@HopingMD, there is a reason that most medical schools in the U.S. don’t have combined programs, much less 6 year combined programs in medicine. Combined programs after high school are always the alternative route for admission. I don’t know why you’d be surprised that a summer recruitment event for UMKC’s BA/MD program by UMKC admissions staff, wouldn’t tell you anything but the positives — mainly 6 years and no MCAT.
@blugrn6, @UMKCRoosMD, @Roentgen, is it common for medical students in the program to do very well in the basic sciences, but not do as well on clinical rotations? Is it pretty easy/hard to get Honors on rotations at UMKC: IM, Pediatrics, Psychiatry, Surgery, OB-Gyn – since your grade is from an exam and mainly from clinical evaluations from attendings and residents? That’s my fear is that I’m very good at doing the book stuff, going to class, and taking exams, but not as much with the clinical stuff. Are UMKC med students pretty good when it comes to performing well on their clinical rotations, on par with traditional MS-3 medical students?
As @HopingMD was saying, I’m still amazed that with all the Internal Medicine exposure and experience that students get at UMKC, that in terms of Internal Medicine matching, the top or at least the good places in Internal Medicine, don’t see this as enough of a reason to recruit UMKC students who would be better starting interns. Not necessarily places like Harvard or Hopkins, but places like UCLA, Vanderbilt, etc.
@blugrn6, even for regional students, UMKC is not necessarily a great deal either, although it is much better than the OOS rate. Besides Nebraska and Illinois, even the OOS tuition at regional public medical schools is still less than UMKC’s OOS tuition.
Arkansas – In-state: $26,624; Out-of-state: $50,758
Kansas – In-state: $33,280; Out-of-state: $58,338
Oklahoma – In-state: $23,844; Out-of-state: $51,926
Nebraska – In-state: $29,489; Out-of-state: $71,269
Illinois:
UIC – In-state: $38,546; Out-of-state: $75,546
Southern Illinois In-state: $32,579; Out-of-state: Not available
@PinkPrincess2014
Have seen all three extremes from students in my time here:
- Those who do super well in classes and then are absolute messes on clinical evals.
- Those who are horrible at taking exams but put them in a clincal setting they will come back leading the pack
- Those who are exceptionally brilliant at both.
Which one you are depends a lot on the type of student you are and your personality and attitude in life.
There are students who are exceptionally bright at memorizing things and at pure recall. They do super well on exams and will know all the answers when someone asks them a question. But they suffer during clinical evals because of two main reasons:
- They have no social skills: they are either arrogant, mean to other students, talk behind the attending’s back, fight with the attending all the time, etc
- They are lazy: you think people don’t notice but they do.
The thing about getting good evals on rotations is to be proactive during the rotation. Just showing up and doing work that you are expected to do anyways will get you a high pass. The student who gets honors is the one who writes an H&P for the intern before they ask you to do it, the student who has gauze and tape in their pocket at all times during surgery because they know that on post op day 2 you need to change the dressing, the student who sees the triage patient if the intern is busy on labor and delivery and is ready to present when the intern is done getting slammed with other work.
You have to anticipate things that people want and act accordingly. Same thing with asking questions. There is a fine line between being inquisitive on rotations and being plain annoying.
As for the difficulty to get honors in each rotation: it really depends on the residents you have, the attendings that are on service, etc.
In general psych is easy to get an honors in cuz the exam is like 40% of your grade and the assignments (which are basically a completion grade) are another 30% and your evals only make up 30% of your grades and most of the psych docs will give you an honors if you show up and stay awake (I’m not being sarcastic)
The rest are more difficult cuz most fall into the spectrum of 50/50 so it can go either way. And again you can luck out with your residents or you can get horribly unlucky at the same time. It just depends.
@UMKCRoosMD
I totally agree, its not the most ideal rate for regional students either.
If I were to come here now, I would def think about it twice. Especially if I was an OOS student. I just don’t think its worth it.
