UMKC 6-year BS/MD Program

Pre-Med & Medical School Multiple Degree Programs
4401

@Blugrn6, yes that explains the research aspect well. Thanks!

If you take a summer campus (June-July) of Year 4, like you mentioned, does your Step 1 target date change in anyway? For example, do they make you take the Step 1 exam sooner than if you had a spring Year 4 campus (May/June)? I noticed because here: http://med.umkc.edu/curriculum/licensing/#criteria, it states, “Dates for CBSE and USMLE Step 1 will be set by Student Affairs and the Associate Dean for Curriculum in planning the Year 4 curriculum for students. The student’s CBSE date and Step 1 target date cannot be rescheduled without petitioning the Council on Curriculum.” — I’m guessing most people who try to petition to change their Step 1 date get denied.

4402

@Blugrn6, in looking at the plans in your year and now, I believe previously in order to do the Bio degree in the BA/MD program, you had to have transfer credit or AP exam credit for General Chem I and II + Labs, Physics I, English I, and a Math (either Calculus or Statistics). Now with the entire Bio degree being made much easier, in terms of the amount of credit you’re expected to come in with, I think they just placed the math class in the schedule and made the choice for you – Statistics 235.

I believe the Anchor/Discourse thing (i.e. the Civic/Community Engagement thing you mentioned), is a new thing for UMKC undergrad freshmen who entered in Fall 2013 for General Education Requirements: http://www.umkc.edu/core/

Just what UMKC students need, even more classes that don’t transfer to any other university.

4403

@blugrn6, that’s another thing that used to annoy the **** out of me at UMKC. Your curriculum schedule is sometimes very dependent on others, especially because of Docent Internal Medicine clinic - which is why you are limited to a certain number of out-of-town months you can take in a year. And God forbid all the people in a certain year be gone at the same time! How will clinic function without you??? At least Year 3 can’t be f’ed up since everyone has the same schedule.

At traditional medical schools, everyone usually takes USMLE Step 1 in the summer - June/July before 3rd year clerkships start, so all of them are “off” from school during that time. But because UMKC has their Docent clinics, not everyone can take USMLE Step 1 in those months because everyone would ask for a vacation month/study month then. Same with scheduling of rotations, if certain rotations had too few students, they would try to enroll more people and change their schedules to fill it up. Very frustrating.

All the more reason, if you go to UMKC, to just be aware that there is always something to possibly f’ up your schedule the exact way you want it. I would follow what @blugrn6 said with respect to maximizing the chance that you get your schedule the way you want. Having a summer campus is very nice and is a nice break to catch your breath, rather than jumping straight from Pathology right into Pharmacology.

Some people said that having Pharmacology right after Pathology was advantageous because you understood the treatments of diseases you had just recently learned in Pathology, since there was no gap of 4 months to forget, and you could theoretically start boards prep much earlier since the only thing left was Behavioral Science. But I think the first positive is largely negated by being so mentally exhausted from Pathology, and the second positive is negated if you’re taking boards in the spring or summer anyways, and you’ll forget a lot of the Step 1 minutiae you need to know just because of the way short term memory works.

4404

@Blugrn6, do you get to choose the order of your required clerkships in Year 5: OB-Gyn, Pediatrics, Surgery, Family Medicine Preceptorship, Psychiatry?

I understand you can’t change the 2 months of Docent Rotation because it is already set for all 3 years with your team and docent, but do you get some say in the order of your Year 5 clerkships? How does that work exactly?

4405

@PinkPrincess2014‌

Not really, you can take step 1 whenever you want even if you have summer campus.
Because of my class and the class above us was so notorious for pushing Step 1 back, curriculum was tired to dealing with people moving their schedules around like it was not big deal just because they got scared and pushed back step 1.
I mean people get towards the end and are like ok I need 10 more days. So they push it back. And once you push it back once, in the back of your mind you now have this safety feature, so you’re like if I’m not ready so i’ll just push it back again. This led several people to take boards on the last possible day you are allowed to in Sept.

When you set your year 4 schedule, they ask you what you want to do. And you would say like: ok well I’m gonna be done with all of my electives on this month, I want two study months and then a vacation month and I’ll take in the middle of my vacation month and then have the rest of the month off to relax after boards. You can still do that and make that a plan. The only difference is: for us that plan was not set in stone. We could push back boards and it was nbd. Now that plan is SET IN STONE. So you have to petition to curriculum to change it. Its mainly a tool used by the school to just make people take the test who would otherwise be too scared and push it back. Doesn’t really mean anything in terms of freedom to actually make/set your study schedule.

