Why should I consider TC especially since faculty, students, or the medical community is not highly recommending the school? What does TC have to offer over any other osteopathic medical school? Please give us the breakdown and grade for TC NY.
bad way to start a response: oh hey, you're the person from the empire state association letter!
better way to start it: The school has been around for four years, of which its first two were clearly filled with growing pains of two different kinds (one for each year) and the second two years have been damn amazing. Right now if you were to ask all four years about their pre-clinical experiences this is what you would get. Honestly.
2011: The teachers weren't ready for the school to be open yet and we learned a lot on our own, but they did the best they could.
2012: probably a lot of cursing. LOTS of cursing. The administration decided that they couldn't afford to have a second bad academic year so they cracked down on 2012 so hard that 2012 began to act up as a sign of defiance. This led to some really bad blood.
2013: *we* *****ing* *love* *this* *school*. not joking. I'll get to why later. But it primarily revolves around the new pre-clinical dean who is 1) amazing and 2) apparently always 3 steps ahead of us on the 'what we need' issues.
2014: except for them pissing off the 8am biochem department by never rolling in before 9am (and getting their asses kicked by a super hard test) they've had an equally "sunshine and rainbows" experience to 2013. prob due to the pre-clinical dean.
mind you the school is far from perfect. But I can honestly say, we deal with "normal medical school issues" and in two years burned past the issues the first two years had. Mind you, that Empire Medical Association letter is completely off the mark referencing random stuff that doesn't apply/is utilizing warped figures or misconstruing facts/makes absurd suggestions without any basis in the reality of medical schools. They pretty much missed every major fault in the school. So don't go reading that letter. The schools faults are the same as everyone elses:
we wish class time was used more effectively or more high yeild. We wish grades were A/A-/B+/B/B- etc. instead of A/B/C/F. We wish we had core rotations (note: we have plenty of non-core, but so does everyone) in manhattan. We have a dept head (family medicine) who is greatly disliked on his personality but is a capable teacher and far too well connected to ever get replaced. As 2012 learned, the deans get very offended when you insult them to their faces (yes some 2012ers are idiots) and have a very long memory of such events which will make your life a living hell in little (and equally immature) ways for being that blatantly rude to them. The school has weird things it does to keep kosher (like require direct school money only fund kosher food, and have rooms that are reserved solely for jewish ceremonies even though they'd make good meeting rooms).
its really pretty regular stuff that is our problems.
now onto the positives. We're the newest school around. That means our facilities are the best. For real. I've been to the other schools on the east coast (DO or MD). Some are close, some aren't, but we are the best DO school for technology and facilities. I guess Hofstra would surpass us, i haven't been there. Visit the campus, its the compliment we always hear. Our labs and other facilities are very impressive (Though we dont have anything crazy... its just the fact that its all the newest things in there).
Our teacher quality has gone through the roof. Touro (big touro) gave us a bunch of doctors, all were quality (since they are teaching at other DO and MD schools now) but there was a constant turnover which peaked in 2009. 2009 was when all the doctors contracted for the Hackensack MD school were told it was put on indefinite hiatus and their contracts were transferred to TouroCOM. So we had all our old faculty, an entire medical school of new faculty, and a few outside pickups (micro and pharm, primarily) all competing for a small set of openings at the school. We pretty much had 2.5 medical schools worth of faculty competing to impress us since we were one half of the decision making body as to who gets to stay and who has to go.
The other half was a PhD in graduate level education who would audit a few classes a day and be constantly rating and counselling the doctors on how to better reach us. This guy is a hoot cause he would surf facebook with us when the docs were boring. He's on our side and wants to know our real opinions, cause if we're playing online scrabble, we're not learning about dendrites. This all lead to the 2013 class (and onward) having pretty much their pick of which doctors we felt were the best teachers and a removal of all the ones we felt were weak.
The pre-clinical dean is amazing. He's an import from Washington University in St. Louis and handles our Neuro. He's also freakishly in love with statistics and numerical analysis. So he got the school a very large grant, pretty much as soon as he got the promotion to pre-clinical dean, to study how to improve education through standardization and tracking. Every question we do on any tests is identified for what topic asked it, what other topics it requires to answer, its innate difficulty, if it applies to one of the seven core concepts of osteopathic medicine, what percent of the class got it right and what the T-score is (aka the performance of the top 20% of the class versus the bottom 20% of the class on that question. it shows if the questions was properly hard so that the smartest got it right frequently while it gave the lowest performing a hard time).
