Question for current medical students.
Would you say you get to spend time on Florida's beaches? I know this isn't relevant necessarily to the school but I like the idea of basically being able to go on vacation whenever you want.
Siesta key is about 40 minutes away, south a few miles on the interstate and then west through sarasota. It's a white sand beach consistently ranked one of the top beaches in the country. Straight west from the school on SR 70 (or further north on SR 64) through Bradenton gets you to Anna Maria Island, which isn't as long or large a beach as Siesta, but also doesn't tend to be as crowded. Either way, you're half an hour to an hour away from the beach if you live near the school. You'll have plenty of time to go there, if you're motivated. I sat on the beach with a biochem review book a couple of times while studying for Step 1, and I'm not even much of a beach bum. My class also had a party at Siesta Key after our last anatomy exam.
So yeah, you'll have plenty of time to go to the beach, especially when once anatomy is done (in first year) and when you don't have an exam in the next few weeks. It all depends on what you want to do with your time.
I saw a while back someone asked about the anatomy situation, and the good/bad about pro-sected cadavers. I meant to respond but haven't gotten around to it until now. I'm satisfied with the way we did anatomy. I think it was intense, and at about the right level to build on.
I did a couple of dissection labs as an undergraduate, but nothing as intense as what most medical schools do. I had a group-mate who had gone through a post-bacc program that included an anatomy course with dissection, and she liked the way LECOM did it a lot better, that she felt dissection wasted a lot of time and wasn't always the best way to learn. (And this is a classmate who I believe still wants to go into pathology.)
One anatomy professor I talked to before going to med school mentioned that his med students go on "search-and-destroy" missions in their dissection labs. He'd give them a structure to find, and they would leave a path of distraction down to that structure.
The bad part of this is that you're missing out on one of the grand old traditions of medicine. You'll have attendings who will just shake their heads if you tell them you didn't have to go through the long hours in the cadaver lab all through first year like they did. Ditto the fact that you won't sit in front of microscopes looking at slides for histology, or for pathology. You'll look at pictures in a book or in power points from the lecturers.
On the other hand, I think you could argue that kind of thing is a huge time sink for what you get out of it. I don't think I'd be a smarter 4th year had I gone through these kind of lectures and labs in my first 2 years. Not that board exams are the be-all, end-all of education, but I also don't think they would have helped me do better on my step 1 exam.
However, I will say that I think problem-based learning is one of the hardest ways to learn material. You have to do a lot of work on your own, but at least you have the time to do it. If it suits your learning style, you'll be happy with your first 2 years. It worked pretty well for me.
The clinical years are more of a mixed bag, and I think it's important to acknowledge that up front. How good an experience you have can depend on where you're willing to go and how much moving around you're willing to do. Things can be better if you get a year-long 3rd year spot at an academic hospital (or, at least, at a hospital with residency programs). That's a subject for another day. In my case, 3rd year went pretty well, considering; a lot smoother than for some of my classmates, but also not without its rough patches.
However, clinical years are a long way away for you guys who are applying; the whole situation with clinicals may change before you get to that point so I don't know how much it's worth getting into it. Anyway, ask questions if you like... I probably won't get back to them in a hurry, but I'll try to get to them.
