What's so good about UBC anyway?

[Guest BigTool]

What the hell is so great about UBC anyway?

 

All that people have been discussing in this forum are bad things but I know that there are a lot of happy students at UBC.

 

Are there any great things that UBC students do that sets them apart?I'm going to UBC this fall, and I hope that I'm going to have some fun.

 

Forget the Admissions process, forget all the elitism stuff. What are the great things that future students have to look forward to?

[Guest Ian Wong]

Great things, and bad things, non-med first:

 

1) The city. Vancouver is an awesome city with an amazing climate and outdoor activities. People from my class routinely drive the 45 minutes to go skiing at Grouse or Cypress, or up to Whistler/Blackcomb. Others go on weekend trips to Tofino to go surfing. There's lots of other other amenities like hiking, biking, camping, rock-climbing, etc. The outside world is your oyster.

 

2) The cultural diversity. You will find a huge mixing pot of races, cultures, and everything else here in Vancouver. Great if you come from a more sheltered smaller city like myself (I'm from Victoria).

 

3) Bad things include traffic, parking, high cost of living, and housing, all of which are just as you'd expect in a larger city.

 

 

Med stuff, good first, then bad:

 

1) Early patient exposure. By the end of the first month, you'll be seeing patients, often by yourself in local family doctor's offices. I think this is crucial to get your feet wet, and helps keep you interested when you are studying the books, because you can apply your knowledge early.

 

2) PBL/Lecture hybrid curriculum. You will get PBL, and you will get lectures. Most people find PBL very enjoyable the first year, especially the first term, and then it becomes tedious. But you'll have a chance to work in small groups of 8 students, and will rotate groups each month or so, which means that after two years, you've worked in a small group setting with the majority of your classmates.

 

Great way to meet people and learn to deal with different personalities and learning styles. You'll also gain lots of insights as people bring their academic backgrounds to the table. ie: a former pharmacist leading the discussion on the side effects of Aspirin, a former physiotherapist talking about rehab post-ACL injury, etc. Unlike a solely-lecture based curriculum, you actually get to take ADVANTAGE of the smartness of your peers.

 

3) Honours/Pass/Fail grading. Not as good as Pass/Fail grading, but a 61% is effectively the same as an 81%. Helps cut out a fair amount of the competition that you would see if percentage grades were kept.

 

4) Lecture handouts. Other schools have note-taking services. The lecturers are required to submit their lectures to the UBC office ahead of time, and each student receives a transcript of the lecture/presentation. So, if you miss a class, no worries. Just pick up the handout, or get a friend to, and you're set. Our instructors in general are very enthusiastic people; I can only recall 2-3 lecturers with a bad attitude in the entire first two years of med school, quite a feat considering that you could have 5 different lecturers each week!

 

5) Organ-based curriculum. None of this bogus stuff about doing Anatomy and Physiology in first year, and then Pathology in second year. When you study the anatomy of the lungs in your Pulmonary block, we'll also teach you the Physiology and the Pathology simultaneously in order to pull things together. It's the correct way to learn, in my opinion.

 

6) Tests at the end of each term (ie. a battery of exams in December, and another in May). Some other schools have exams at the end of each block, which can be good, but also really facilitates the "cram and puke" method of studying. At UBC, either you'll have to be really good at cramming, or you'll actually need to study for long-term retention, because your May exams will test you on everything you've learned from January up until the end of May. Most of us seem to end up cramming anyway, but the concept of long-term learning is there if you want it.

 

7) A mandatory rural elective in the summer after Med 2. I was initially quite cynical of this before I did it, and I think it's a wonderful idea. This month of rural medicine really helps you to consolidate a lot of learning because you often get to be really hands-on. I spent a month working in the town hospital doing everything from assessing, casting, and suturing up people in Emerg, to working one on one with the radiologist and pathologist, to starting IV's and intubating patients in the OR, to scrubbing in with surgeons from most specialties (I worked with general surgeons, orthopedic surgeons, ophthalmologists, otolaryngologists, plastic surgeons, and gynecologists). It was awesome.