Because of the volume of students they have to schedule, you cannot pick the entire order for your rotations.
I mean you will certainly put in your preference, and most people get what they want. But they will ask you: what is your number one non-negotiable choice. So examples are:

  1. I HAVE to have surgery first because I want to rule that out
  2. I HAVE to have peds first because I want to know if I’m passionate about it
  3. I HAVE to have surgery last because I want to make sure that I have enough experience to blow them away, etc.
    So they will def try to get your non-negotiable item, the rest, most students actually get what they want. There will of course be some students who will not get what they want, but that’s a minority.
    I have to say though, we switch our schedules around a lot anyways.
    I petitioned and changed two of my cores around that were in the opposite ends of the academic year 15 days before the rotation started.

The thing about curriculum, and Dr. Stephanie Ellison, who is the chair, who approves all the petitions personally is that she just wants to know if there is a reason behind it.
And this applies for the Step 1 scheduling above as well.
If you explain the change and it is a legitimate reason, you will get approved. I have petitioned three times to drastically change my schedule to curriculum and they have never once rejected my petitions. You just have to make sure you justify it.
“I want to switch peds and ob/gyn because ob/gyn is more chill and I want to get peds over with” is not a good reason.

But if you have some sort of family issue, or some personal emergency, they will let your switch your schedule.

I don’t remember if it was @Roentgen‌ or @UMKCRoosMD‌ that said this earlier but they were like: “if you want a specific schedule for convenience reasons UMKC will fight you to the death, but if you have an emergency, all of a sudden there are no rules and they will fit you in wherever in a second without any issues”

Its so true. Usually you can’t do doro split apart, like you have to do the two months together. But have a sudden family emergency or some reason to push boards back to something and all of sudden you can do one month of doro with one team and two months later do the second month with another team no problem. If you ask to do that so you can do an away rotation you will be shot down.

4406

Is UMKC any good?

Look at the residents at UMKC: http://med.umkc.edu/fm/class-of-2016/ Ross (foreign grad) and many DOs! I looked at other years, and clearly not top or even middle tier!!!

I thought that having a strong residency was important, and was a place for graduates to go? But, this is family med - UMKC’s specialty and look at the people they attract.

What does this say about UMKC BA/MD program and UMKC Medical School? Are we in the same standing sa Ross Medical School or Osteopathic programs?

4407

The problem regarding Step 1 policy wouldn’t be an issue if UMKC worked like every other traditional medical school where everyone takes Step 1 at the same set time. At most traditional schools, after the end of the second year, you have a certain number of weeks to study for and take Step 1, and if you don’t take it by then, you don’t get to set foot into MS-3 clerkships, which everyone starts at the same time. I remember our class even near the end of our Step 1 date, would change schedules around last minute to get more study time, but it was also because the previous year’s pass rate was disastrous, and the school wanted to avoid that at all costs again. To be honest, back then we all felt that basic sciences was poorly taught especially with Step 1 in mind, so we relied heavily on commercial prep courses like Kaplan, so it really did take us a year to learn all the things we wish we had learned in classes.

In the end, only you end up getting hurt if you push off rotations bc then the first half of your Year 6, when you could be doing audition electives (if needed) in your specialty, you’re stuck doing a Year 5 rotation bc you pushed it off for a few more weeks of study time.

@blugrn6, yup, I’m the one who said it but I was more referring to the different application of Council on Curriculum policies to on-track students vs. extended students. For an on-track student, if you petition for a particular curriculum change for a particular reason, it will be denied, but it’s like once you extend (at whatever point for whatever reason), if you need your curriculum done in a specific way they are suddenly happy to do so. This was especially true for extended students when it came to curriculum in Year 4 for Step 1 preparation – like if they needed to do a longer, more extensive Kaplan course. If you were an on-track student, you had to first get a summer campus, then you had to have open months when those specific Kaplan courses were available, etc. It’s one thing it seems like they’ve become more adept at doing, in looking at their website, is in more detailed processing of leaves of absence. Maybe more and more UMKC BA/MD students are taking leaves of absence than in the past?

A perfect example is the requirement for a Year 4 campus. If you finished all of your undergraduate course requirements (it was easier in my time bc you really got 2 full years to take undergraduate classes), but you’re an on-track student, you still have to take a Year 4 campus (bc of the “3 returns to Arts and Sciences campus” rule), so people in my class just took easy online classes or something like Computer Science 100, whatever). But if you extended sometime in the first 2 years and finished all your undergraduate classes, you don’t have to take a Year 4 campus. The only difference between the 2 scenarios is the extended year, but the whole point of that campus semester is to finish your Bachelor’s degree in the first place.

