Osteopathic Med Student

Archive for the ‘PBL’ Category

I was very impressed with the West Virginia School of Osteopathic Medicine. The campus was beautiful. The school used to be an old military base and it was converted into a school. The school has taken great care to keep everything looking nice, and they seem to continually update the facilities.

The lecture halls are huge. WVSOM has 2 lecture halls; one for first year students and the other for second year students. The sound is great and the screens for overheads are big, so really there isn’t a bad seat in the room. I sat in on a lecture and spoke with a professor about classes and she took the time to show me the online system. WVSOM records all the lectures in MP3 form. Students are able to go back and listen to any lecture they feel they need. I liked that idea a lot.

The anatomy lab was also really nice. They had 50+ cadavers to work with. One strong selling point was that the lab did not have the tradition stench of other anatomy labs. The faculty at WVSOM has devised a ventilation system that keeps the room smelling pritine and clean.

WVSOM has a fair amount of construction going on at the moment. They had 2 new buildings in progress when I visited. One was a new research facility (I think). The other was a brand new wellness center for students and families to use. It was in the initial phase of construction, but it looked like it will be very nice.

West Virginia, like LECOM, offers lecture track and problem based learning. However, their PBL system is very new and still developing. One nice thing is WVSOM always has a DO and a PhD in the room with the students working their cases. LECOM only had one faculty member.

Last of all WVSOM has robots that simulate real patients. They were very nice. Students have the opportunity to work on cases and learn from mistakes before heading into the real world to work on real people. I will talk about these simulators in a later post since multiple schools have them.

The one downside I found in the West Virginia School of Osteopathic Medicine was the out of state tuition. In-state tuition was fantastic; somewhere around $22,000. Out of state was $50,000+.

Since LECOM was the first school that I interviewed with I was not sure what to expect. LECOM’s interview is different from any other school I visited. I was interviewed by 2 doctors at the same time. One of them had a PhD and the other was a DO. The thing that made LECOM’s interview different was that neither of the interviewers had access to my file. LECOM’s admissions commity has the opinion that if you were good enough to receive an invitation for an interview then your interviewers should just get to know you. I found the interview to be very relaxed and actually enjoyable. The PhD interviewer was very friendly and loved to talk.

My first interview was at the Lake Erie College of Osteopathic Medicine, Erie campus. I first learned about LECOM when a representative from LECOM came to present at Utah Valley University. I left the presentation very excited about the school, and was convinced that LECOM was a great school for me to apply to.