 

8) Strong clerkship program. We have one medical school in BC, and tons of hospitals at our disposal. No competition from other intra-provincial med schools as there aren't any! Like Western, we finish all of our clerkship rotations by the end of Med 3, so we have our elective time in Med 4 to get our faces known for the CaRMS application process and interviews.

 

9) Strong match rate. I think UBC grads are generally well-regarded, and this last year we had what I'd call a banner year as far as our success in the CaRMS match. UBC grads landed pretty much every specialty but Dermatology.

 

10) Financial aid. There are lots of bursaries to be had which you can apply for AFTER you start med school (so don't worry about them now, you'll get information later on). Many of my classmates got as much as $5000 in their first year, which was more than the cost of tuition. Also, something that no one knows about is that during Med 3, UBC actually PAYS you about $500 a month, so you take home $6000 that year automatically, irrespective of student loans, bursaries, etc. As a Med 3, paying you this money is more advantageous for UBC than not paying you; I think it has something to do with insurance coverage for you as Med 3 doing rotations at the hospitals.

 

Bad stuff:

 

1) Tuition is going up. No thanks to the BC government, but the tuition freeze probably wasn't sustainable. Tuition could hit $14,000 after three years from now. Given that Ontario and BC have crumbled and deregulated med school tuition, it will be interesting to see if any other provinces follow suit within the next couple of years.

 

2) The Doctor, Patient, And Society (DPAS) course which runs through the first two years of med school gets some pretty mixed reviews. I think that this type of a course, which tries to emphasize the humanistic side of medicine, tends to get sketchy approval from med students in general, as it's not the "hard science" stuff like learning the anatomy of the median nerve, or studying the cascade of hormones from the pituitary gland, etc.

 

3) The Clinical Skills course which runs through the first two years of med school also gets mixed reviews. Through troubles with scheduling, you could be learning about how to do a thorough cardiac exam, including listening for heart murmurs or feeling the chest for thrills or heaves, and still not yet have covered that material in your PBL and lectures in the Cardiovascular block. I think this course would also benefit from smaller group sizes than the one instructor to eight students ratio that it currently is.

 

4) Anatomy is taught with students doing cadaver dissections (groups are either 6 or 8 students, I don't know what it is currently), and also using some prosections (although not as extensive of a prosection collection as many other med schools). This isn't a negative as such (I think you NEED specimens of one sort or another to learn anatomy, as you can't really learn it off a book or through a computer simulation), but the amount of Anatomy teaching time seems to be decreasing each year, which I don't think is a good thing. The problem is that there's so much stuff to learn within medical school that something has to give in order to fit in DPAS, Clinical Skills, and Family Practice within the first two years of med school, and Anatomy took a hit as a result.

 

5) Lots of residents here. I put this as a negative (although it's also a good thing), because I think the amount of stuff a medical student gets to do is inversely correlated with the number of residents on the same service. I would have loved to be the first assist on any number of surgeries, but there's usually a resident in there as first assist, which means that as the second assist your job may be as benign as holding retractors or suctioning out blood. Not too glamourous.

 

On the other hand, residents are INVALUABLE when it comes to teaching. During your rotations, you often spend very little time with the attendings themselves, and most of your time with the residents, who are logging as big, if not bigger hours on-site as you. Therefore, most of your teaching comes from the residents, and most of your contacts, which will serve you well when you apply for residency, will similarly come from residents. Since they've just been through the whole process, they can also give you lots of advice regarding CaRMS, doing electives, etc. So, having residents close by is both a good thing and a bad thing simultaneously.

 

I'm sure there's more pros and cons out there, but this is a quick laundry list. The bottom line is that I GUARANTEE that you'll enjoy the first term of med school, and you WILL be impressed by the diversity and cohesiveness of your class. I honestly think we have an awesome med school here, and I think you'll agree with me once you start.

 

Ian

UBC, Med 3