Hey everyone. I am a second year student at Touro. I have a friend that is starting here this next year, and he asked my advice about a few things and recommended that I post it here for people trying to decide where to go. Kind of a "here is my honest opinion, the good and the bad" type thing for those of you that have been accepted to multiple schools and are trying to make the decision. I know when I was trying to decide, it was difficult to find somebody to give an honest opinion that wasn't somehow part of the admissions process.
I think people are going to find things to complain about no matter where they go to school, so take any complaints you read about with a grain of salt. I have overall been fairly happy with Touro. As a school, TUN is fairly responsive to student needs. Overall, the teachers are good. Some are really good, some aren't. I didn't really have any major complaints about academics the first year other than the common "I can't really understand that teacher," or whatever. You are going to find that type of thing wherever you go.
As a second year, I have two things that bother me, and I think they are significant enough that I'm not sure I would come here again if I had to do it over again. First, the pathology at TUN is only partially "taught." We have several pathology professors, and the main one really doesn't teach path. He gives a huge single spaced word document (with no pictures) that you are supposed to learn from (like 200 pages long per lecture), and then class is pretty much just spent doing review questions. That type of learning works for some people, but it doesn't work for me and the vast majority of my classmates that I have talked to. So, pathology ends up being almost a self taught course at TUN. That might be appealing to some people, but it worries me that the single most heavily tested subject on boards is self-taught. We have brought this up to administration, and there seems to be no interest in changing how things are done. TUN has traditionally done fairly well in the path section of boards, but I think that is because we are so worried about the class (his tests are REALLY hard) that we almost neglect other subjects to teach ourselves path.
Secondly, most other schools realize that the second semester of your second year is a time most people use to prepare for boards, so that semester is purposely light. At TUN it has been the busiest semester so far. I had planned on studying for boards a lot more than I have, but classes have been so busy that there really hasn't been time to do too much. Again, this might not bother some people, but boards scores are ridiculously important (much more so than class grades) so I would appreciate if this semester were lighter to allow for studying, like most other schools do.
Those two complaints might not be a big deal to some people, but I feel like they directly affect how I will do on the boards, so it bothers me. The rest of our faculty is actually pretty good. I really like our pharm department, and I think the micro department does a really good job getting us ready for boards. I'm not just looking to complain, because most things are really good at TUN, I just don't know if those two complaints are acceptable to me or not.
Good luck to everyone in the application process. It can be very stressful and annoying if you let it. If anyone has any questions about living in Henderson, or going to med school with a family/kids, or anything else, feel free to PM me, I would be happy to talk.
Edit: Forgot to add something I really like about TUN- the students aren't out to get each other. At least in the 2nd year (do14 class) it seems like everyone is more than happy to help out classmates--sharing notes, helping study, etc. I always heard before med school that it was so cutthroat that people would purposely try and hurt classmates' chances, but I haven't seen any of that here. Not sure if that is unique to my class, or unique to TUN, or what, but there you go.