All You Need to Know about BU’s Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine

If you want to know how much of BU medical schools recently received $100 million gift it intends to use for scholarships or what happens to applications to ensure a genuinely holistic process or what its associated dean of admissions wants to see in students, you want to listen to this interview with Dr. Christine Goudelle, associate dean of admissions at BU's Chobanian and Avedecian School of Medicine. Welcome to admission straight talk, the podcast dedicated to graduate admissions and helping you approach the application process thoughtfully and successfully. Your host is acceptance founder and world-renowned admissions guru Linda Abraham. I've accepted our mission as to get you to that unforgettable moment when you read your acceptance email and shout "Yes, I'm in! Confident you'll be attending the perfect program to help you launch the career of your dreams." Welcome to 541st episode of Mission Straight Talk, thanks for tuning in. Are you ready to apply to your dream medical schools or are you competitive at your target programs? Accept its mid school admissions quiz can give you a quick reality check. Just go to accepta.com/medquiz, complete the quiz and you'll not only get an assessment but tips on how to improve your chances of acceptance plus it's all free. Again, take the quiz at accepta.com/medquiz to obtain your free assessment. Today's guest Dr. Christine Goudelle, associate dean of admissions at BU's Chabani and Abedizian School of Medicine, earned her bachelor's degree at Colby College and her MD at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. She completed her residency in family medicine at Tufts and has been a practicing physician ever since 2007. In addition, from 2012 to 2017, Dr. Goudelle served as a director for innovation in medical education at the Harvard Medical School Center for Primary Care. In 2017, she was appointed assistant dean of admissions at the Boston University School of Medicine and became associate dean in 2018. Dr. Goudelle, welcome back to admissions straight talk. Thank you so much. I'm happy to be here. Great. Can you give an overview of the Boston University of Chabani and Abedizian School of Medicine program focusing on its more distinctive elements? Sure. So the most important thing to know about the school of medicine is that we are a social justice medical school and you see our social justice focus come through in many, many different ways. It is woven into the curriculum quite explicitly. You see it in what our students do with their free time. You see it in the sort of particular areas of expertise of our faculty. And of course, it's in the patients that we serve at our primary hospital, which is really on the same campus with the medical school. Okay. Great. Now, I normally ask what's new, and I will ask what's new, but the obvious thing that's new is the school's name. So when we start with that, then you can tell me what else is new in addition to that? Sure. So last year, we got a new name for our medical school, along with a hundred million dollar gift. That's a big gift. Right. And it was a wonderful gift. And in my mind, perhaps the most exciting thing about that is that 50 million dollars of it. So half of the gift was specifically earmarked for financial aid. Ever since I have been here, been really focusing on increasing the amount of scholarship aid that we have available to give students. And the maximum scholarship award has almost doubled since I've just since I've been here, it's gone from, you know, 30,000 dollars to 55,000 dollars per year. And that's that's just only for scholarships and it's need-based. So that's that increase has been really remarkable. But now we know that it's going to increase even more. So I think that is amazing. As a private school, we know that our tuition is high as a school that is in Boston. We know that living expenses here are high. So anything that we can do to offset the cost, I think is really, really good, obviously for our students, and makes us a more accessible institution. You think you're going to get to a point where you can make it free. Medical education or female education. You know, there are intermediate goals before we get completely free. We would love to be able to meet the full demonstrated financial need of our students. I think that's like a sooner goal than making it free completely. And I think I feel comfortable with that, you know, I feel good about giving resources to the people that need them the most. Okay. And what percentage of the student body is currently getting some of that scholarship money? Oh, it's a good question. I don't know the answer that probably a little bit less than half. Okay. Great. I just thought of it. So what else is new? That's pretty big. That's pretty big. If you want to stop with that, it's okay. We actually also have another really big thing since we last spoke, which is that we have really reorganized our curriculum. So we have moved completely away from lectures and towards a flipped classroom team-based learning format for the first two years for the pre-corship phase. And we had already redesigned the doctrine course, which is the clinical skills course. And that has been great. And we're, you know, that gets tweaked every year based on feedback, but basically stays the same. But now our big, you know, foundational basic science work is all done in the format of small group discussions, problem solving, workshops, labs. It's very, very hands-on. And this means some important things. It means that, first of all, attendance is required. But it also means that when you come to class, you're never just sitting and listening. You're always, you know, discussing problems or discussing cases with the 18 members at your table or your table is debating what's the correct answer with another table and trying to figure out why or you're interacting with the faculty as they put questions on the board and invite you to answer using a clicker to make sure that people have understood the foundational knowledge. So it's really exciting. Basically, the way the curriculum happens is that instead of coming to lecture and having the content delivered to you by a professor that's standing there, which frankly, I mean, that's what we were doing before. That's also the way it was when I went to medical school in a year that started with 19. So one might think that we could have updated. You know, they should update things since then. Now the content is delivered to students in the form of these self-learning guides and they are online and it has some reading material, some videos, some animations. A lot of questions like test questions and some of the questions are study questions that are meant to be discussed with your classmates. So, you know, describe the process by which, you know, the three journal cell layers, you know, whatever reform to make the forex or something like that. And some of the questions are more board style, multiple choice questions to make sure that you understand the information in the way that it'll eventually be presented on an exam and on later on on a board exam. So students have these self-learning guides. You have lots of time on your own to review those before you go to class. And then when you go to class, you have all these different formats that I talked about with some some big group interactive sessions and some small group problem solving and then some labs and some hands on workshops and things like that. Like you learn the material on the own and you apply it in class? Yes, yeah, that's right. And it's great. This is the second year that we have been doing it and the students really like it. We, lots of medical schools have made this change and it's often very rocky and I feel as though ours has not been rocky. I mean, sure, we get feedback about it and you know, we're collecting and tweaking things. We've made some small changes, but