@jjbinks295 Are you in state, regional, or oos?
Thank you!! @efr009 I am instate
Congratulations @jjbinks295! I guess you got to find out a little early?
Great news @jjbinks295!!!
Yes, @xiaomeimei77, I still feel that way. It you are talking about getting interviews and eventually matching at top residency programs in certain specialties, then yes, you will have a much harder time (on average) coming from UMKC than if you went to a medical school that is ranked higher. There will always be lone exceptions, but at the medical school level, it’s always a good idea to go by the rule, than believe yourself to be the exception (unlike maybe high school or college). I think @bluegrn6, explains it quite eloquently of why this is the case, even with the best of grades and board scores.
If you see the match list this year, this supports what I said. You can see that when it came to competitive specialties, i.e. ENT and Ophthalmology, all the people who matched were AOA members, and those matches were to middle-tier programs, if not some being a strong/solid middle-tier.
I think also whether UMKC is worth it will depend on whether you’re in-state, regional, or out-of-state and what specialties you are interested in. See @PinkPrincess2014’s charts above regarding tuition comparisons. In financially planning, I would calculate, based on what @bluegrn6 has said, that if you’re regional or out-of-state, that you likely won’t qualify later for eventual Missouri residency to get in-state tuition.
Thank you for your reply! The cost won’t be an issue because I am in-state but I still don’t know whether I want to compete for those top residency spots. I was leaning towards dermatology or neurosurgery, but after shadowing I think I might pursue cardio or oncology. I’m not quite sure whether UMKC would stifle my chances if I decided to pursue upper tier residencies, but I don’t want to get into something before I know the possible repercussions.
I think you may have a harder time getting into fields like Dermatology and Neurosurgery coming from UMKC, as UMKC has neither of those residency programs available to students. KU Med has those specific residencies, but you would be seen as a visiting student just like everyone else outside of KC, although it may be possible to take part in research with them.
If you get an acceptance, you may want to kindly and respectfully email those who matched into those fields this year (from the UMKC student directory on the website), and ask them their take regarding how much easier/harder it was when it came to building up their residency application coming from UMKC and its available opportunities/resources.
Cards and Onc are fellowships after Internal Medicine so that should be no problem, getting an Internal Medicine residency, after which your performance in residency will affect your ability to get the fellowship. I know for sure UMKC has good available Cardiology research with Saint Luke’s Mid America Heart Institute.
@Roentgen, if the research area isn’t available at UMKC, you said it’s possible to take a year off and do research somewhere else, effectively making it a 7 year program. Does that research year make up for coming from UMKC and lead to matching in that specialty?
Do KU Med grads do residencies at UMKC?
A “research year” just means you get to pause your medical school curriculum/responsibilities and do research in a specialty of your choice for that year. Usually it’s in a specialty that is competitive (but doesn’t have to be) - which means that research ends up becoming a defacto requirement to match. Hopefully by the end of that year, you come out with a few publications which you can then list on your residency application and improve your chances of matching. It’s not a guarantee, by any means, to match in that specialty or to match at a specific residency program. You effectively take a leave of absence to go do research somewhere else, usually at another academic medical center whose additional strength is research. It doesn’t “make up” for it, it more mitigates it, if that makes sense.
In the most optimal of circumstances, you would want to participate in research in that specialty sometime during your 4 years of medical school if not during all 4 years - although each year will be different in terms of how much time you can realistically commit. It’s obviously much easier to do that if your medical school has that department and they are doing research.
Many students in the higher ranked medical schools, during undergrad, participated in research and/or got their name on a publication so it’s not a stretch for those same students to take advantage of the research available there during med school w/o having to take a year off. At some medical schools, several months of required research are incorporated for medical students as part of the medical school curriculum - Case Western, for example. At some med schools you can even do an MBA, MPH, MS in Clinical Research, etc. which can also make you unique for residency applications.
Honestly, I don’t think I saw many KU grads come to UMKC for residency, the exceptions being Children’s Mercy Hospital (CMH) for Pediatric residency and I think sometimes UMKC’s OB-Gyn residency. CMH is a really great Pediatric hospital in the Midwest: http://health.usnews.com/best-hospitals/area/mo/childrens-mercy-hospitals-and-clinics-6630340, and seems to have every pediatric fellowship imaginable and is an awesome hospital - http://www.childrensmercy.org/Health_Care_Professionals/Education/Fellows,_Residents_and_Students/Graduate_Medical_Education/Fellowship_Programs/Fellowship_Programs/.