@Roentgen
That’s true, I did not think about that. Most of those students plan to do a fellowship so it makes sense.
@bluegrn6, Is it just because the type of thinking is different? For example, being able to memorize and regurgitate on multiple choice exams vs. on the clinical rotations where you do things on the fly, can be asked questions in which you’re expected to answer relatively quickly, etc. I’ve heard that at most medical schools the first 2 years is nearly all bookwork, and the 3rd year is all clinical (seeing patients, writing notes, working face-to-face with residents/attendings - some of whom are tired themselves, doing patient care tasks, all with some sleep deprivation/being tired) although you do take 1 exam at the end but it’s not your entire grade.
Are there students you know who may be just real shy when it comes to presenting to an attending and it can really affect their clinical evaluations and their grade?
Best of luck everyone at UMKC, I formally rejected my offer this morning.
I have other offers, and I will not degrade UMKC by saying that they are better medical schools, rather, I need to select among several better fits.
UMKC is a great medical school, be proud to be a roo, you will become doctors, you will learn to help the sick - and who could ever want anything better than that. Best of luck at UMKC and in the rest of your lives!
I know @blugrn6 will answer as well as to his/her experience, but in my opinion, I do think the type of thinking involved is different. In your undergrad science classes and medical school basic science classes, most of your exams will be multiple choice, purely rote memorization/recall type questions. There might be some basic “application” type questions that are written as clinical vignette cases to “try” to mimic what you would see clinically, and there will be some subjects that are more conceptual understanding in nature – Physiology, but overall at least in the first 2 years – your ability to be the top of your class will depend on filling out the right bubbles on an answering sheet with a pencil through pure memorization - something you are well used to by now and have been successful at in your education. The problem with basic sciences for most people is the (sometimes ridiculous) volume of information you’re expected to master in a relatively short period of time.
In real-life clinical medicine, often times there is no “one best answer”. You have a patient who comes in with a variety of undifferentiated symptoms and signs, some important to the diagnosis, some not, who will give you an intricate history some of it important, some not, after which you do a physical exam, and then report back to your resident/attending and give them the story. It’s not a multiple choice exam where you fill in a bubble and then move on. Often times you have what is called a differential diagnosis (u can google what this is) after which you rule in and rule out diagnoses based on history, lab tests, imaging (in American medicine we have a bad habit of using the last 2 but not the first as much) and be able to explain your reasoning. You’ll have to interact as a team with other physicians and healthcare professionals, consulting other physicians in other specialties for whatever reason. A lot of times, you may not even figure out what was wrong, but what is the most likely or what we can do to try to find out why. Not to mention in medicine, there are a lot of things you will do as a physician that aren’t medicine-related. Medicine doesn’t always have definitive answers. You’ll have to be able to deal with and effectively cope with the many different types of personalities (sometimes good, sometimes bad) that pervade medicine – affected by being tired, sleep-deprived, hungry, thirsty, etc. That’s something a lot of high schoolers at your age don’t have experience in, which many times would have affected whether one goes into medicine in the first place.
Real clinical medicine is truly high-order and critical thinking. It’s NOT rote memorization and recall which you may be used to from AP courses. It’s not checking off a bunch of preset boxes on a list of symptoms and signs, having a diagnosis, and then writing a script on your pad. If that was the case, a supercomputer could do that. The problem is we have metrics that adequately measure the first paragraph (mainly GPA and MCAT score), but we really don’t have any metrics to measure all the skills you need in the second paragraph – interpersonal skills and ability to work with others, being responsible, doing things without being asked, ability to work under pressure, stress, sleep deprivation, etc. all of which are necessary. That’s probably why UMKC has now switched to the MMI for interviews. Not to scare you, but this profession has a real high rate of things like anxiety, depression, even suicide. I’m not trying to sugarcoat. All the more reason to evaluate your reasons about whether you should enter medicine, much less choose going through a 6 year combined program. It’s not as glamorous as many think it is, and it’s not the key to the “good life” as many people not in medicine think it is.
