Caveat: I am not yet a student there, but I spent a lot of time talking to students there and driving around looking at the area.
As far as I can tell, nobody lives as far out as LA because of the commute. Essentially, that's two hours out of your day, every day, that you can't study or do anything useful for yourself (cook, eat, laundry, sleep, etc.) It sounds like the workload there is big enough that you won't want to lose those precious two hours.
The school is offering a new curriculum this year, which may make the opinions of 2nd-4th years obsolete. From what I can tell, they are trying hard to make the curriculum more integrated and less stressful for the students. They are also trying to offer clinical exposure (through standardized and model patients) as early as possible in the first year, something which they didn't do in the past. There is also a student run community clinic in the area that you can work at.
From what I saw, the campus is not the prettiest, but it isn't ugly either. The interior (i.e. the important parts of the campus) are IMMACULATE. Beautiful lecture halls, anatomy lab, library, etc.
People in the area are quite friendly, much friendlier and engaging in my experience than folks in NYC
Interview and tour were low stress, conversational...the staff was absolutely the friendliest out of any I've met this interview season.
Just for kicks, I drove from the campus to Santa Monica on Saturday morning at 9am. It took 40 minutes, and the traffic wasn't bad. So, you can get to the ocean on the weekend if you like.
Pomona isn't the nicest area, but it certainly isn't a ghetto. Much safer than many parts of NYC. Around Pomona there are a number of nice areas, and many students live in them.
One of the coolest things I saw was that they are building really nice student housing across the street from campus. The place will offer all utilities paid, plus free cable and high speed internet (its on the schools network, so its pretty fast. T1 or something...) It'll have a rooftop deck for hanging out/studying as well as a study hall indoors.
Another thing that I REALLY liked: All the lectures are recorded and available online--both the audio and the powerpoint slides. This means that you don't have to go to most of the lectures, you can listen to the lectures at 2x speed at home and use the remaining time to read/study. I learn much better this way, so I am pretty stoked about it.
Allright, you asleep yet?