Dr. Ellison is a really great choice for Curriculum Council. There have been some other chairs in the past – who tend to be real a-holes or gigantically cruel to students. That’s part of the problem at UMKC, the really nice faculty or those who want to change things so that it is genuinely better for students tend to be the quiet ones, or those without much clout. The people with a lot more clout tend to be people who have been at UMKC much much longer (some have been there since the 80s/90s, and some even from when the school was built!) and are very resistant to changing things especially if god forbid, they make it a little bit easier on students instead of making things harder.

4408

@AdVitam, Family Medicine, as a specialty in the United States, isn’t very competitive. UMKC’s Family Medicine program is also not in a competitive city, unlike say Boston, LA, Chicago, etc. so that makes it even less competitive. Couple that with the amount of debt that students from UMKC are graduating with, many students are not going to choose that specialty by default. This says nothing about the quality of the UMKC Family Medicine faculty, some of whom are quite wonderful and many of them are Year 1/2 Docents.

I would say “UMKC’s specialty” is more Internal Medicine, since all UMKC med students have to do Docent Rotation (the 2 month Internal Medicine clerkship that is repeated in Year 4, 5, 6) and Docent clinics (the half-day Internal Medicine clinics you do each week from Years 3-6).

UMKC is definitely above Ross (or any Caribbean med school for that matter) and is above osteopathic schools. You can see KCUMB’s (The D.O. school in Kansas City) match lists here: https://www.kcumb.edu/academics/college-of-osteopathic-medicine/eras-residency/match-statistics/, and you’ll see their match lists (on average) are much lower in quality, in terms of competitive specialties and institutions, than UMKC. A U.S. allopathic medical school applicant will always be favored over a Caribbean medical school or an osteopathic medical school applicant, with all other things being equal.

4409

Thanks @ Roentgen

I do not think Obamacare or the death of fee for services will be an issue for MDs, I believe DO schools will be the problem.

Pharm graduates were making $130 K, and at Ohio Northern and other schools in only 6 years. Then schools started cranking out more and more grads, now pharm grads cannot find jobs. even LECOM opened two pham schools.

Lawyers used to make a good living, there were Wall Street fat pay checks, but the little guys made a great income. then colleges learned that a law school was cheap to implement and law schools popped up faster than gophers in Olathe. Now there is a massive glut of lawyers, and few make enough money to pay off school loans! Talk to UMKC law school grads about income opportunities!

There are few new MD schools, but DO schools pop up and get bigger and bigger classes, like those Olathe gophers, they just keep popping up, more and more of them. add FMG and DOs to the pot, and they are all doctors (and many are good too) fighting for the residencies MDs are fighting for. Since the pie stayed the same size but the number of FMG and DOs increased, the pressure is stronger on MDs. And, nothing negative about DOs, but they generally are the ones not good enough to get into MD school. So they are also often willing to take lower pay. as a result, income for MDs will and is dropping because of the pressure from more and more non-traditional doctors. As the glut of doctors forms in the next 15 years, even specialists will find income lower and lower.

From UMKC residency bio, I must conclude it is very low on the list of places a MD would want to go.

4410

@AdVitam, I disagree with you. Obamacare will definitely affect the way physicians practice – there are already changes being made at the medical school level on rotations (interprofessional education) and in residencies (making residents aware of costs). Obamacare changes the way doctors are reimbursed, and the death of fee-for-service is a clear indication of this change. The way you are reimbursed affects your paycheck, unless you’re an employee of a hospital, to where you are on salary. Even then you are expected to see a certain number of patients, etc.

It isn’t just DO schools (realize that currently there are DO residency programs as well). New allopathic MD schools are being built. When I graduated there were about 125 allopathic medical schools. There are now 141 allopathic medical schools with even more being built. Physicians are the only profession that require residencies in order to practice (the other professions may have residency, as an option, but it is nowhere close to being required). The AAMC has also instructed already existing allopathic medical schools to increase the number of students they are taking into their matriculating classes.

You are also incorrect about DOs willing to take lower pay. I don’t know who told you that, but you’re very much incorrect. Many DOs enter the same residencies that MDs enter so it wouldn’t make sense for them to take lower pay. In terms of employment, an MD medical license is equivalent to a DO medical license since they are both physician licenses. Many of the FMG graduates have been taking residency spots in specialties and programs where American medical graduates are unwilling to go. Income for physicians is dropping across the board, but it has nothing to do with new medical schools being built, since the total number of residency positions, and thus total number of graduating residents has stayed static.

