@slimybananas420 Nah I’m worried and Im in-state
@slimybananas420 Yep, feeling a little nervous for sure, but not worried as I know it’s not a big deal, there’s other ways to become a doctor, and thinking about it won’t change anything now that the interviews done. And I’m in-state just like @Watang as well.
I am so nervous, too! Like @Watang and @AtticusFinchh I’m also in-state. It’s so exciting to think about how the Council of Selection starts meeting today about our applications. Since there were more people interviewed this year, I’m guessing we’ll find out close to April 1 (25 days!!!).
Last year, it looks like the first acceptance reported on CC came out on 3/26, so my guess is that it will come out this year on that first Monday, 3/28 thru the end of the week.
@Roentgen Well, at least most people (at least I do) have spring break in the middle or the week before that so that’ll speed up the wait!
Also:
Is it possible for the students to get a part-time job? I know with the course load and class timings it could be hard, but have you seen it be done successfully? Or at least for the first two years?
Anyone else getting senioritis lol?
The BA/MD FAQ says this with regards to part-time jobs (http://med.umkc.edu/bamd/faqs/): “Some students are able to manage a part-time job, however it is not always recommended. Students are encouraged to acclimate to college life prior to pursuing any employment. On-campus jobs are always preferable to off-campus jobs because they generally tend to be more convenient and flexible. Most students in years 3-6 are unable to work due to the structure of the curriculum.”
The ones I know who worked a part-time job, mainly did Work Study type of jobs, which is part of your FAFSA financial aid package: http://www.sfa.umkc.edu/site2/work_study.cfm. These tend to be jobs available on campus whether on Volker or at the med school. I have heard of people doing “real” part-time jobs like working at restaurants on the Plaza, etc. but those jobs tend to not last as long for BA/MD students, just because of the inherent structure and increased workload in the BA/MD program after Year 1. Definitely possible at the Year 1 level for sure though. As you can guess, you wouldn’t be able to do this while on a clinical clerkship, so it works best in the first 3 years usually.
People also do stuff like being an SI (Supplemental Instruction) tutor to make extra cash, like teaching Baby Anatomy, Baby Micro, or other required science courses for BA/MD students.
@Roentgen Thank you!
@Roentgen, you had mentioned in your questions about pass rate and the average score for the USMLEs. Do you know where I can find this information?
So you can actually find the national average USMLE Step score and pass rate information off of the University of Virginia (UVa) School of Medicine website:
https://www.med-ed.virginia.edu/handbook/academics/licensure.cfm.
They’ve been doing it for quite a while now, but UVa posts their medical school’s unredacted score reports, which has the pass rate and mean score w/standard deviation both for their school and at the national level, every year. Click on the summary PDF for a particular year, look under “Performance on First Attempt” and then look under “Examinees from U.S. & Canadian Medical Schools”.
For specific medical schools, you can see USMLE data here: http://www.best-medical-schools.com/index.html, which I believe that data is from 2012, although I don’t know if this has been verified by the schools or if it is just self-reported data. I believe it comes from US World News Report, if you were to get a Compass subscription. UMKC does not participate in the USWNR rankings, so the data is not there:
http://www.best-medical-schools.com/University_of_Missouri_Kansas_City_School_of_Medicine.html
Thank you for those links. Does UMKC have a link like that with scores?
Also, I wanted to know how beneficial is all that early clinical exposure and experience at UMKC? At my daughter’s interview day, students mentioned that quite a bit as to why they chose UMKC. I guess what I’m wondering is do UMKC med students come out in the end as better practicing doctors than med students from 4 year med schools, when they first go into residency? Does all that early clinical exposure that UMKC students receive, benefit students later in terms of test scores, getting residencies or a fellowship, or maybe they feel like they can handle better the tough cases that come in because of UMKC? What is it that students do in those things that those students liked?
My daughter applied to several combined programs, so we hope to get to have several acceptances in which she can choose from.
I know your question was directed at @Roentgen, and I’m sure he will give you a more detailed response but I can shed some perspective on this as well having gone through the program.
The early clinical exposure that students talk about is the Docent Experience and Continuity Care Clinic.
