I am a current student at SUSOM--finished with their "basic sciences" portion of the curriculum. This post is a recollection of my experiences and opinions which I hope will guide you away from considering this place for your medical education.
Things the school will not tell you before matriculating into the basic sciences:
Study Good
~ohnodoc~
Things the school will not tell you before matriculating into the basic sciences:
- You likely will not get your financial aid disbursement on time
- About 80% of the student body regularly receives their financial aid disbursement, meant to assist you in paying for the basics of life: food, housing, transportation, in the last couple of weeks of the semester. My colleagues and I regularly had to live off of credit cards or borrow money from family and friends just to survive because the school failed to disburse our money in a timely fashion.
- Should you attempt to ameliorate this concern, you will be unable to speak directly with school representativers directly because they will not answer their phones. Rather, they will vaguely reply to your emails until you become so frustrated that you give up trying to get your money, or continue to provide you with barebones answers or refer you to the 'financial aid guide' for further questions.
- You will be in class for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. This goes on almost without exception for the entirety of your 5 semesters down on the island. You will be told that you are in class 40 hours a week because the Dutch accrediting body, the NVAO requires it, but truthfully, you are in class because the Executive Dean made an error while filing paperwork with the body and didn't have the integrity to correct it. You will be exhausted, and you will wonder how other Caribbean schools' curricula function when classes are not mandatory, or are 1/2 of what SUSOM's are.
- You will not have access to the internet from 0750-1200/1300-1700 Monday-Friday. I'm serious. You cannot even attempt to fact check a professor's statement, or use internet-based platforms to enhance your learning experience during class hours because administration has it turned off. You will be told that there's "anecdotal evidence" that students performed better on their exams after they tried turning off the internet during class hours for a month one semester. But, that's all it is...anecdotal evidence.
- When all is said and done, based purely on statistics, you will not make it through the basic sciences portion of your medical school education with SUSOM in 5 semesters. My cohort began with nearly 90 students, and by the end of my 5th semester, we had fewer than 25 members of our original cohort still with our class. Most students left by the end of the first semester because they were never cut out for medical school, or because they followed different career paths. Many of our classmates failed a course and had to repeat the semester. When it comes down to it, though, the administration of the school cares only about your money. They are a bookie: if you want to bet that you can make it through medical school, SUSOM will take your bet, but they will do nothing to truly assist you in that endeavor, and, in some regards, will actively work against you trying to reach your goals of doctor-hood.
- You will be forced into hours of "clinical" education while on island, by professors who have never practiced modern medicine in North America. You will be told how important these classes are, but they exist to keep you in class longer so that the school can keep their good standing with the NVAO, and to give bored professors something to do.
- You will have 1 (one) professor teaching you in the basic sciences with an American M.D. That means one person on that island who has written USMLE Step 1, which, let's be honest, the basic sciences are really just a very expensive Step 1 prep course. They will tell you that they have a dynamic curriculum that changes frequently to cater to the needs of the student, and to account for changes in content on Step 1: they are lying. For the last 5 years, through all of the faculty changes (and there have been many), any new professor that has arrived on island has been forced to reuse the same slides as their predecessor. Tell me, does that sound like a dynamic and evolving curriculum that serves the ever-changing world of medicine? Professors have even been punished/derided for trying to update the content of their slides to 1. reflect the truth and 2. updated information.
- You will have a Student Government Association, which is attended by one of the many faculty/administrative who is amazingly walking around upright despite not having a spine. You will have weekly SGA meetings to discuss recurring themes of: lack of consistency in policies regarding student conduct, lack of USMLE-style multiple choice exams, poorly-worded or completely incorrect answers on exams, not having internet for 40 hours a week, not being able to eat in class buildings, forced attendance. The list goes on. You will be told that your concerns are being passed on to Devens, Massachusetts, where SUSOM headquarters is located, but that is a lie. Your concerns will go into a little notebook, nary to see the light of day. You will be frustrated at your lack of power, but you will continue to try to make school and your life on that island despite the school's lack of compassion or action.
- You will be bullied by faculty into complying with the will of the on-island administration and the will of Devens, but that's not because most of the faculty are bad people, it's because they need jobs, and the SUSOM administration has them scared ****less that anything they do to step out of the line of conformity, including letting students do the same, will result in their immediate termination.
- You will have a few great professors, and they will likely not last the entire 5 semesters of your basic sciences. SUSOM administration has a knack for identifying professors who are actually talented at teaching, devoted to their students, and good at their jobs, and finding a way to fire them. It will be tough, and you, the student, will be the one left in a lurch trying to figure out how you are going to pass exams the day after your professors are terminated right before your very eyes.
- You will likely not be able to take USMLE Step 1 on time, despite your best efforts. After you finish your basic sciences, you must pass the NBME Comprehensive Basic Sciences Examination. If and when you pass this exam, you will have to complete all of your annual compliance documentation before you can even consider scheduling a date for Step 1. This means getting a urine drug screen, background check, numeric titers, a physical examination and clearance by a physician, and other documentation. Only when all of this has been gathered by the annual compliance department can you schedule Step 1, after going through the headache of ECFMG applications.
- You will take Step 1 and wonder why you haven't started clinical rotations. You will wonder this because SUSOM requires you to write an RLRA, a 20-30 page literature analysis paper. This type of paper doesn't exist in the world of academia. It's the school's own special form of paper with a non-sense number of flaming hoops to hop through, in hopes that an omniscient "paper committee" will approve your final draft. Perhaps, then, a couple weeks after you submit that draft, the school will approve your paper; however, you still won't be placed into rotations. You will have to fill out paperwork to figure out where you want to be placed, and will likely not be placed where you would like. And, if you do not complete Step 1, your RLRA, and all of the other steps to achieve clinical student status within the first 6 weeks of the following semester, the school will not even attempt to place you into a clinical site.
Study Good
~ohnodoc~
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