Wow. That thread is a serious bring down.
The following are my opinions--feel free to disagree, ignore, correct me, whatever.
What bothers me about that thread, that is to say the original poster and a couple of his buddies, is that their attitude is, now that we're graduating, let's try to hurt AZCOM as much as we can--discourage new students
who have a choice from coming here. I don't get any sense that they're working with the school administration to reform the problems they perceive, or developing creative solutions for getting better rotations, as one or two intimated. They're whiners. I can totally believe that the school has problems, maybe even severe problems--every school has problems--and AZCOM may be going through a tough time right now. But it hardly seems like a service to the school and to one's fellow students to bash them so gleefully in a public forum. It also is a sad display of immaturity.
I interviewed at six osteopathic schools and turned down two other interviews after reviewing their information. Three of them required class attendance; one in particular assigns you a badge you have to swipe in at the entrance of the lecture hall, and if you're 10 minutes late, or absent, you can get called in front of the dean for disciplinary action. Three of the schools have a no food, no drinks policy outside of the cafeteria area--students told me they would sneak their food and drink bottles in under their jackets and so forth. One school I didn't get invited to had a famous osteopathic department but then lost a lot of its high quality staff to other schools, and now they're trying to build back up. A couple of schools including one I visited had exorbitant tuition for out of staters, like $8K or $9K higher than AZCOM's per annum.
Someone in that thread stated that it would have been better to go to the Caribbean than attend AZCOM. Now you can decide for yourself where's best for you to go, but students from AZCOM are matching into pretty competitive programs and for those of us going into primary care, it's an outstanding program on a gorgeous campus with no lecture attendance requirement or dress code (did I mention the dress codes at some of these other schools???). You have to keep things in perspective.
Look, I'm sure these other schools are fine programs, including one or two of the schools in the Carib--if I had only gotten one acceptance that's where I'd be and I'd be grateful to have gotten in, but luckily I had a choice and I picked AZCOM for a variety of reasons. You can't base your career decisions on a couple of school bashing threads in an internet forum. You have to do your due diligence: visit the school, call them, talk to students, and form your own opinion. These are skills that will be needed from here on in. I'm visiting to look for housing in about 3 weeks and I'll be visiting the school at that time and checking into some of these issues, and will report back if anyone's interested.
Good luck to everyone,
Therapy Ball
go, azcom. i recall seeing similar threads addressing nova, the touros, and lecom (some schools seem to have these threads popping up every month). i guess it's only fair we get some fan/hate threading, too. 
