Hi all,
I was one of the five Medical Student Design Partners last year who helped to pilot and build the PSCOM University Park Program, and I'm currently one of the 12 students in the first year of the UP Program. I haven't checked this thread in a while and it looks like there are some odd misconceptions (for example, we do indeed have 12 MS1s in addition to the 12 MS3s and 18 MS4s here). I would be happy to answer any questions you might have as you're going through the admissions process at PSCOM and other schools. In a nutshell, the UP admissions process involves first being accepted by PSCOM in general following your interview in Hershey, after which time a subset of accepted students will be selected to come to UP for an interview event, and then UP acceptances will be decided thereafter.
The UP Program is built around experiential learning in the clinic, where you will spend 12 hours each week in a primary care clinic starting in the first month of MS1. You will quickly learn patient navigation skills and rooming skills, proceeding to a more clerkship-like experience by the winter of MS1. Clinic will provide you the opportunity to meet and work with patients and physicians who will hopefully inspire your curiosity with real patient stories. Each week you will write up a patient summary (much like a case presentation but including health systems and medical humanities information) which you will present to your Inquiry (IQ) Group, a team of six MS1s plus a physician. Each of the six students in the IQ group present their case for the week and then the group decides on which two cases will be the focus for the Wednesday and Friday seminar sessions. Working in this way, students get the opportunity to explore topics which interest them and which actually apply to the patients they are working with in clinic. This asynchronous and experiential learning setup helps to anchor our learning and make it quite practical. For example, my IQ has so far focused on diverse topics from HIV to trimalleolar ankle fractures to bipolar disorder to ectopic atrial tachycardia to pulmonary embolism. It is indeed a quite tight-knit group here, and that may not be the right fit for everyone but frankly we love it.
One other big misconception I've heard is that the program is only designed for rural or primary care-inclined people. If that description fits you, great, but we are by no means pushing anyone in a particular direction. I'm personally interested in specializing and working in an urban setting, and our students vary in a similar manner to the Hershey Program; the past few years of our Match agrees with this and I would expect we get more diverse in interests, not less, with the new UP Program curriculum.
In any case, I wanted to put out some correct information since I saw several people post about the UP Program. Please feel free to PM me if you have any questions.
Cheers.
