Wow. If ever there was a post that I should post on. Let me add 2 disclaimers. 1. Gleevec is right. 2. I'm president of a few things here so I know more information about this stuff than almost any other student because I've been to way to many meetings on it.
Now onto some things that have happened, will happen, etc, etc.
As you know, we are Keck School of Medicine at USC. This is because a foundation named after Keck gave us 110$ million dollars. This money was originally trying to be given to UCLA, but it was taking 3+ years because of red tape and stuff over at UCLA. Steve Sample, current president of USC, called up the chair of the Keck foundation and told him that if he wanted to give the money to a medical school, USC would be a great choice. He could go strait through the presidents office and it would take less than a month. With the 110$ million dollars, the med school would be named after Keck and also strive to be a powerhouse in research. We promised to raise 330$ million in matching funds and be a top ten school in ten years in research funding (not USNews)
That was 3-4 years ago. So far, we have raised 400 Million in gifts to the school and have reset the goal to getting one billion in ten years (Even in this bad economy. We made the promise during the boom years, figuring it would be easier) We have completed one research building which is estimated to bring in 30-40$ Mill a year in research funding, and have 1 more research buildings that should be complete by next March and another just had ground broken so that it will be finished next December. 3 new wings to currently existing hospitals have been built (open in 2-3 months) and another one is just had ground broken on it. One research building just had it?s ground broken and construction will start within a month or two. The largest of the currently planned research building will break ground in another couple of months. Funding for all buildings planned right now is fully complete. There is also a new hospital being built to replace county hospital, but that won?t do anything to help Keck become a better research hospital, except that I think we are going to inherit County hospital (which can?t be used for patients after 2010 because the building is to old) which will be used for more research and office space. Our NIH research funding has gone from 78$ Million 4 years ago to 150-160$ million this year. Top ten is about 310$ Million right now, but the number will prolly go up. I think we?ll end up top 15-20 (right now I think we are around 25)
That was pretty dry, now for the cooler stuff.
I?m a second year here at Keck. Once we got the Keck gift, we actually started actively recruiting students, which we had never done before. The first year we did that, we offered 250 acceptances, and 195 people enrolled for a class of 168. That mistake wasn?t done again. But the level of people who have enrolled here has gotten consistently better. The class above me had the highest MCAT and GPA in school history. My class beat them by .8 on the MCAT and .05 on GPA. The current first year class beat my class. I?m fairly sure the class of 2008 will beat them.
We also implemented a new curriculum 3 years ago. The current third years are the first people to have it. It switched to a systems based curriculum from a standard curriculum. Right now we have a maximum of 20 hours a week of class and 3-6 hours a week of patient interviews/physical diagnoses a week. It also changed to pass/fail the first 2 years, and all new learning stops March 10th so that you have 7 weeks of review (12 hours of review class a week), one week for a clinical test, one week for a year end test (one day that week) and then 4 weeks before you start rotations. There was a few snags in their teaching, since it was the first time the material had been taught this way. At most schools when they put in a new curriculum, there is a dip in the board scores for the first class to go through it, and then it rises above the former average. The current third years scared 5 points more than the previous class and easily the best in our history. My class should beat them easily, in part because we are smarter than them, and in part because we didn?t have any of the problems they had. ( I feel sorry for them. They always complained, but they didn?t fix it for them but they fixed it for us)
Those are some of the main things that has happened here. I don?t think we will end up a top ten school in either ranking, in part because other schools are trying to improve, too. I look at it as Keck/USC is finally living up to it?s potential, especially considering it?s location and the name USC has. I think we will prolly end up in the 20-25 range in USNews when all is said and done.