The Docent experience starts at a Year 1 student in two areas:
- One with a general internal medicine preceptor
- One with a psychiatrist at the Center for Behavioral Medicine
Students are usually divided into teams of 10 per group, and that group is assigned one physician and on one half day per week (Tuesdays and Thursdays from 8 - noon) students shadow that attending in a clinical setting.
What students do during that time is usually very attending dependent. The school does get all the docents together and lets them know what is expected to happen during this experience, however, most docents don’t really stick to the rules and sort of set up their own curriculum. As a result, students get a very varied amount of experience.
As for me personally, I can’t speak for my colleagues, my Year 1 docent usually had about 5 patients picked out for us (about 2 per student) and had us go in pairs to go to the hospital room where the patients were admitted and talk to get and just get to know them. Eventually that moved on from getting to know them to asking them why they were at the hospital, than on to their medical history, and eventually on to doing a full history on the patient. Than we went back to a conference room and as a whole team we would go around in a circle and present each patient to group. Our physician would usually suggest ways for us to improve the questioning skills, ways they did it that worked better, and helped us perfect the interview skills.
During our psych experience, we usually went to the behavioral units in the inpatient psych facility and started off by watching the doctor interview patients who were acutely psychotic. Than he used to pick out one patient who was calmer and more open to students to have us try to interview them. The psych experience was more of a shadowing experience where we observe what’s going on, the internal medicine was more hands on.
Once you move on to second year, the psych docent is taken away. You only have one half day per week with your general internist that you were assigned to first year. So you continue working with them.
In my second year, our docent continued to have us interview, but the difference was they used to send us alone instead of in pairs and than after that we started to discuss the medical processes that the patients were admitted for and how they work, what the treatment would be, etc. We would review images, sometimes learn how to suture, etc.
Once we move on to third year and are assigned to a different team on the hospital hill campus (they might have talked about this on interview day), we start continuity care clinic.
So as first and second years the team that you are a part of consists only of students that are in your class. When you join a team third year, you are joining a team that comprises of a few 3rd years, a few 4th years, a few 5th years, and a few 6th years.
You are also assigned a 5th year student as your senior partner. Their job is help you navigate your new responsibilities in clinic, the upcoming inpatient docent rotation and really help mentor you in terms of advice for classes you are taking etc.
Your Year 2 docent team goes away. That experience is over. So when you start third year, you start going to clinic with your new team for one half day per week. The assigned physician that is responsible for your team is your “docent” for the next 4 years. The idea behind it is that you are seeing the same patients over 4 years so you get to see how disease progresses and develop a deep relationship with your docent and get to work as a part of a team. The team that you are assigned is also the team that you do six months of inpatient internal medicine with. Two months each in 4th year, 5th, year, and 6th year.
So in clinic, you see patients that are here to see your docent, you see the patient first and than go present the patient to your assigned doctor and than you both go in together and see the patient and come up with a plan. Each year in clinic has a different responsibility in terms of what is expected from the student (I won’t bore you with that right now).
Now to your question about how this is different from the traditional medical school experience. I’ll tell you the difference first and than I’ll explain what I think are pros and cons of our system.
- Traditional medical school students usually only have to do one month of outpatient internal medicine clinic, usually no more than 30 days. By the time we graduate, the school of medicine students will have done well over 150 days of internal medicine clinic.
- Traditional medical school students usually only have a maximum of three months of inpatient internal medicine. Usually its more like 2. By the time we graduate, the school of medicine students will have done six months of inpatient internal medicine.
- Traditional medical school students usually don’t partake in much clinical experience during their first two years of medical schools (its usually taking basic science courses), although that might be changing now. Our time in the first two years is filled with the Year 1-2 Docent experience that I explained above.
- Other than that, the clinical experience that UMKC provides is the same as other medical schools.
Now lets discuss the Pros and Cons.
Cons:
- If you don't want to do internal medicine, the amount of clinic you have to do and the amount of inpatient medicine you have is absurd. I personally feel that six months is excessive, and it takes time away from students who want to explore other things. For example, because of your docent schedule you usually don't have much elective time until your sixth year, which is too late for you to decide what you want to do, you have to submit your application for residency at the beginning of your sixth year.