During Year 5, when you enter clerkships, you will have General Surgery (2 months), Pediatrics (2 months), OB-Gyn (2 months), Docent Rotation (2 months), Psychiatry (1 month), Family Medicine Preceptorship (1 month). You will work with interns, residents, and attendings – some good, some bad, some terrible. It’s a shock to many students, especially people in the BA/MD program, because up until now, your success has depended on how well/much you study and exam scores. Medicine is so much more than that, hence why @Bluegrn6’s extreme #1, I think can be quite common. Many times your ability to get good evaluations relies on your particular intern/resident/attending you might have and how easy/hard graders they are. That’s life and it’s how most people who have real jobs are evaluated. It’s not just filling bubbles and getting an “A” on an exam".
I agree with @bluegrn6 with respect to getting Honors. A lot of it is depending on making other people’s lives easier – i.e. your intern, with the good examples he gave, not necessarily on how smart you are. I know people who did fantastic on the NBME shelf end-of-rotation exam, but didn’t do as well on clinical rotations. They didn’t get Honors.
In all honesty, it is pretty much impossible to fail a rotation due to a lack of knowledge, even though, in reality, there are people who should. Part of the reason for this, bc you’ve invested so much money to get up to this point that schools are very reluctant to do so. That being said some people do – i.e. not showing up to rounds on time, not finishing up their work before leaving, “professionalism” issues, etc. If you pretty much do your work as you are asked, I agree with @blugrn6, you’ll at least get a High Pass. Getting Honors, is much harder, I think especially when you’re working with residents on OB-Gyn and/or Surgery. Your clinical evaluations will really impact your grade greatly overall, so a common mistake some people think is if they ace the shelf, they’ll get Honors, but that’s usually not the case — maybe with Psychiatry though, but Psych as a rotation is quite easy, so if you’re really into lifestyle Psych might be a good rotation you like.
Good luck @HopingMD! I got in UMKC. But, quite confused with all the negative rapport it has, compared to any other BA/MD or BS/MD program
Good luck to you, @HopingMD!! I’m assuming you were able to get other better offers and decided pretty quickly.
@pleasant, I think the negatives are valid reasons for many people who would otherwise have chosen a much different route. I think every potential applicant should do their due diligence about this program, especially if you are out-of-state. $330,000 (or I guess now $333,000 by @PinkPrincess2014’s latest figures) would pay for a very nice house.
Hey everyone! I recently got accepted, and I am weighing my options before committing to the program. I have 3 questions and would be so thankful if they could be answered.
- I've never taken multiple difficult science classes at once and I'm concerned about managing the work load. How does the stress for work load during the first two years compare to the last four? I would be so happy if anyone could provide a brief overview of the biggest stresses and difficulties during the first two years, as well as afterwards.
- How involved are students/ what are our responsibilities during the docent rotations? Is it more like shadowing, or should we come in expecting to learn a lot and recall it?
- Do you have any advice for being able to recall information that was learned early on in the program for the USMLE?
I truly appreciate any help while I’m making this important decision. Thanks in advance 
@Butterfly16, I think the stress/workload depends on a) how much credit you are coming in with, b) what your science background is coming from high school.
- At least as the way the program is structured now, you take about 2 sciences per semester: Chem I/Anatomy; Chem II/Micro; Orgo Chem/Cell Bio; Biochem/Genetics, Human Stucture Function I-IV (Gross Anatomy, Histology/Embryology, Physiology, and some Biochem by organ systems), Year 3 Fall: Micro/Neuro, Pathology for about 4-5 months, 2 months of Pharmacology in Year 4, 1 month Behavioral Science.
