Navy housing is kind of like a large neighborhood that is right next to RFUMS. A semi-busy 2 lane road divides RFU and Navy housing without any walkways from one side to the other for pedestrians. Also, the Navy housing neighborhood is huge, you might end up with a house that is on the opposite side of the neighborhood and would either have a 3 minute drive, or 15 minute walk. Student housing/Woodlands is 5 minutes away.
I have a brother going to school full-time as well so I really need to find a cheap place to live. Are there certain areas near campus known for cheap housing? How about in the surrounding towns like Waukegan?
So it seems as though most BMS students are split between Woodlands and Student housing, although i know a few people in Navy housing. Woodlands is the same distance to school as Student housing is, both are a 5 minute walk away, so you will not need to drive your car to campus unless you are lazy/its -20 degrees out lol.
Did you get in? congrats!
when are you going to talk with the advisors?
Probably before I start there- I’m doing research in Chicago right now so getting up to North Chicago by train is pretty easy. I guess I’ll wait till the BMS program ends so that the professors may have more time to spend with me.
There is no guaranteed admission into the MD school. Even if someone performs well in the program, they could be rejected due to poor interview performance.
A lot of schools around the country have been changing their curriculum to be more integrated and less repetitive. So rather than take dedicated courses for biochemistry, pathology, and pharmacology, you just learn the pertinent bits of each discipline for the system you’re studying. The way most schools try to teach is start with the basics: what is the cardiovascular system? Ok. You know it now, what diseases affect it? Oh you got that? Moving on to how you treat those diseases with drugs. This makes things difficult for SMPs since they want to provide students with a whole course rather than just blocks. I’m not sure of all the SMPs that have switched to the block system but Gtown has. And it seems to be working fine. Maybe more will switch in time. At Gtown, you get grades within the first 8-10 weeks. Regardless, every SMP is going to teach the same stuff and it will be immensely helpful for medical school. I make cookies and I bet you do too. But our recipes are probably a little different. But I bet they still both taste good.
In short, from my understanding the change happened because it allows the curriculum to be more predicative of actual clinical scenarios (integrated topics) and because PBL curriculums have been correlated with higher Step 1 scores.
From what I've been told by the advisor as well as previous posts, if you're accepted into the BMS program it essentially means you MCAT is suitable for CMS. Unless you want to retake it for another school with higher requirements I don't think it's necessary. Enjoy the summer before you sell your life to the program
I'd really not recommend studying lol. Enjoy your summer and do some volunteering. I tried to study over the summer prior to BMS, it didn't help me at all. The material you'll be seeing in BMS isn't like basic physics, or chemistry material. You are gonna get hit with a lot of different scientific procedures (like PCR and blotting and stuff), some basic biochemical pathways (glycolysis and such), and a bunch of different cellular transporters (Na/K atpase, AE1...). It's all stuff you just have to memorize.