- The school of medicine pulls you out of all of your rotations during your fifth year (surgery, pediatrics, etc) for your clinic. So when you start as a third year, not only as your assigned a team, you are also assigned a clinic day that you have to go to clinic. Under no circumstances are you allowed to miss clinic, it takes precedence over EVERYTHING. The problem with that in my opinion is that when you only have 8 weeks to spend on surgery, on pediatrics, etc, you being gone for 8 half days greatly compromises your education. Now you might say its only 8 half days its no big deal. Well it is a big deal and I'll give an example that affected me. Lets assume that my clinic day is Tuesday, well I had a situation that one particular surgeon on my surgery rotation (who happened to be the chairman of the program) only operated on Tuesday mornings. So if I wanted to go to the OR with him, I could not. I had to move clinic, which I was not able to. To me that was not a big deal because I was not going into that speciality but for those who want to, it compromises 8 instances during a two month period during which they can potentially work with someone and establish a relationship with them. Again, the only reason I say that is because I think 150 days of clinic is sort of excessive.
- This system sounds great on paper, but the problem is implementing it. Each student, each docent team, and each experience is wildly different from another. Some students have great docents, some get unlucky and get ones that are, I don't want to say uninterested, but they are less involved in teaching. The other problem is that docents leave and come to UMKC like no one's business. Its rare for students to have one docent for an entire four years. A lot of my friends have had two or three docents change during their 4 years, and at that point you lose any advantage you have over getting to know someone personally. The other problem is that its unfair for students who have great docents who get an awesome experience vs. ones who have docents who are not as passionate.
Pros:
- You do become very comfortable around patients early on. Students are more comfortable in clinical settings because they have had a longer exposure to it. I'm sure there are more pros but I can't think of any for now.
Does it give you a huge advantage over other students from traditional medical schools? No.
Here is my view on it. Because students have been more exposed than other students, when they are compared to them, sure UMKC students come out on top. But its because they have been doing this for a longer time than other students. But as with anything, practice makes perfect. Personally I don’t think talking to patients is that hard for many people to get comfortable with. And as students from other medical schools get more exposed to clinical care, they become just as proficient as UMKC medical students.
To answer your specific questions:
“I guess what I’m wondering is do UMKC med students come out in the end as better practicing doctors than med students from 4 year med schools, when they first go into residency?”
Maybe when they first start like very early on. But after a month of working as an intern, I don’t see how any UMKC student would be better at patient care than someone from a traditional medical school.
“Does all that early clinical exposure that UMKC students receive, benefit students later in terms of test scores, getting residencies or a fellowship, or maybe they feel like they can handle better the tough cases that come in because of UMKC?”
Test scores - No. In fact I was just talking about this with one of my friends the other day. I don’t think I would have done any better on Step 1 because I had a year of clinic. It would have not mattered at all. Obviously I can’t say that for sure because I did take it after having a year of clinic. But I don’t see what I learned in clinic I would have used on the test, if that makes sense.
Getting residencies - this one you can argue as a Pro, maybe. It depends on the student. Like I mentioned earlier, when you compare students from UMKC vs. Traditional medical school, yes when we do addition rotations we have had more exposure to patients so we are more comfortable around them. That comfort can sometimes be viewed as confidence and professional behavior. But again this depends on students. I’ve seen fifth year UMKC students who are terrible with patients and third year medical students from traditional medical schools that are excellent communicators. Would I use that as a reason to attend UMKC? No.
Fellowship - Absolutely Not.
Better handle tough cases. No. The tough cases part really comes in with where you trained and how many complicated patients you saw during your rotations. It makes no difference how long you have been seeing patients. Think about it this way: you can see easy patients for four years vs. seeing really complicated patients for two years. Which person do you think is gonna know how to handle a tough case? My bet would be on the person who has been seeing complicated patients for two years vs. the one who only saw easy patients. Not saying that UMKC has easy patients AT ALL, just giving an example.
In fact, I would argue that the Truman patients (that’s the UMKC’s affiliated hospital) are some of the hardest patient’s to see both medically and socially.
