Also, theres this from another thread, "Pros and Cons of your DO School"
UMDNJ-SOM.
I posted a review on this thread years ago covering first year. I still stand by most of what I stated there, although with the caveat that the curriculum has been further revamped to make exam blocks less intense than they were for us. Block exams are now broken down by subject and given over the course of a week, which leads to much less cramming and stress.
As for the 3rd/4th year experience...well, it left a lot to be desired. These were the major issues:
- The class sizes have been getting bigger and bigger every year. The class before us had ~115 students; ours had ~135; the class after ours has around 160. Predictably, these increases are causing the 'core' rotation sites to become overloaded with students. While the school has addressed this somewhat by finding a number of new rotation sites, the quality control at the new sites is uneven at best, with some sites delivering very poor experiences. (For instance, 3 weeks of my internal medicine rotation took place at a hospital with no didactics, no morning report/noon conference, no residents, and an attending who would not even let us examine patients because of 'liability concerns'.) Another problem is that many of these new sites are a long drive away from the main campus; one major site is about 45 minutes away, which is a problem when its OB rotation demands you be there from 6a-6p 5-6 days a week.
- There's a mandatory 2-week radiology rotation during third year. The increases in class size have caused the school to run out of radiology spots in-system; their solution is to tell the 20-25% of the class that didn't get an in-system spot to 'find one yourself'. Problem: most academic institutions will not accept third year medical students for two week radiology rotations, thus many students end up having to search around for local radiologists that are willing to take them in. These local practices have become fed up with this, and many won't take students anymore. After calling more than 40 locations, I had to drive to Princeton (100 mile round trip) for two weeks to get that damn rotation done. Naturally, the school gives students practically no assistance in finding these out-of-system rotations.
- The people who are in charge of handling 4th year rotations/aways/etc are unhelpful, disorganized, and ultimately unapologetic when things don't get handled properly. For instance, I had an away sub-i scheduled at least 4-5 months in advance. This rotation site required an affiliation agreement with our school. Knowing that the office was grossly disorganized, I notified them several times of this and received an email implying that action had been taken on it. With about a week to go, I asked about the status of the agreement and was told that the paperwork had never been submitted to the legal department (!) and that it usually took said department months to produce an answer (!!). Because of this, my sub-I was cancelled and I was forced to find an alternative rotation at the last minute. (This was a problem because I was kinda relying on that rotation for IM rec letters...yeah.) Just to rub it in, I got an email a month and a half later eagerly telling me that my affiliation agreement had been approved.
- Many questionable decisions have been made in terms of how much time gets allocated to the various 3rd year rotations. FM gets an overly generous 12 weeks, two of which are a worthless 'AHEC community health' rotation which usually has little to do with medicine. There is also a mandatory 4 week geriatrics rotation, which most students frankly don't find to be that helpful. Because FM and geriatrics claim 16 weeks between them, IM and surgery end up getting a scant 6 weeks apiece. One week of IM is outpatient, meaning that you get 5 total weeks of inpatient IM experience as a 3rd year (one week of geri is inpatient, but it's not really the same as IM wards). The quality of these rotations is often questionable. I wrote very few notes on IM; as I stated above, 3 of my impatient weeks were spent in places where I couldn't examine patients/write notes, and while my other two weeks were better I still did not get to do many H&Ps/notes/procedures there either. OB was simply awful; I selected a specific OB site because I was told there were no residents there and students got to do almost everything. When we finally got there, an OB program had materialized...meaning that the students basically got to do nothing. The residents were extremely nasty to students and the site director insisted the students work the same hours as the the residents (6a-6p)...this was 45-60 min from my apartment...I never delivered, never got to do a speculum exam, and basically spent 12 hours a day 5-6 days a week with my thumb up my ass on an L&D ward in Nowheresville, NJ. Meanwhile, the students on the 'core' OB rotation were working 7:30-3:30 M-F...our site director refused to change hours despite repeated requests from the school. I could go on and on about how ****ty some of these rotations were. I spent some of peds in a clinic where nobody spoke English and nobody translated for me (as there 'wasn't time for that')...that was real useful. On surgery, we were told to 'man the ORs' whenever we were on duty...this led to me witnessing some incredible procedures (liver/kidney tx), but I got practically zero surgical management experience on the floors, never wrote notes of any kind, and never saw the inside of a surgical clinic. There were occasional bright spots (FM was actually a really good experience outside of the AHEC weeks, as was psych), but overall 3rd year was bad >>> good.
- There are different 'tracks' for 3rd/4th year...the 'North Track' caters to people who want to live/stay in North Jersey. People seemed to be relatively satisfied with it, but the actual quality of those rotations sounds somewhat questionable (some North Trackers told me that on surgery they rarely scrubbed in and basically spent most of their time chilling in the library, sometimes going home at noon).
- UMDNJ got busted up by Chris Christie, and SOM got picked up by Rowan University. I'm going to refrain from commenting on this extensively because I just don't know many details about it. I've heard both good things (Rowan's going to invest money and enhance research at SOM!) and bad things (Rowan just wants SOM for its rotation sites...why would it operate two medical schools, since it already has Cooper...SOM will eventually be shut down...etc.) It still looks like we won't be rotating at Cooper, which is a large university hospital that used to be a UMDNJ-RWJ rotation site but has now become the centerpiece of Rowan's MD school.
- The social scene here still sucks. I talked a bit about this in my earlier posts, and nothing really improved in later years. Our class was filled with people who wanted to drink and party, and if this wasn't your thing...tough ****. I ultimately did find a few equally disenchanted people throughout 3rd/4th year, and I still regard these people as good friends.
- The school makes you pay for Kaplan Step 2 lectures unless you hit 600 on COMLEX level 1 (I got 588...bah). At least the school gave everyone a month off for step 2 studying...but I'm going to be paying interest for decades on the $2k I had to drop for the Kaplan stuff, even though I never touched it (249/634 on step 2, baby).
- There's more mandatory rotation stupidity 4th year, including a palliative care/pain mgmt/hospice mashup rotation that has a required shelf exam and brutal oral exam about random PM&R nonsense (as 4th years...blah).
- Advising is essentially nonexistent, but I get the impression that this is endemic to DO education in general.
Overall
I'm gonna be honest here...if I could do this over, I'd go MD. If I had to go osteopathic, I'd go somewhere else. If I was somebody living in the area and I wanted to go DO and not go far (seemingly the target audience for SOM), I'd go to PCOM. I know people at that school, and they are legitimately happy with it...PCOM seems to actually have its **** together, and the experience seems to be much better overall. Most people in our class were thoroughly disenchanted with SOM by the time 4th year hit. I'm just glad to be done with it. I managed to match an upper-middle tier ACGME IM program that I'm very happy with so far, so clearly good matching is possible coming out of SOM...but I really feel like my match was more in spite of the school than because of it.
PM me if you have any other questions.