In my opinion, I do believe there are shortcuts taken – all students aren’t required to take General Biology I and II, Physics I and II, and you don’t take Organic Chem I and II (I think that’s the one good thing UMKC did since Organic Chem is utterly useless with respect to being useful in medicine or Step 1). So people who haven’t taken those courses may feel they don’t have a good foundation before going into Cell Bio and Genetics (UMKC undergrads not in the BA/MD program have to take General Bio I and II before enrolling in these courses).
I think the stresses of the program are multiple and multifactorial, many of them having to do with soaring debt, entering at age 18 and all its stresses at that age and graduating at 24, emotional/mental/personal stress, keeping up your science GPA, running all 6 years without break, as well as the usual stresses of medical school in general, and matching into residency – even more stressful if you’re going for a competitive residency. The program is a 6 year program with no clear separation between undergrad and the medical school unlike other BS/MD programs, so it’s not like the undergrad is very very easy like it can be at other places and to where you have an easy out if you feel the program isn’t for you - I would say that Year 1 is pretty awesome for most people but again this depends on how many credit hours you are taking.
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I believe @blugrn6, described earlier in this thread exactly what students are doing in Year 1 & 2 Docent — Fundamentals of Medical Practice I, II, III, and IV.
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The sciences tend to build on each other so for example, you’ll see many of the repeated topics in different courses, etc. Students do get all of Year 4 (you do take 1 month Family Med Preceptorship, 2 months of Pharm, 1 month Behavioral, 2 months DoRo, and campus during the year) to study for Step 1 and review that information. Most people use board review books of some kind as well as USMLE question banks to keep the information fresh.
@PinkPrincess2014
I don’t think I can phrase the answer to your question any better than @Roentgen did. Its two very different types of environments.
We all know what basic sciences courses are, we have done them for most of our lives so I’ll focus on my thoughts on clinical medicine. Success in rotations and clinical medicine is all based on intuition and your “gut” feeling. Like @Roentgen said earlier, a lot times when patients come into the clinic or the ER we have no idea what’s going on with them and its a giant puzzle that you need to piece together. That’s essentially what most of medicine is. Students who are successful on clinical rotations are not the ones who can list all the abnormal symptoms of a super rare disease or the most rare side effect of the newest drug. Sure that will turn heads and impress people, but knowing a laundry list of symptoms is nothing if you can’t apply that clinically.
What students don’t often realize is that clinical medicine is patient AND the symptoms. You have to put your findings together with a clinical picture, and I know it sounds easy but its not that intuitive for everyone to understand.
The other thing that @Roentgen brought up, that I think students don’t realize is that medicine is not glamorous people. Honestly. If you are doing this for the lifestyle that people not in medicine has portrayed for you then you’re in for the biggest disappointment for your life.
My reason for doing medicine is simple: even after being in clinic for 12 hours a day when I come home and wake up the next morning, I don’t regret going back. I often times am taking to my other friends, who are not in medicine, they are like don’t you get tired of going to work on weekends, and always being busy on rotations, or bringing your work home (pagers), and my answer is: no I would rather do an extra shifts in the hospital than do any other career. All other jobs seem tedious to me. But medicine is just as tedious if you don’t like it. I’m not discouraging anyone from pursuing medicine, i’m just saying make sure you’re 100% sure before you commit.
There were a sizable number in my class, who didn’t realize the real and true lifestyle of a physician - number of hours you work per day/week, working weekends, being on call, the busyness while you are working many long hour shifts, the continued reading well beyond medical school to keep up with your field, taking specialty boards, recertifying every 10 years, etc. that a resident and an attending physician has to do. Much different than being even a midlevel – PA, NP, CRNA in the same medical specialty who are nowhere near expected to work the number of hours a physician works. It’s also not glamorous either – medicine is not 100% exciting, 100% of the time, maybe not even the majority of the time.
Being able to ace multiple choice exams in basic science courses, does not mean you’re meant to be a physician.
