Hello all, I've finished the first year at Wake so I can help clear up a little of the confusion/misinformation.
Everyone gets a laptop during orientation. You don't pay extra for it, the tuition more than takes care of that. It is "free". Ours was an IBM thinkpad, 800 MHz with a CD burner. They have a great tech department right by the classrooms which take care of the online curriculum and fix your computer if something happens. I never was a laptop guy before but now I don't know what I'd do without it. You also get a color printer, a lock for it and a carrying case. The undergrad school requires people to buy a computer I think, so that might be where some of the confusion is. You DONT have to buy a computer, they give you one.
As for the school, it recently changed it's name (a few years ago) from Bowman Gray to Wake Forest so a lot of people still refer to it as such. It's well known in the southeast and in the medical community. We work out of Baptist Medical Center, which is a trauma center and recently finished construction on Brenner's children's hospital, which is awesome. It is also working on a new cancer center which is a nice addition and should be done in time for rotations for any new applicants (and hopefully us).
The school is VERY wired, with ethernet ports all over the place. All the lectures are on powerpoint and are recorded on Realaudio to be downloaded so you can listen to them later if you want (or the first time if you missed lecture). I basically keep everything on my computer.
The curriculum is different than most you are going to come across and is probably the biggest selling point of the school. It is a mixture of the traditional classroom curriculum and problem based learning, in that we have small group cases on Monday and Friday and regular lectures during the week. You also get on the floors very quickly, as I was interviewing patients the first week as part of our doctor-patient relationship class. we also start physical exam teaching at the beginning and have regular standardized patient exams to check how we're doing. We take the boards in april of our second year and start rotations by april 15th, so we have a lot of time in the hospital and we go through more rotations than most schools by the time we have to decide where to do away rotations for 4th year and hopefully have a better idea of what we want to do.
There have been a few glitches with the curriculum/administration that has caused some recent problems with the boards, in that the way the curriculum is set up if you aren't a very strong student and solely rely on what they give you in lecture, you aren't going to do as well as at a school where they teach TO the boards. We've been making some changes and probably the best thing about the school is how much the administration actually cares what we think and takes our input, sometimes too much. they aren't a bunch of docs who happen to be at an academic hospital so they have to do some teaching, but really spend an amazing amount of time with the student government to make sure things are working.
As for the spanish, it really isn't a big deal. You take a short phase of classes after you match as kind of a "this is stuff you need to know to actually be a real world doctor". One of these is a medical spanish class which has 3 levels from beginner to advanced. this isn't a high school or college spanish course, it's more FYI and I don't think you have a test, you just have to be there. NC and Winston-Salem has a huge hispanic population, so spanish is very helpful. we're talking about moving it up in the curriculum though since it isn't as helpful after you match and might be heading off to someplace else!
sorry this is so long, if you want more info about Wake, let me know. PM's are down for a while for the upgrade but I'd be happy to answer any questions. I truly love it here at Wake, and gave up a state school (South Florida) to come here and even though it is very expensive, I think it's worth it.