“What is it that students do in those things that those students liked?”
I hope I answered the content of what they do above in detail.
I think what students, and this includes me, like about it is that we get to get “involved” right away. I knew that medicine is what I wanted to do when I choose to attend UMKC. So from that standpoint, I absolutely loved it that I got to start seeing patients the first week that we started school.
I will have to put this disclaimer:
I am not by any means saying that all the Cons I mentioned above a reason not to attend UMKC. I’m just pointing out some of the negative aspects of the system that were probably not addressed on interview day.
Overall, I don’t think that the clinical experience that UMKC gives you is leaps and bounds above that of traditional medical school. Is it nice to have that much clinical exposure: yes. Is it necessary: no. Would I use that as the SOLE reason to attend this school if I didn’t like anything else about the school? No.
@sweetjujubees, those are really great questions. No, UMKC does not have a link similar to UVa’s link above with scores. I’ll try to answer since you asked me for my opinion, but @blugrn6’s response pretty much hit the ball out of the park, in terms of accurately describing the clinical exposure in this program.
The “clinical exposure” that they were referring to in your daughter’s interview usually refers to 3 aspects:[ul]
[li]Year 1 & 2 Docent Experience[/li][li]Continuity Care Clinic - which is the half-day per week outpatient Internal Medicine (IM) clinic with your Docent and docent team in Years 3-6[/li][li]Docent Rotation, referred to as “DoRo” for short - 2 months every year inpatient IM clerkship, with your Docent and docent team in Years 4-6[/ul][/li]The Year 5 clerkships at UMKC are also clinical experience as well, but this will also be present at other medical schools during their required MS-3 year – IM, OB-Gyn, Surgery, Peds, Psychiatry, Family Med and usually with Neurology as well.
Here are some links you and your daughter can read from the UMKC website which will give you at least some better idea about it:[ul]
[]http://med.umkc.edu/docent-learning
[]http://med.umkc.edu/docs/SOM/AcademicPlan.pdf (Pages 9-12)
[]UMKC Catalog on pages 1 and 3: https://catalog.umkc.edu/colleges-schools/medicine/medical-degree-programs/six-year-program-description/six-year-program-description.pdf
[]Virtual Tour video: http://www.youvisit.com/tour/umkc/80372?id=67811 (if you win the free VR headset, send it to me! LOL. j.k.) – first 6 links labeled B.A./M.D. apply to you.[/ul]
So in a traditional 4 year medical school, a few decades ago, it used to be that you did 2 full years (MS-1 & MS-2) of basic science coursework basically in a lecture hall (so for all intents and purposes, solely bookwork + exams) and you never stepped foot onto the clinical wards to ever see even 1 real patient during this time. Then you took USMLE Step 1, after which you started your third year (MS-3) and that was your first time onto the hospital floors seeing patients. This was around the time that the UMKC med school was built in the 1970s to follow a different blueprint, not only in terms of time (6 vs. 8) but also to incorporate clinical exposure much early on (which in that era, was revolutionary, but not really so much now). There are several reasons why this is no longer the case, but as of now, nearly all allopathic medical schools, have some level of clinical exposure in those first 2 years - as it is now an accredidation requirement.
Here are some examples of other medical schools with combined Bachelor/MD programs that incorporate clinical exposure early on:[ul]
[]Case Western’s PPSP program - in the first 2 years of their med school, they have clinical immersion blocks: http://casemed.case.edu/curriculum/education/y1y2-blocks.cfm.
[]Drexel which also has quite a few combined BS/MD programs, also has this as well: http://drexel.edu/medicine/Academics/MD-Program/Curriculum/Clinical-Experience/.
[li]Miami which has the HPME program (same name as Northwestern) has it as part of the Doctoring Program and Competency Assessment Weeks: http://admissions.med.miami.edu/md-programs/general-md/curriculum/first-two-years[/ul][/li]My point in bringing this up is that early clinical exposure will be present at ANY US allopathic med school, so using the presence of it as your main differentiator for choosing UMKC’s med school, over some of your other options, is not really valid anymore since they all have it.