Just wanted to say, Good Luck to everyone on this forum!! I hope everyone gets into their top choice schools 
And does anyone know, by any chance, around what time the emails are supposed to be sent out?
@prospectivemd, @15match inquired and they said it would be by the end of the business day today when you will get your answer about acceptance, rejection, or being waitlisted. Fingers crossed for everyone!
@jjbinks295 Congratulations…, this is the result of your hard work through out your school life. Congrats…again!
Maybe they release them alphabetical order? If @jjbinks295 already got it
LOL! He was also in-state so that might have something to do with it. It really wouldn’t surprise me though if they did at the very end of the business day right before leaving for the weekend - since they don’t want to field any applicant phone calls.
Congratulations @jjbinks295!
Hahaha Friend is instate too but don’t think they got an email yet…
@PinkPrincess2014
First I would like to say I’m so sorry for the delay in response I was on my 30 hour call.
Anyways
Yes that is what I meant. Sorry for the confusion.
All lectures starting with biochem will not be recorded.
Docent system
I’ll start with the easy stuff first: no, once you are matched with a docent you essentially cannot change teams if you don’t get along with them. So be nice from day 1. Only way you switch teams is if your DoRo scheduled changed drastically because of personal reasons etc that having DoRo with your team becomes impossible, then you switch units. There are always insinuating circumstances but the norm is you get what you get.
When you are placed on your team you will have your docent schedule for years 4, 5 and 6. As in the two months in each year you will be in DoRo. The rest of your schedule revolves around those months of DoRo are for all intents and purposes those DoRo months are set in stone.
This is what annoys some students who want to do sub specialties. Because you take 4 more months of internal medicine compared to other medical schools you get annoyed because if you don’t want to pursue internal medicine that bites into your elective time and time you get for aways. Even if you have elective time, if your DoRo is Aug/Sept (those are ideal months for an away) you can’t move DoRo so you’re gonna have to do you away electives another time and just have to deal with it. Lots of students petition to curriculum to change that and most don’t succeed. Again there are exceptions.
In terms of the quality of the docents, they are all, at the least from what I know excellent clinical educators. I don’t have a single friend who complains about their docent and the education they provide. Each one has a different style but they all are great clinicians.
I do agree that there are a lot of docents that are Umkc graduates but I think that works in your advantage. They are familiar with the system and use it to their advantage to make it better. The foreign graduate docents are actually the best docents to have because honestly I don’t know what it is about their education but they way they teach is excellent. Dr masoud, zia, and Mustafa are great examples of that. We also have docents from other schools. Dr Pauly recently was added to the blue service, she was recruited from the university of Florida where she served as a chair of internal medicine and she currently serves as the chair of docent council and I think she will provide a fresh perspective to the Umkc way.
With that said, are all the docents at the same level of educational excellence? No. Would you mesh better with some versus the other? Yes. And absolutely there is a difference in education. I would be an idiot to deny that. But I will say this: you are only with your year 3-6 docent for weekly clinic and one month for each of your DoRos. So out of the 6 months of DoRo that you have only half is spent with your docent. The other half is with two week chunks of all the other docents at the school of medicine. That makes the education “even” in some ways.
In terms of not being able to keep docents around, it all hit us at the same time. They all had a reason to leave and they had nothing to do with the school.
One left to go to private practice, one retired, one left because her husband got a new job somewhere else, one left because she was tired of the Truman patient population. But there are docents that have been with the school of medicine for years. Dr. Salzman and bamberger have been here for more than 20 years. Honestly I was really worried about it too because you hear all of these embellished stories down the grapevine but in all honesty I don’t have any complaints about my docent.
It does suck for the students whose docent gets moved around because there are some where one docent left for private practice and their new docent then moved for a new job for her husband but those are exceptions to the rule not the norm.