People have many different reasons for why they choose different different residencies, when they come up with their rank list to enter the residency match process.

4411

ATTENTION - ALL WHO WERE NOT ACCEPTED AT UMKC

If you still want to be a doctor, have you considered osteopathic medicine?

I applied to the LECOM EAP program as a backup for allopathic med school programs, and I wonder if it really is a back up!

DOs income the same pay as MDs - I have been told that to think a DO gets less money is not only incorrect, it is very incorrect (see above).

All things being equal, I have been told MDs get better residencies. BUT UMKC med students get low step 1 scores, while LECOM medical students get #1 score on Step 1 in the country (1 year they had second highest average, instead of number one). So wouldn’t they do better than UMKC med school graduates for a residency?

But, UMKC is no MCAT, and people are afraid of the MCAT. Well fear no more, you do not have to take the MCAT in another program if you maintain a 3 year gpa of 3.5!!

What is the EAP/accelerated BS/DO program? You must have a 1200SAT or 25 ACT and 3.5 gpa. You interview while a high school senior, or wait until freshman in college, up to you. If you pass your interview - then no MCAT! Yes, NO, NONE, NO MCAT. Go to an affiliated college and get a 3.5 gpa and after 3 years you are automatically a medical student at LECOM (3,4 gpa if you take 4 years of college).

And the affiliated colleges are easy - if you cannot get a 3.5 gpa at one of them, you cannot get a 3.0 at any other college!

I just raise this, because what I am seeing about UMKC makes me wonder if many applicants would have been better off considering LECOM? I know those that were not accepted should consider LECOM!
Internal medicine is the specialty of UMKC - this I have read and re-read here.

And yet the UMKC residencies are full of DOs and foreign medical graduates from Jordan, India and elsewhere
http://med.umkc.edu/im/residency/pgy1/ So if they got residency here at UMKC, you can too, and via LECOM’s EAP program with no MCAT!

So do not give up if UMKC did not accept you, you may be better off with a higher Step 1 as a DO than as a UMKC grad (and you will be less in debt too)! Do not limit yourselves, find a way to be a doctor! Look at UMKC internal med residencies - surely you can go to almost any school and come here!

4412

I would not recommend entering a BS/DO degree program directly from high school. You are already limiting yourself by entering a combined program in terms of the medical school (some medical schools with BS/MDs are fantastic deals which is why they are so competitive to get in), and with a DO school you are further unnecessarily limiting yourself in terms of available specialties as well as institutions - especially in the competitive specialties. If you notice the matriculation stats to get into a BS/DO program (1200 SAT, 25 ACT, 3.5 GPA), they are much lower than that for a BS/MD program as well as the stats to stay in the program. It’s one thing to go to a DO school after an inability to get into a U.S. MD school through the normal route usually due to low stats, but it really is a huge mistake to do this right from high school without even trying.

On average, DO schools have students with lower MCAT scores and lower overall GPAs. That doesn’t mean they are bad people, as many DOs make excellent doctors – I’ve worked with DOs myself and have had residents who were DOs when I was a med student and many of them were great teachers. You can see the average MCATs and GPAs of LECOM’s students for 2014: https://bulldogs.kettering.edu/premedclub/files/2011/03/LECOM-Presentation-Part-2.pdf

I highly doubt that LECOM gets the highest Step 1 score in the country, especially when most DO students don’t take the USMLE, since they are not required to. They take the COMLEX exam: http://lecom.edu/about.php/LECOM-COMLEX-pass-rates/49/2206/608/5746. Also there is so much more to getting into residency than just a USMLE Step 1 score. This is evidenced by LECOM’s match lists: http://lecom.edu/college-medicine.php/Where-do-LECOM-graduates-match-for-post-graduate-medical-education-residency-programs/49/2206/612/4925, where you can see the types of residencies they get into and the type of institutions they match into – more community-based hospitals vs. academic teaching hospitals. You can directly compare LECOM’s match lists to UMKC’s match lists previously posted by @UMKCRoosMD.

Many DO schools also charge more in tuition than many public state MD schools.

If you want to keep your options open in terms of competitive specialties or if you are considering going for fellowship, as well as academic institutions even in non-competitive specialties, you should always go for the MD not the DO. You will still have to work hard, get good grades, get Honors on rotations, get good Step scores, etc. but you won’t also have to fight against the stigma.