I won’t go into great detail about the Year 1 & 2 Docent experience, as I think @blugrn6 did an excellent job at laying that out. I do believe there is (compared to when I took it) a separate mandatory lecture component, to sort of serve to standardize the experience for all students, so that everyone comes out with some basic level of knowledge, as the actual bi-weekly experience can vary A LOT between different docents and different hospital sites. That was the most frequent complaint from students – you’d have some people who absolutely loved Docent in Years 1-2, others who thought it amounted to nothing more than just glorified shadowing, and thus utterly useless, and usually correlated with the particular Docent you were assigned to. The Year 1 & 2 Docent experience does tend to change in terms of logistics based on whatever perceived need the school believes should be inserted (i.e. the insertion of Geriatrics). According to the catalog link from above, you can see they do women’s health (Fall Year 1), geriatrics (Spring Year 1), pediatrics (Fall Year 2) or adult medicine (Spring Year 2). So you probably noticed, more generalist, primary care type fields. Not at all surprising as most of our clinician teaching faculty tend to be in fields like Internal Medicine, Pediatrics, and Family Medicine.
The Year 1 & 2 Docent Experience serves as an Intro to Medicine and sort of quenches the thirst, so to speak, for clinical exposure for beginning BA/MD students who are very overly enthusiastic to get their feet wet.
@sweetjujubees, I’ll talk more about the Years 3-6 Docent system as that tends to stay relatively unchanged in terms of curriculum objectives. It is like holy water for the medical school.
So when you promote to Year 3, you are placed on what is called a Docent unit (team) for the last 4 years of the curriculum - which is either at Truman Medical Center-Hospital Hill or St. Luke’s Hospital. The head of that team is called your Docent, who is an Internal Medicine (IM) attending doctor, but can also be an IM subspecialist of some kind, like in Rheumatology, Nephrology, Pulmonary, etc.: http://med.umkc.edu/directories/docent_units/. The Docent team is comprised of about 12 students ranging from Years 3 to Year 6.
On top of your current curriculum (whether that’s a basic science class or a separate clinical clerkship), you will do one half-day a week of outpatient IM clinic w/your Docent and your docent team for all 4 years. Every student in Years 3-6 will participate in this, with the exception of being on a vacation month or on an out-of-town elective (of which you’re limited to being out-of-town for 4 months total in a year - and that’s because of our Continuity Care Clinic requirement to get credit). This can be a Godsend if you absolutely hate your current rotation so you get a break from it, or it can be hugely irritating if you’re on a rotation that you love. For example, there were people in my class who during their Year 5 Pediatrics clerkship wanted to go into Peds as their specialty (since Children’s Mercy is a great hospital), and they absolutely hated having to leave Peds for their morning Docent IM clinic, because then you miss any morning didactic/teaching lectures in a specialty you like, you have to then come back in the afternoon when your clinic is over, to get updated on anything that occurred with your clerkship patients, yada yada. It’s much different than other med schools in which your sole responsibility is that particular clerkship when you’re on it.
In the last 3 years, 2 months out of every year is done in inpatient IM, which you do with your Docent and Docent team. Your 2 months of inpatient IM (called Docent Rotation or “DoRo”), stays static and is already set in advance in your curriculum plan, as they follow a particular timing cycle. Again, if you already know for sure early on that you have no desire to go into Internal Medicine, then that’s 2 months of every year in which you don’t get to explore other possible specialty interests not offered as part of the required curriculum, to rule them in or out, and make an informed decision on your future specialty. To put it in traditional medical school terms, you’re pretty much repeating the MS-3 IM clerkship, three times. As @blugrn6 mentioned, by the time you get to Year 6, it’s kind of late to be deciding among specialties, when you’re actually supposed to be doing audition electives in your decided specialty.
One of the benefits (in theory) of the Docent system in Years 3-6, is you have a Docent who gets to know you for all 4 years, as they can see your trajectory in terms of your medical knowledge base, clinical skills, get to know you personally, etc. In reality though, depending on which team you are placed on, it is very possible for your Docent to leave (they’ll be replaced by someone else, or you’ll have a series of rotating docents usually in clinic and DoRo), so you would not get that benefit, which seems to be happening more and more these days. Obviously, if your docent has been there for decades, then you’re pretty likely to keep that same person at least thru your 4 years, and that person can then write you a great letter of recommendation for the residency match.