At UMKC, Year 3, 4, or Year 5 rotations is not the time to suddenly figure out that you don’t really like clinical medicine and how it is practiced (or will be practiced with Obamacare) or you had no idea what it was like. The problem is that by the time you reach Year 5 and start doing clerkships, and if you figure out then that you either hate it or you don’t like it anymore, it’s already way too late to turn back. You’re already invested 6 figures in debt and 4 years by that point, so you pretty much have no choice but to go for residency – and the ones with the best lifestyle tend to already be the more competitive ones to begin with. All the more reason I highly recommend students to shadow and round with residents, take call, etc. in a hospital as @blugrn6 did. I really think that’s the best way to figure out that medicine fits you as something you can do the rest of your life.
My classmates who did it because they wanted to make their parents and friends to be proud of them, or because of clear family guiding/pressure, or who or felt they’d be making a 6 figure salaries with banker’s hours, or did it only because they “liked science” in high school, and figured becoming a physician was the just the next natural step, were usually the ones who were most disappointed by the time Year 6 came around. It’s very difficult for people not in medicine to understand physicians’ lives. When you’re the one on call on working long hours, it’s only you – not your family, not your friends who have to go thru it. There is a lot of delayed gratification by going this route that other professions don’t have. So make sure you can handle it for the long haul.
@Roentgen, @bluegrn6
Do you guys recommend that students take college courses in the summer before Year 1 starts? If so, what classes do you guys think are helpful?
I would first take a look at these degree plans which seems to be updated and easier to read from the UMKC Medical School website (vs. the Major Maps link from the university UMKC website)
Biology: http://med.umkc.edu/docs/accepted/BA_Bio_MD_Major_Map.pdf
Liberal Arts: http://med.umkc.edu/docs/accepted/BLA_MD_Major_Map.pdf
Chemistry: http://med.umkc.edu/docs/accepted/BA_Chem_MD_Major_Map.pdf
Testing credit (limit of 30 hours): http://www.umkc.edu/Registrar/transfer-credit/default.asp
I don’t know if they still have the Communication Studies, Psychology, Philosophy, and Sociology degrees available as options for BA/MD students anymore.
For some people, it was going to be their last summer in which they got to travel with family internationally, so they took no classes. For others taking summer classes made their course load much easier. No one can stop you from taking summer classes (since you’re not officially a School of Medicine student until the fall) and if you take courses in the UM-System (UM-Columbia, UM-KC, UM-St. Louis, or Missouri University of Science and Technology) you’ll not only get credit, but also GPA. Since you’re not officially a med student until the Fall, you can take undergrad classes at UMKC in the summer at the normal undergraduate rate. If you take classes at your local college, make sure you know that it actually transfers to UMKC for credit before you enroll.
I think it depends on how much credit you’ll be coming in with as a freshman, in what classes, and your energy level at the end of senior year of high school. You have to strike a balance between getting credit, but also building enough of a cumulative GPA at UMKC. At the end of 6 years, your cumulative GPA (which includes your undergrad classes and med school classes together) will factor into your overall class rank (as will your clinical grades and Step 1 score) which goes on your MSPE letter to residencies.
Several things you want to achieve with your undergrad requirements:
a) come in with some type of General Chemistry + Lab credit – whether it’s an AP test or sitting in a college class in the summer, so that you don’t have to take Cell and Orgo Chem together in the summer.
b) get rid of as many undergrad requirements as you can, to where you only need a summer campus in Year 4 vs. a full campus. I had classmates who finished their requirements in Year 2 and just took online classes in Year 4 campus, so they literally had 2 months off, besides going to clinic once a week.
c) try to pad your cumulative GPA with as many easy undergrad classes as possible – online classes, PACE classes, etc.
d) finish your Writing Intensive requirement by the end of Year 2 Fall so it’s not a worry in Year 4 when you have to worry about studying for USMLE Step 1.
