Current BCOM student here, created this ID just to answer.
1. This year has met expectations to date. The faculty and administration have been fairly receptive to our concerns and I can honestly say our class is amazing and helps each other out. We have an active facebook group where study materials, questions, social activities are listed and participation is pretty high.
2. Population health is not yet valuable. The department currently consists of one professor and I imagine it's difficult to cover all concepts in such a way that is beneficial. I do believe it will one day have value, but not right now. Most people skip. We are tested on the concepts but as long as you do the reading/power points you're fine.
3. I'm liking the curriculum. It's a "helical" structure so we return to concepts frequently and layer on detail. While we have "blocks" it's not the typical "Anatomy" followed by "Biochemistry" etc. It's a mix, i.e. our first block was "Molecules to People" and integrated biochemistry, physiology, microbiology, pharmacology, etc. We have exams approximately every other week, and they're individual (80% of our grade) followed by collaborative (20%) of our grade. That's when you work in partners, and is intended to mimic the real world where you'll be surrounded by colleague physicians. Everyone was hesitant about it in the beginning but as the collabo score has been higher now on both exams we've taken, I think we're all ok with it. We also have team based learning, where you get an individual test (30%) followed by a group test (70%). They occur on specific topics where we can prepare ahead of time. Those haven't been too bad either. I think only about 3-4% of the class failed the first block (they will need to remediate) so clearly we're all doing pretty well thus far.
PS. we have a little snack shop/coffee place in the building that takes text orders.
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