Here is that student's review of TUCOM:
"Hello! Touro OMS III here.
Different people have different attitude about this school. For me personally, I am 11/10 satisfied with it, I think the experience I’ve had here is significantly better than I could have had at any other school, and I am beyond grateful I ended up here.
From what I’ve seen there are 2 (often overlapping demographics) that tend to dislike the school.
1) People who hate osteopathic manipulation and do not believe it should be taught in schools.
2) Gunners who to whom gunning is the end all be all of life.
If you fall into either of those, you probably don’t want to go here.
Beyond the awesome location (Mare Island, where over half the students live, unlike Vallejo is a safe quiet natury friendly communal neighborhood, and basically the only affordable one like that in the Bay Area), there are quite a few strong positives about the school.
General Strengths of the school:
The school has a very focused ostteopathic emphasis. Some osteopathic schools are more allopathic and spend very little time on osteopathic work or integrating the principles into the curriculum. Many of the faculty and administration are passionate of maintaining an osteopathic identity to the school. Some students came there for that reason, while others realized they had a deep love for osteopathic manipulation from exposure to this emphasis, and of course a minority regretted this emphasis. There is a lot of fabulous support for OMM, and many students I know at other DO schools (who are passionate for OMM) are basically pissed off they never went here when we’ve compared notes on the OMM programs.
If you take advantage of it and make the effort, a lot of what the OMM program gives is basically magic for 3rd and 4th year, and I cannot count how many people were blown away by what it allowed them to do during clinical years (and many of our long time attendings are comfortable referring tricky cases to the Touro students).
The student base is extremely close and supportive (in other words we are not at a gunner school). On many exams, we’ve gotten through from other students going out of their way big time to help each other, most of the class is on extremely friendly terms with each other, and we can often have fun parties or bonding activities that don’t actually need alcohol to have everyone relax enough to vibe and have fun (although that’s not to say we are opposed to it..).
The administration from my perspective is super cool. They will listen to complaints and suggestions you have, and they go out of their way to open doors for you so that you can succeed or do beneficial things in addition to the normal medical school experience. As far as I can tell, that is not the norm for administrations.
The faculty are also very passionate about supporting their students and go way over the top to support and help their students succeed. Some of the lecturers are also very good. They will also give you a lot of time outside of class to help you succeed.
Give or take all lectures are recorded so you can watch them at home on 2x (or faster with a chrome plugin
).
We have a very good anatomy program (most schools have significantly less anatomy than me do) and the lab is well ventilated. This might seem like a trivial details, but insufficiently ventilated anatomy labs are a large problem for many individuals I have spoken with.
This school is supportive of holistic practices. For example, we got in the news for having an elective that teaches anatomy through yoga (soooo many facebook shares you have no idea…), there is a weekly meditation class and an integrative medicine elective for interested students.
The school
puts a fairly large emphasis on training you to be primary care physicians.
As a result, we tend to have a lot of labs and education to work with all that stuff (which is actually turning out to be really helpful for 3rd year shelf exams), and we perform better on rotations. A lot of medical students aren’t really prepped for the clinical years, so as a result they struggle on rotations and I think there is some on going debate in the medical community of how much more it needs to be taught pre-clinically, but our school already does it a lot.
I do not have a good comparison of how it’s done at other places, but our school is invested in the students succeeding and has a lot of support systems in place to address all the issues which could commonly come up. From what I’ve seen, they’ve gone far beyond the duty I would expect a school to do in order to help medical students succeed.
The new system clinical distinction system for 3rd year gives an
absolutely amazing degree of flexibility for students and ability to succeed as they want to as a physician. I feel very lucky to be in the first class to get it.
The global health program (where you spend a month in a foreign country like cambodia, ethiopia or taiwan practicing medicine) is pretty awesome and available to anyone who wants to do it.
Overall, I feel confident in generalizing that the students here are
MUCH happier than students at a typical medical school.
Debatable Weaknesses of the school:
Touro is one of the most competitive DO schools in the country (due to location). As a result, many excellent candidates I would view as perfect fits for the school are not able to get in.
The school is fairly small, so certain resources you would expect to be present at a large school aren’t there. I actually like the small feel because it’s much more informal and allows much greater flexibility, but many things you would normally expect a large institution to have (ie our gym is functional but quite small) aren’t here.