Schedule of Classes: https://umkc.umsystem.edu/psp/prdpa/EMPLOYEE/HRMS/c/COMMUNITY_ACCESS.CLASS_SEARCH.GBL?AITS_HDR_CODE=2
Chemistry credit (Chem 211, Chem 211L, Chem 212R, Chem 212RL)
→ AP Test: A ‘3’ used to give you credit for Chem I and II + Labs, but no longer. http://www.umkc.edu/Registrar/transfer-credit/default.asp#anchor-2. It’s changed to where a score of ‘4’ gives you credit for Chem I and Chem I Lab only; Score of ‘5’ gives you credit for Chem I + Lab and Chem II + Lab
→ Take General Chemistry I and/or General Chemistry II with labs at a college in the summer
SOCIOL 101: Sociology - An Introduction
→ Summer 2015 - UMKC has an Internet version of the course available
ENGLISH 225 (gives you credit for Discourse II)
—> Summer 2015 - UMKC has an Internet version of the course available
PSYCH 210: General Psychology
→ AP Test: Score of 3 gives you credit; CLEP Psych Test: Score of 50 gives you credit
→ Take at a college
Focus A: Arts and Humanities - Humanities prefix required
http://www.umkc.edu/core/courses/index.cfm?sortCol=attr_desc&sortOrder=ASC
Focus C: Human Actions, Values, and Ethics - Missouri Constitution course
POL-SCI 210 - American Government (Summer 2015 – Internet version of the course available)
HISTORY 101 - U.S. History To 1877 (Summer 2015 – Internet version of the course available)
HISTORY 102 - U.S. History Since 1877 (Summer 2015 – Internet version of the course available)
@PinkPrincess2014
I think @Roentgen explains it really well in terms of logistics.
The decision to take classes in the summer is a really personal one, that depends on factors like: how much credit you’re coming with etc.
I personally didn’t even look into it because I was like, this is my last full summer break (all three months) for me to do nothing and take a chill pill before life gets intense. The longest break you will have after you start the program is 20 days at a time until year 4, when you start getting 1 month vacations.
Honestly, if you got a 5 on the AP chem test and you are getting are coming in with a lot of other credits, take the summer off.
If you don’t care about taking the summer off, then take some courses and lighten your course load later.
It seems too much “holding hands” from current and past UMKC BA/MD students. If you made to the program, you must be very smart and academic prepared, and you should be able to figure things out yourself.
@efr009, why do you call it “holding hands”? The medical school should try to help their students to be successful and give them the opportunities and resources to be successful in the residency match. I appreciate people like @Roentgen, @UMKCRoosMD, and @Blugrn6 taking the time out to help those who will enter the program who don’t know the tricks and little details beforehand in being successful. It’s one thing to be smart and academically prepared, but that’s not enough to be successful in this program or any program.
There is no way I would have been able to interpret this year’s residency match list from UMKC without them.
Trust me, I do appreciate @Roentgen, @UMKCRoosMD, and @Blugrn6 very much for providing valuable information about pros and cons of the program. But having someone to map out the classes/summers for you, I call that “holding-hands.” Helicopter parents don’t even do that. You are correct, you can’t be successful if you are only smart and academically prepared. You also need to study hard. But having someone to figure out things for you …?
@efr009, I’m the one who asked them the question about whether it’s wise to take classes in the summer before Year 1 and which classes would be smart to take that summer. In clicking on the Pathway link above, it looks like many of those undergrad classes are online and can be taken for GPA and credit by those of us who are out-of-state. They pasted the degree map links from the UMKC Med School website which I couldn’t find on my own. Unlike others or maybe you, I don’t have a brother and sister who has gone through the program who I can ask.
I’m not just talking about being smart/academically prepared/studying hard - all of those things together alone aren’t enough to be successful anywhere. Why would I waste my time unnecessarily trying to go through the maze? I just don’t get it. Out of all the BS/MD programs on CC, this thread has been most helpful overall in finding the little things out that can make a difference before I get there, so why not take advantage of it?