The reason that the IM residency program at UMKC is filled with DOs and non-American graduates (on average) because most UMKC grads going for IM want to rightfully explore other programs and start on a fresh slate with different faculty. UMKC’s IM program isn’t the “best” program, although it does have all the fellowships you could possibly want besides maybe Rheumatology and Allergy. After being at UMKC for 6 years, most UMKC students going for IM want to get in the best Internal Medicine program that their application can get or live in a different city, especially if they are interested in a competitive fellowship like Cards, GI, or Heme/Onc. I’ll let @blugrn6 explain this if he/she wants, with regards to current students going for IM and their thinking.

4413

@AdVitam, on your link that you posted of the PGY-1s in their Internal Medicine residency program (http://med.umkc.edu/im/residency/pgy1/), all 3 DO students are from Kansas City University of Medicine and Biosciences (KCUMB). There is one UMKC graduate.

The rest are from SABA, a Caribbean school, and from medical schools in Jordan and India.

4414

I must add, that UMKC students - the ones that went or are going there - from almost all the prior posts, they cannot get into a better program. They are like the DOs, lower tier in smarts. So anyone who graduated or is going to UMKC is by definition limited and lower tier, and thus should not be advising on anything other than UMIKC med school options. Sorry, but everyone needs to understand the limitations of the advice given when it is outside of UMKC.

And pinkprincess2014, you want to go to UMKC? Why? And instead of focusing on 5th year elections and schedules, why not focus on the May mandatory orientation and getting done with year one? There is plenty of time in the next 6 years to ask about residencies, etc, everything changes anyhow. Year five summer campus seems silly to talk about now before one has even started year 1.

All UMKC people going there - let’s talk about books, car pooling, etc - real things that will impact us.

And yes I have accepted. But to those who were not accepted - LECOM with no MCAT is a great choice!

4415

@AdVitam, with all due respect, just because UMKC may qualify as a lower-tier medical school (I agree with you here), doesn’t mean all the students, themselves, who choose to attend the program or graduate from it are “lower tier in smarts”. I definitely wouldn’t call the people on this year’s match list who matched into Dermatology, Plastics, Anesthesiology at BIDMC with Harvard and Mayo, Ortho at UPenn and MGH with Harvard, limited and low tier would you? All of us are more than just the institutions that we graduate from, especially since the real learning and training for your specialty in medicine happens during residency and fellowship training.

Part of the college admissions process is you apply to as many BS/MD programs as you think you can get into, along with normal 4 year colleges and make the best decision with the limited information you have. BS/MD programs are a conditional acceptance, the medical school is taking a chance on you by not having you go through the normal admissions process – taking certain premed prerequisites, taking the MCAT, maintaining a certain GPA, etc. that they make everyone else go through, with a guaranteed acceptance to their medical school.

You can choose to heed my advice or not (I’m really not offended either way as we all have different reasons to choose various schools), but the same thing could be said for you, as someone currently in high school, advising people to enter a combined program to a DO school, which up until I corrected you, you said that DOs are willing to take lower pay (false), that Obamacare/death of fee-for-service won’t affect doctors (false), etc. That just wasn’t correct information. You’ve accepted and will be going to UMKC, so by your own stated rule: “So anyone who graduated or is going to UMKC is by definition limited and lower tier, and thus should not be advising on anything other than UMIKC med school options.”

There are UMKC graduates (and not just a few) who work as attendings at Wash U, a top-tier institution, so it seems like Wash U doesn’t believe they are limited and lower tier in smarts.

4416

@AdVitam, why are you questioning me about where I want to go? I have other BS/MD options and I’m comparing my different options before I have to make a decision by May 1st. That’s what people do. I am out-of-state. Year 1 is all undergrad classes - it’s not a big deal. It would be stupid of me to just say I’ll wait till I hit Year 5 to figure everything out about UMKC, when by that time I’d have paid out 5/6ths of the $330,000 dollars in tuition. Figuring out the strengths and weaknesses of each program is being proactive and in this program, I’ve heard you really have to be proactive in certain areas, bc that information won’t be handed to you.

If you want to talk about all these things – orientation, Year 1, books, carpooling with classmates, isn’t there a class Facebook page where you can talk about all these things? This isn’t the right thread for that kind of stuff.

