Another M1 trying to beat the dead horse deader:
Would I choose OUWB again if I knew everything I know now?
Yes but with some hesitation. I had multiple MD acceptances. I came here for the Beaumont system not OU and I still feel like that was a good decision. I also didn’t have to make a financial decision in choosing OUWB so that made it easier.
PROS: Grass is always greener on the other side
1. Beaumont Health System:
One of the largest health systems with many residency programs. Research available if you look hard enough. So far the first semester lectures from Beaumont physicians have been incredible. Imaging lectures were superior and my opinion is that Beaumont has some good educators.
2. “Community”:
I met some really good friends that I wouldn’t trade. M2s and seniors have been incredible so far and often go out of their way to help. Big Sib/Little Sib is a good program implemented by the school. Sometimes you get lucky with a really good big. Our class also shares study materials and resources with the rest of the class.
3. Support:
I think it’s unfair to say the professor’s don’t care. Some really do go out of their way to help. One of the classmates told me that they had a 4 hours one on one tutoring session with one of the professors. There are also some good lecturers, especially the Canadians. The staff at career development and research counselors are also incredibly helpful.
I think for the most part OUWB did a good job transforming into an online curriculum given how less time they had to turn everything around. OUWB also has resources if you want counseling and mental health related help.
Grass is always greener on the other side. I have heard plenty of medical students in other schools complain about bs they have to go through. This is med school. It’s supposed to be hard. There will be no gain with no pain.
4. Match:
OUWB’s residency match has been incredible for the past few years.
Step 1 is P/F and that changes everything. We don’t get to ride the scores to good matches anymore.
CONS: The elephant in the room
@Aseptique and
@Medsitter16 hit the nail on the head with what is wrong with this school but I will add some more. I don’t mean to rain on your parade but I think it is important to make an educated decision while selecting a medical school.
1. Mandatories:
If you are someone that doesn’t learn by going to the class or has an attention span of a fish, think twice about coming here if you have a choice. Lectures are mostly death by powerpoint with the same information repeated over and over for 50 minutes. You can find a better explanation in outside resources in half the time. I have a feeling the instructors get paid for making their lectures exactly 50 mins because otherwise it simply doesn't make sense. They add a bunch of unnecessary minutia to fill up the 50 mins.
I was not sure about attending a school with mandatory attendance policy with a H/P/F grade. Most of the senior classmen told me that preclinical grades don’t matter because Step1 scores outweigh them by far. That has possibly changed now so I don’t know how much value the preclinical grades have. Remember you have to attend 70% of the classes to honor. If you are trying to match into a difficult specialty or into a top residency you’ll have to think about honor grades.
COVID a blessing in disguise:
A lot of times I hear from my classmates, “But they work so hard to provide us this lecture”. I couldn’t give rats about how hard they’ve worked if it doesn’t help me learn the material my way. A lot of students worked hard but had to remediate. No one gave them a pass because they worked hard. So why do the professors get to force us to learn their way of teaching? For a school that preaches “Treat every patient as unique”, they don't think that every student is unique and learns differently. I have done very well in the classes so far because we were lucky that mandatory attendance policy was scrapped. I can’t say what will happen next semester. I will say though I will not attend a single lecture which will cost me my honor grades even though I have been scoring well above 90.
There are plenty of students that like going to the classes and genuinely like the lectures. I am not advocating scraping lectures all together. I am saying that there has to be an option to either use the lecture material or the outside resources. With them doing away with the NBME exam and making it entirely professor written in the future, that is not possible.
2. Go on a wild goose chase with the Longitudinal classes
PRISM: Let me start by saying this class doesn’t have exams or any significant work. There are reflection papers to write but you can bs your way through it in 15 minutes. That being said, the biggest waste of time in this school. I don’t know which hippie beaurocrat came up with this nonsense and decided to schedule a mandatory session a day after the exam. I feel bad for us but I feel even worse for the practicing clinicians that have to endure this. If I wanted to talk about my feelings I would do it on my own accord. I don’t understand why we are forced to have mandatory ‘fun’. Most of my team doesn’t say a word the entire session. It’s an awkward waste of time on a day that I should be using to rest.
EMBARK: It’s true this is what you make of it. It could be easy, it could be hard. However every single upperclassman has told me to do an easy EMBARK project and focus my energy on better research outside of EMBARK. Translation: it can be major pain in the rear end so do the bare minimum to get by. That being said the faculty running the EMBARK has been incredibly helpful.
PMH: If I had any morsel of interest in primary care this class took it away with constant ‘primary care good’ and ‘specialty care kills people’ rhetoric. That being said I think this class does have some use in research and there isn’t a lot of effort you have to put to get by.
MHCB: I think the faculty is good for this class and this is a necessary class given the state of health care in this country. I still don’t like it being mandatory and the assignments are dreadful.
APM: So far it had been atrocious but the last class was PBL and for the first time I learned something. I hope it will keep getting better from here on out.
TBL: Disaster.
Bottom line it doesn’t take a lot of work to get by these classes but they are a massive waste of time. Other than APM none of the classes should be mandatory. I often hear “you get to interact with your classmates in these mandatory classes”. Most of the people don’t talk and if you need to be forced to interact with your classmates you aren’t really interacting.
3. Barking up the wrong tree
It’s true they listen to student’s concerns but then they don’t do anything to fix the major problems. Moving the exam 2 hours so the Californians can take it at a reasonable time is indeed the bare minimum. I was told that the reason classes are mandatory is because some instructors drove 30 minutes to teach but only 7 students showed up to the class. So instead of realizing ‘hey students don’t like to go to class lets change our teaching strategy’, they decided to make classes mandatory to boost their own ego. Now they resist any opposition against that policy or professor written exams. The quality of questions from outside resources are far superior to anything professor written. ‘We listen to students’ is nothing but a big facade. Step 1 being P/F our energies should be spent on research and other EC but we’re stuck memorizing some minutiae that have no clinical relevance.
Conclusion: A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush
If this is your only MD acceptance it’s a no brainer. This post is not supposed to discourage you from attending this school. I have a strong distaste for mandatory attendance H/P/F curriculum and I am still here. Like I said before I would choose this school again for all the pros this school has. I just wish the school gave me more independence on how I study. No school is perfect, you just have to weigh the positives and negatives. This post is to help you make an educated choice. My advice to you is the same given to me by clinicians I worked with “Go to the cheapest school”. If you like schools that are highly structural and hold your hand then this is the perfect school for you. If you like independence then you’ll hate thursdays. Talk to as many honest senior classmates as possible. Skip anyone that tells you only the good about the school. Also Dean Dan and the admissions team are genuinely nice people. They’re not trying to trick you into anything.
If you have any further questions DM me.
