Med School Update: Last Didactic Week

Picture from COMP-NW Facebook page

The fourth and final didactic week of Scott's third year was poorly organized. I had thought for sure, as I'm sure other families did, that this would not be a complete week on campus.

Typical didactic weeks have the first and second days scheduled for Objective Structured Clinical Examinations (OSCEs, clinical exams with actor patients). Then the third day of the week is for testing on rotations just completed. Then typically the last two days of didactic week include preparation by faculty for the upcoming rotation block and any administrative meetings for the medical student class.

This final didactic week had OSCEs on Monday and Tuesday, tests on Wednesday, nothing on Thursday, and a mandatory meeting on Friday (for the Oregon campus only). Scott had his OSCE on Tuesday, which meant that he had nothing scheduled for Monday or Thursday. This is okay for us, since we live across the street from the school. Most students, though, are driving every day that they need to be on campus from either their third-year home base, or their fourth year home base city. After this didactic week some students drove home to U-haul to their fourth year home base city.

Since there was unscheduled time during the week, you would think that the school would make more efficient use of student time to allow them to prepare for fourth year audition rotations and board exams... either by hosting administrative meetings twice for students not in OSCEs or by offering for students to view the mandatory information online (not out of the norm for this program, where half of the lectures are filmed on the Pomona campus). It sounds like the mandatory lecture was for both second and third year students, to show off the third year students experience and knowledge. If this were the case, I'm sure selected student representatives would have been willing to attend on behalf of the entire class.

Rant over.

Third year over. Wahoo!