4417

@Blugrn6, @Roentgen, and @UMKCRoosMD, did you guys feel like that people coming from outside of Missouri (regional or out-of-state) had a harder time adjusting either to life in Kansas City or to the UMKC BA/MD program in general? Did they have more complaints about the program overall? I realize it might be different for someone who lives in Illinois/Oklahoma which are right adjacent to Missouri vs. someone coming from a state in which you have no choice but to fly home.

What do you think contributes to them either being happy or not as happy there?

4418

@Blugrn6, are Year 1 and 2 students really able to join and actually participate well in UMKC college organizations like every other UMKC college student, or is it much more limited due to the intensity of the BA/MD curriculum? Or if they don’t participate is it because they feel they don’t have to since they don’t have to build up a CV to apply for medical school? I know on my interview day, there were some med students who join fraternities and sororities, but I didn’t know if this was that common for med students to do.

It seems like UMKC has a lot of organizations: http://info.umkc.edu/getinvolved/studentorgs/, and has a relatively new Student Union as well as the Atterbury Student Success Center: http://www.umkc.edu/maps/documents/volker_maps/UMKC_Volker_campus.pdf

4419

Hey everyone! I would like to congratulate everyone who has been accepted to the program or any school of their choice once again! I realize that there is no way of truly knowing this, but does anyone know either how many OOS students accepted UMKC’s offer or how many are declining the offer? Thanks for your help! And congrats again!!

4420

@PinkPrincess2014‌

So you have to understand that most of us (by that I mean me and my friends) that come into the program are not really big fans of long breaks. Not that we don’t love our families, we do miss them, but for us, after 2 weeks of a break we are like: ok its time for me to come back to school.

Yea, students who are from california arguably do have a longer and more expensive travel home.
A 3 hours flight to LA that is $300 vs a 40 min flight to chicago that’s $88 round trip does make a big impact of how often one can go home, but students find ways to go back home all the time.

I’ll just break down all the breaks we get so you can better understand what our schedule looks like.

Year 1: one week for thanksgiving, 4 weeks for winter, 1 week for spring break, 2 weeks beginning of summer and 2 weeks at the end of summer
Year 2: one week for thanksgiving, 4 weeks for winter, 1 week for spring break, 2-3 weeks after HSF before year 3 starts.
Year 3: 4 days for thanksgiving, 4-5 weeks winter break (changes every year), no spring break, and then that’s when it gets tricky
Year 4:
Summer campus: you will get a 1 month of vacation time, all together that you can take anytime in your schedule that you want.
Fall campus: you are for from Aug 1st to Aug 19-22nd ish (whenever undergrad starts), 1 week for thanksgiving, and off from december 13th (or whenever your last undergrad final is) till Jan 1st (when behavioral science starts.
Spring campus: Jan 1st to whenever undergrad starts (around Jan 20th ish), spring break, and then may (whenever your last final is) till June 1st.
Year 5: you get one month of vacation (a lot of students waive this vacation month to get an extra month for away rotations or electives)
Year 6: one month of vacation (if you waived your year 5 vacation, you can re-instate it year 6 and you will have two months of vacation year 6)

You will definitely go home for all breaks, everyone does. And then when things get busy year 4, you will find long weekends here and there to go home.
You have to decide if that is enough time off for you.

Yes for instate students its easier, longest drive home for them is max 4-5 hours. So they can technically go home all the time. But honestly, even they don’t end up going home all that often unless they have family issues cuz then they end up missing out on all the fun that their friends are having in KC.

If you are coming from Cali, midwest weather is a big change. It is literally bipolar, i’m not lying.
It was 60 degrees one day this december and then it was 20 degrees two days later. That is a bit hard for people to adjust to, but after the first year, you will get used to that as well.

This was an issue for a few students: they came to school with rear wheel drive cars because it did not snow where they were from. But they all traded their cars for all-wheel drive versions. I don’t know if that impacts your decision at all.

Students are actually very proactive in their first and second years. I mean yes you are busy but you do have the time. Unless you are absolutely lazy (which some students are) then they don’t.
Yes thinking about residences is really early in Year 1, but its not really all that much far away. If you were to start med school the traditional way you would get involved in extra curriculars right away, which to us is like Year 3, so by Year 2 most students find some activity that they are going to commit to. Its late if you start thinking about that stuff Year 5, but most students are encouraged to find school of medicine activities Year 1. And we, as officers of med school organizations, always come to Year 1 class meetings and send out emails to your class to encourage participation.

No one really has the mindset that, oh I don’t have to apply to med school so let me chill. Most students are already in the, I need to do the best I can, I’m gonna apply to residency before I know it.

Hope that helps.