The school is technically Jewish. In reality that doesn’t mean much, but on a practical level:
1) We get different holidays (pro in my opinion)
2) You are not allowed to use club funds for providing non kosher catered food on campus.
3) All the food in the cafeteria is kosher (so no pork basically).
4) There are lots of free jewish dinners/religious services provided and typically some type of jewish ceremonial thing at each assembly we have.
5) I have asked a lot of people and no one has been able to give me a clear answer on if the Jewish name Touro is pronounced Tour-Ooh or Tuh-Row. (people use both, the former is probably safer at interviews).
We bought the historical buildings from the navy and as far as I understand there are various agreements on how much they can be renovated (historical character needs to be maintained), so the campus is not super pretty.
The school is less board focused than other schools, and emphasizes teaching you useful stuff besides busting you case every day non stop to study for tests (thus happier students). A lot of the random stuff we learn ends up being tested on Comlex so we score a bit above average on it, but if we grilled non stop for boards, given the average MCAT of our school (before they switched to new mcat, we were the only DO school to break a 30 average), we probably do a lot better. On the other hand, we aren’t prepared well for USLME (which matters less now due to merger) and we tend to do much better on Comlex 2. At the end of the day, we have a good match list since the non boards part of preclinical is great preparation for years 3 and 4, and thus there are much better letters evals and rotation interviews.
Politically the climate is fairly liberal (bay area medical school). I like it but I have heard conservative students complain.
School is more open than most schools to non traditional applicants.
The school is very open to changing and improving (both from the faculty/admin debating it and from students proposing ideas), so there are often new programs and curriculum changes introduced, and as far as I can tell, the school is a lot more awesome than it was 4 years ago when I initially decided I had to go here.
Students frequently complain about the school health insurance plan. If you are too lazy to find an alternative option you may have dissatisfaction here.
Parts of the osteopathic program (the advanced useful OMM) require you to either have some natural sensitivity or a willingness to practice and quiet your mind. That is a good life skill to have, but if you don’t have it and don’t want to learn it, some of the Osteopathic manipulation in 2nd year will not be your cup of tea, although you aren’t really penalized for lacking sensitivity it in the grades, it’s just more really frustrating to not be able to do what a lot of other people can.
I really like my 3rd year rotation schedule and think I have it much better than most people I know at other schools, but unlike most schools we do not have an affiliated teaching hospital (way too much competition for sites in the bay area), and as a result we have to split into a lot of different groups (which is super sad because we all got super close in the first 2 years). The rotation experience is slightly different, although still cool and you just need to make sure you get the site that fits for you. There is a lottery to select everything afterwards. I am not positive, but I believe almost all of the class got their first or second choices for rotation sites as only 10 people were asking to trade sites once it was worked out.
Parts of Vallejo have crime, but crime on Mare Island is almost non existent.
Objective Weaknesses of the school:
There is a degree of bureaucratic disorganization with the school, which I believe partly comes from the fact we are partially managed by Touro New York, and amongst other things, from my inquiries the time zone difference actually makes things very complicated. Every person I’ve spoken to has a tale or two of something frustrating happening (ie. if you don’t hear back in a few months, you should make sure your application is in the correct pile). I am yet to hear of any issues that were serious problems however.
The pathology program really needs to be supplemented with Pathoma, and I like many wish I had realized this early on (pathology is hard to teach, and pathoma just does it so perfectly…).
The mosquitos here kind of suck, leave actually irritating bites and can bite through clothing. There is due to a nasty asian species that can only live in this specific biome. The mosquitos aren’t unmanageable, and don't carry diseases, but for some reason this year there have not been very many of them, and they are honestly my least favorite thing about this school.
I will admit in writing this I am super biased towards this school. In the past the only reason I paid for college was because you had to to get the degree, but in Touro’s case, I actually feel like the education I am getting is basically worth what I am paying for the degree. I also probably forgot a few pro/cons but that was everything off the top of my head and a pretty good list."
I have bolded the things I think are major red flags. The bolded and underlined are even bigger flags and the one part with all three bolded, underline, and italics, is a huge red flag. Remember, this is all coming from a student who loves this school "11/10", the people who aren't so biased have even less nice things to say.