I mention this because the individual perception of the Years 3-6 Docent experience, which is a huge portion of the program, will vary a LOT for students - with many factors that contribute to that: whether the student and docent meshed well in terms of personality, how cohesive the docent team was overall, how well of a teaching physician the docent was (some are fantastic teachers, some are not so great or as invested), maybe whether the student ended up liking Internal Medicine or not. Depending on who you ask, you’ll have people who absolutely loved it, people who absolutely hate it, people who are just plain sick of doing it, and those who are indifferent to it.
@sweetjujubees,
So in terms of in going initially into residency, I think this leads into one of @blugrn6’s points that one of the pros is comfortability in interacting with patients, mainly just due to tons of exposure. Nothing magical about it, it’s just practicing again and again - just like you would practice how to do a medical procedure like suturing a wound closed. By the time you’re done with Years 1 & 2, at the very minimum, you should be comfortable in talking with patients, maybe even comfortable eliciting a good history. Then in Years 3-6, you take a clinical skills course, you get even more exposure with Continuity Clinic and DoRo, you do Year 4/5 clinical rotations, etc. So if you do audition elective rotations in Year 6 at other institutions, your comfortability will likely shine thru much more, and thus probably put you in a better light, both in terms of a grade and getting an LOR. That being said, I’ve known traditional medical students whom I did audition electives with, who did very well in their MS-3 clerkships, and were great clinically on their audition rotations, and I’ve known UMKC med students who for whatever reason, still weren’t as great clinically, even with all that early & additional exposure they got. Even in internship/residency, medical graduates catch up very quickly just because internship has such a high learning curve, since you’re working 80+ hour work weeks seeing and evaluating patients. If you’re going into a non-IM field, then all your countless hours of IM will be pretty pointless in terms of having direct application to your chosen non-IM specialty, as that is what residency is for.
But no, overall, I don’t believe UMKC students are somehow magnitudes ahead in terms of being better practicing doctors vs. traditional students. It’s more an issue of comfortability, which again is quickly achieved (if necessary) by traditional graduates, just from the sheer hours of residency training.
In terms of effect on test scores/u – probably not a huge difference, esp. with Step 1, so no real benefit, compared to the traditional student. It’s a multiple choice exam, and a lot of the questions are testing on facts and concepts that aren’t necessarily very useful clinically on a day-to-day basis and thus wouldn’t be learned or picked up with that extra clinical exposure. It could probably be even a little detrimental in terms of thinking, when it comes to answering standardized test questions, just because in basic sciences, everything is taught as being so decisive, black & white, and clear-cut (if medicine was really like that in real life, we’d just get computers to do it), while clinical medicine isn’t really like that - where you’re taking a subjective history, asking pointed questions, filtering in your head what patient answers are relevant and irrelevant, going thru a differential diagnosis process and seeing whether labs/imaging support or can rule it out (http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2012/08/doctor-start-differential-diagnosis.html). Even on Step 2 CK, that early & extra clinical exposure probably doesn’t affect it much also, just because by that time we all take shelf exams in our Year 5 clerkships (like all other med students across the country) that are similar to Step 2 CK questions, so those are probably much more helpful towards that. UMKC does require that you have completed at least 1 required Year 4 clinical rotation (either Family Med or DoRo) before taking Step 1, I believe the rationale was that you could see how basic science facts you’ve learned are applied in a real clinical medicine setting, since the exam tends to be much more application in nature (analogous in grade school to having word problems on a math test vs. straight rote arithmetic), but again, traditional med students take Step 1 without any clerkships in hand, so it’s obviously not necessary.