I will say this about taking a year off for research. It is extremely hard to coordinate. Umkc has a very annoying way of dealing with it. They have all of these fancy rules that make sense for students who are taking a year off because of grades or family but they are not conducive to students taking a year off to enhance their application. For instance, let’s say that you take a year off between fifth and sixth year to do extra research, when you come back in June of sixth year you cannot do away rotations for the next 6 months or something (don’t quote me on it I don’t know the exact time) but that sucks because the reason you do both is to increase your chance of matching and doing one without the other is pointless. I’m sure there is some way around it but it’s so annoying to fight curriculum about it. I have a guy in my class wanting to take a year off, if anyone wants to know more I will find out the specific annoyances and report back.
Good luck to those who applied. I will be relatively free this weekend so hopefully I won’t be so late in responding.
To add to what @blugrn6 said, I’m actually not surprised that UMKC Med doesn’t video record their basic science lectures for students to view on their own, on a consistent basis, even though now with classroom renovations, they have the ability to do so. I remember when we were in school, as class officers we talked with the administration about starting a medical student led lecture notetaking service - as KU’s medical school was known to do, at the time, to have one. We were told that they were afraid that students would start skipping lecture in huge numbers. I was honestly surprised that basic science classes now give student’s powerpoint PDF files of their lectures to print out before lecture. With us, it felt like we were pulling teeth to get faculty to post or give us a copy of their lecture slides at the end of the lecture or ahead of time. All around, basic sciences at UMKC is just very disorganized which is a shame because a lot of it is very fixable – 1) recording all lectures, 2) giving all the lecture handouts/powerpoints at the beginning of the course. Many med schools make a hardcopy bound notes syllabi which you buy at the beginning of the course.
It’s well known at other med schools that do record and stream lectures for viewing, that there is a real risk that students may not come to class as often, and the med school accepts this risk, as many of them understand that only you know the best way of how you learn and absorb information, and it’s up to you to decide how you learn, since you’re an adult now. Schools have published research on recording basic science lectures and none of it has been bad, which is why so many medical schools do it and traditional med students demand it now and ask about this type of stuff before making med school decisions. The same with Pass/Fail grading in the basic science years - as a historical note, Pathology and Pharmacology actually used to be Pass/Fail at UMKC for a long time. I know because we had it like that. They’re all letter graded now.
A lot of us by the end were just really frustrated because a lot of curriculum and evaluation policies effectively treat students as if they are little children, but at the same time they expect you to act like mature, professional adults. UMKC always seemed to want to have it both ways: following what other med schools do one moment and wanting to be “different” in comparison to other medical schools the next moment. There is a lot of inertia to change things from the way things have always been done at UMKC, which can be frustrating, and I think a lot of it stems from certain faculty members (MD and non-MD) who just don’t want to change things. I think many times we felt like the school purposefully was trying to make things harder, make policies more strict, or trying to get people to extend on purpose.
The times people hated their DoRo (Docent Rotation) schedule the most (which is already set in stone for 2 months in Years 4/5/6 when you join a Docent team in Year 3), was usually a) if it was really close to when you were to take USMLE Step 1 in the Spring of Year 5 or b) if it was early on starting in Year 6 when you would normally do audition electives at other places. Same for being annoyed with Medicine Clinic, when it came to being out-of-town a certain number of months in Year 4 or in Year 6 because you HAD to go to attend your half-day a week Internal Medicine clinic a certain number of months - something no other med school has their students do throughout the year.
There are definitely some excellent teaching docents at UMKC when I was there: Salzman, Bamberger, Butin, Palmer, Cochran, Wooldridge - they know how to teach and they know how to fairly grade students also. Being a docent can sometimes be a backbreaking or a thankless job, so we weren’t really surprised with docents leaving - especially if they had done an IM subspecialty - GI, Heme/Onc, etc.
I also agree about switching your schedule around. If you happen to extend in the program (due to academic trouble or personal trouble) and you need your schedule switched around, or need it done in a particular way, they’re able to magically make it happen. But if you ask for the same change and you’re an on-track 6 year student, then it’s almost sure to be rejected. For example, I knew people who came in with enough credit or took enough classes in Years 1 & 2, to not require a taking a campus semester in Year 4, but the med school forces you to return to the Volker campus 3 times in the 6 year program, so they had to. They normally would have just taken electives.
Just got notified that I got accepted into the program!!!
@tangent2medicine, congratulations!!! Are you in-state, regional, or out-of-state?