From what I've experienced, its a hell of a system. From what I've heard, its shown great results for tracking every student and identifying their weaknesses so they can be intervened on early and offered appropriately focused advice on what tutoring to seek out. Additionally it lets us students be able to see the reports on the % right and the T-scores and realize which questions werent fair, leading to them being kicked back to the prof before the final scores come out and the doc has to defend why the question should stand (or should be stricken) when the wrong half of the class gets it right, or most of the class gets it wrong.
Also the pre-clinical dean is frequently (about once a month) meeting with the student body just to hear our complaints and concerns and talk to us about every little thing. The dude is great in the fact that he has a higher plan to pretty much force us to work hard, but be given clear feedback along the way. We complain sometimes that his system is hard, but thats cause we're whiny. of course we want it easier. He tells the teachers to make the tests as hard as they realistically can because he doesn't want us getting easy As out of classes, he wants them to fully challenge us so that our weaknesses can be exposed for him to track.
We also get Dr. Barone to come in with some frequency and teach our Path class in second year. If you know Dr. Barone, you know you'd sell a kidney to get a 2 hour lecture with him. Him and Goljan will one day fight to the death for the title of most loved doctor in America. I'd actually bet on Goljan, that old dude has guns.
I hear a whole lot of complaints about our clinical rotations from people not in TouroCOM. The people at TouroCOM pretty much all feel the same way. "Well I wish there was one in manhattan/connecticut (we have a lot of CT residents), but Im still really excited about _____". We all seem to have a different hospital to fill that in. St. John's has the only DO opthomology and dermatology on the east coast and its a touro-affiliated hospital. SIU is a major residency location. Palisades hospital is constantly ranked as one of the top 10 hospitals in NJ (and Jersey City isnt that bad either). We have an additional "north jersey track" which has a medical director who is Obama's personal doctor when he's in the NY metro area. That dude has some crazy connections that he's just handing out willy nilly to our students.
I also think you should go to ANY hospital (I know this is true of DO schools, i imagine it applies to allopathic) and try to find more than one or two that have all of their core rotations within 40 minutes of the campus. Cause thats what we have. Would have been 30 since the farthest one is under 25 miles away, but the ferry adds some time to the SIU trip. Technically we also have about 7 core rotations spots upstate and 2 in Texas, but they are excess spots and would have zero people in them if no one elected to go, so i'm going to exclude them.
and our board scores have been going up rapidly. Like i mentioned before, 2011 felt the teachers in place were not sufficient and they scores 77% first time pass rate. 2012 had some of the teachers in place, but got in their own venemous drama with the admin (and the law won. like the clash song) and ended up with a 88% first time pass rate, alreay putting us above a couple of long term established schools. Our pre-clinical dean has been crunching the numbers and he expects 2013 to pull a 92 or 93% first time pass rate, which if we pull off puts us just around the mean of DO schools in our 3rd class to take the boards. We're a brand new school. No one, myself included, expected us to get off the ground so damn fast and so damn well.
Yes we had two very tough years from a PR point of view. But we are in the midst of two very good years too now. We have every single person at that school driven 100% to not be "that new school" for even another day longer and no one at the school will be happy until we are considered competitive with every other DO school. And you know what, we aren't PCOM or NYCOM. But we are blowing out expectations for school thats is not even 4 years old yet and our 'stock seems to be rising rapidly. Much faster than any school [at its opening years]'
that last quote is from COCA in their 2009-2010 meeting with our school. Admittedly, it was a verbal quote so don't sue me if you are the son or daughter of the person who said it to me and i got a word choice slightly wrong, but its not a complicated one so i'm sure i have it recalled correctly.
p.s. we have flat screen TVs and a PS3.
as for grades, i just wrote all this crap, so i'll just give it B+'s in everything. It gets an A+ for effort and an A- in communication. Everything else gets a B+ because thats the kind of grade that you know you're doing very well but being 'great' is just out of your reach... and damn you're motivated to reach that A- range.