Getting Residencies – Not really. Again, all medical schools will have some level of clinical exposure in the first 2 years of med school, so that’s not very “special” anymore, in the eyes of a residency faculty interviewer. If you do end up going to UMKC, all programs you interview at for residency will ask about you having done an accelerated 6 year program, but I’ll be honest, NONE of my residency programs that I interviewed at really cared that I did IM clinic 1 half-day a week for 4 years and 6 months of DoRo, as an added benefit for them, in selecting me over another candidate. I guess what I am saying is, having all that clinic and 6 months of DoRo, wasn’t the weight that tipped the scales hugely in my favor, especially since I wasn’t going into Internal Medicine. Even if you decide you’re going for Internal Medicine, having all that Continuity Clinic and all those DoRos, by itself, still doesn’t tip the scales tremendously, like you might think when it comes to those more top-tier IM programs. The reason is that there are so many OTHER metrics that residency program directors can look at to compare residency applicants – Step scores, Clerkship grades, Audition elective performance, Letters of Recommendation, Research publications, etc. especially in the more competitive specialties — all of which can be found in traditional 4 year medical schools. No one is going to say (especially in non-IM fields) “Oh my God, can you believe he’s done 6 months of IM and has done so much IM outpatient clinic at his school, which is 4 more months than everyone else, let’s get him/her!”
Getting fellowship – Nope. lol. Your ability to get a fellowship will look more at residency than anything else.
Tough cases – as @blugrn6 mentioned, your ability to handle more severe cases is more due to your breadth and rigor of your patients you’re seeing in medical training, as well as during residency, rather than any specific length of time. It’s not like you’ll be walking into internship and it will all be a cakewalk just because of your early and additional exposure in the Docent system.
So @blugrn6 mentioned those things above, but to add to it, I think the reason why Docent gets rave reviews from some students is because starting at that age, it’s what all students are craving. No one craves sitting in a lecture hall hearing a professor reading his/her powerpoint lecture about DNA replication, especially millenials: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gutCFMc5khY. I mean for 12 years of schooling, your daughter has done school work, maybe done some healthcare activities and a little shadowing, but hasn’t really gotten to really experience anything even close to what med students and attendings do. I think the Docent system in the first 2 years gives a window to see that so there is a lot of initial excitement. So because it’s all new to you as a BA/MD student, it’s lustre is very bright, vs. 3-4 years down the road when it becomes quite mundane.
Oops, sorry, @sweetjujubes, I misspelled your CC handle. Please see above.
Folks, does anyone know if it is possible to gain Missouri residency if you get admitted as an OOS? I have seen the residency application form and wondering if one of my parents move to KC, Missouri when I start the program, then will I be able to claim residency after one year in the program. My parent to move will not be working but will pay for my tuition in the first year thru her bank account in KC and live there as well. Any advice is much appreciated. Thanks.
I’ll let others give their take as well, but when I entered the BA/MD program, if you were OOS, you agreed to pay OOS tuition for the full-time you were in the program. In fact, before matriculating you were actually made to sign an agreement stating exactly that: “Out-of-state residents applying to this program agree to the non-resident fee payment and other fees paid by resident students for a full six years or longer if individual circumstances require and agree not to apply for or otherwise claim entitlement to any UMKC non-resident scholarship.”
That being said, I believe this may no longer be true, as I have heard of students who buy some type of property (a condo or a house) to try to establish Missouri residency, some of whom have been successful. It’s a whole petitioning process as you probably already figured out from the website: http://www.umkc.edu/residency/. And you’re in no way assured of having it approved. What trips up people the most in terms of approval is usually the Missouri income tax liability requirement of at least $2,000 in income. Rules can be loosened or tightened up all the time at the state level which is why depending on the requirements students may or may not have been approved even if they all did the same thing to check off the boxes.
You can go here thru Mizzou (the same rules will apply since it’s all in the same UM system) since it’s easier to read, as that UMKC residency petition looks a little blurry: http://registrar.missouri.edu/residency/. They also have a helpful Youtube video to explain what you need. Best would be after you get an acceptance to the program, to ask around and to get in contact with an out-of-state BA/MD student (best would be from your state) who can tell you about how successful people are in being able to do so and maybe get you in contact with someone who did.
Great question though, and hopefully others here can shed some light as to how it is accomplished by students currently.
@Roentgen thanks for the detailed reply. I am wondering if getting a job on campus which pays a total of $2000 a year is hard to get on campus during the first year of the program. Does anyone know? Thanks.