforce knowledge if this didn't have courses that were not always lecture based on the exam. If you fail a few of these exams over the course of school you can be made to repeat a year regardless of GPA, I do not agree with this. A good example of non-lecture based would be IPPE which is a rotation in a pharmacy, the school will ask questions they feel you should know for IPPE but didn’t include in the syllabus as a learning objective and preceptors may not cover it. The End of Year is a semi practical exam where some of it is patient counseling and some of it is written this is exam is actually pretty close to the way it should be.
7.) Lack of rotation sites. USF didn't plan ahead to secure sites before accepting large numbers of students every semester there is a struggle to find a place to put everyone. The thought of accepting less people never seem to cross their mind. Instead let’s get 20k per person and hope it works seems to be the thought process.
8.) Some instructors feel the need to post majority of their lectures online and require attendance to do “activities” in class. These can vary in levels of usefulness. Sometimes they are patient interviews other times they are crossword puzzles or bingo.
9.) There is often a lack of professionalism among faculty. A strong example is an assignment where we were instructed to take a “selfie” at a pharmacy with the most effective form of contraceptive and STD prevention. That is something I would expect in high school. Other examples include in group case discussions if a group of students is unaware of an answer to a follow up question certain faculty members will belittle the students.
10.) We use a free to play MMORPG with programed npc’s to do mock patient counseling. They can only respond to particular wordings and don’t even come close to emulating real life.
11.) The school schedules 2 mandatory seminars a semester called the Dean’s Bull Pen. These happen outside of class, this wouldn’t be a big deal if they actual related to health care at all. Sometimes we have a business man or a sports coach talk to us about their success. The worst of these events wasn’t actually relating to the event itself though. It was scheduled at a time that interfered with some of the class schedule for students having to go to our downtown simulation building. Our class as a whole was chastised, even though it only applied to 10% of us, for not bringing it to the attention of the faculty that they aren’t capable of making a schedule without conflicts. It is also interesting how few times the dean actually sticks around for the seminars with his title on them.
12.) During fourth year there is a course called professional forum that will give mock patient cases and projects to do in addition to working on your rotations. This strongly penalizes students with rotations with higher expectations or those that spend 3 hours a day driving to site (I know the drive sounds bad but this part happens at most schools and it is not the majority of students). The contents of the course were useful towards the end but during the beginning of the year before we had concise material to review for the course it was nothing but a burden.
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