generally people feel satisfied with it. Even the students themselves are able to realize that they have a really good depth of understanding and faculty. I mean, when faculty go and sit in these classrooms and listen to the types of questions that students ask, it is, I mean, there are three clicks more advanced than students were ever asking before. They just are asking much more interesting thoughtful kind of deep questions instead of, I don't understand why this thing belongs to this category instead of this one. You know, it's much more, it's just much more sort of indefinite thoughtful and that's good because that's what medicine is. You know, we don't need to memorize stuff, right? We can look up stuff. If it's just facts, we can look them up or we really need is for people who can like think and solve problems and really understand how things work. I would assume that you'll, it's probably one of the goals or one of the ways you're going to test it, but I would assume that the score is on the step two should go up. Hopefully, I mean, we have to do some tell because so the first class that's had the new curriculum is just starting their second year. So they haven't, they still have nine months before they take step one. Right, right. Sorry, I noticed on the medical schools website that you have 40 plus outpatient sites where students learn and practice their clinical skills. In addition to in the classroom, how does this wealth of opportunity and the program's location in Boston influence the educational experience of medical students at BUSM? And also, I guess that would be part of your focus on social justice. So yeah, I mean, it impacts students in a lot of different ways of one of the important and social justice related impacts is that we are affiliated with the largest network of community health centers in Massachusetts. So many of these outpatient sites are our own community health centers that exist in the different neighborhoods at Boston. Often they have a sort of have a particular patient population that tends to go there. So for example, East Boston community health center is almost entirely Spanish speaking patients. Really all of the doctors speak Spanish who work there. So that's one really interesting thing. There are others that focus on other, you know, other populations. of patients, I think it's this Dorchester House and Codman Square, both of them have very large African-American populations. So we're really glad that students have opportunities to work in those health centers for a number of different reasons. One is because you should have experience taking care of populations that are from a background different from you. And also because, you know, you really, these health centers are incredibly robust primary care sites that have many, many different kinds of services to support health that go far beyond what you might see, either in a community office or in a hospital-based practice. So for example, the community health centers often have dental services at them. They have some of them have food pantries. Many, many of them have integrated behavioral health. And these are just wonderful things for students to learn about, partly because you get to see a much broader scope of the things that are needed to help keep people healthy. And that's good for all doctors to know. Also, because we really want people to be thinking about health care in that way. I mean, that those things should be our job also. So I think it's kind of a good influence in that way. So that's one way that the health centers in particular are great and support our social justice mission. The other thing is more general. I mean, we also have students, obviously all students do some rotations at Boston Medical Center, which is a big academic medical center. But we also have affiliations with some community hospitals. And that's important too, because not all doctors work in a giant academic medical center. And so we really want people to understand the whole scope of health care. And not simply, this is what we do in this big, fancy hospital. And I guess the other thing is that it's always good to, when you are mostly or solely in one hospital, you know, their practices that hospitals do, not because they're best practice necessarily, but because they're habit or it's the way that the hospital has always done it. And this really even gets to, well, we always treat a real fibrillation in using this particular protocol. And the hospital across town might use a different protocol. And so the actual fact is that neither one of those is known to be better. But if you only ever go to one hospital, you assume that that is the correct way. And then, you know, you're sort of missing information. So it's good to be able to see how health care is practiced, how medicine is practiced in a variety of different settings so that you can just understand the different way things you've done. It's kind of like helps build your toolbox for your own practice. Yeah, and the point, the point you made about the big academic medical center, the big academic medical center might have resources that the smaller community hospital just doesn't have. So how do you treat the sick patient who ends up in your hospital and you don't have the right, super duper, whatever it is. Yeah. And also just, it's just, it's so clear that in a big academic medical center, your typical patient is just much sicker. They're more complicated. They have more things going on. It's a bigger deal. It's more life threatening. But also, that's not most of medicine. There's this really famous image from the New England Journal of Medicine that was published a long time ago, like maybe in 1989. And then they redid it in the early arts. And it was, it was like the, it wasn't the sociology of health care. I can't remember what they called it, but basically, you know, you start with 1,000 patients, 800 of them experienced symptoms, 600 of them think about going to see somebody about it. And then it goes on and it basically is, you know, they show boxes, a big box of 1,000 people and then on, down, down, down, and, and less than one out of 1,000 ends up hospitalized in an academic medical center. And yet, that is where most medical training takes place. That does not make a lot of sense. You have a whole bunch of people being trained to do something that is not actually what their job is going to be. So it's really important to have experiences in other settings so that you can get a better sense of how to do the actual job that you might have someday. Right. Right. Can you touch on Pisces? I'm pronouncing it correctly. Yeah. So Pisces is the name of our new basic science curriculum that I was describing before. And, you know, I, I talked a little bit about kind of the theory behind it. I guess some other things to mention about it are a little bit more nuts and bolts. So it is team taught. So there are in any given module, there are a, you know, a small handful of faculty members that are kind of running the show. It's pass fail is another really important thing to know about it. And they're also learning progress assessments LPAs. We used to call those exams, but now they're called LPAs. And they happen, they happen every other week. Which is, is good. The idea is that it basically, you know, we're basically trying to reduce the stress. So it doesn't feel to people like, you know, you've got this big giant exam. In fact, you know, what you have is a lot of assessments over time. Another thing that we've changed speaking of assessment is that if you, if you don't pass an LPA the first time, you are allowed to just retake it. And it doesn't go on your transcript or anything else. And that is because the goal, and we really, this was really built into the new curriculum, the goal is to get everybody to master the material. The goal is not to try to identify, okay, who's really amazing and who's on rocks. You know, that's not what we're trying to do or trying to do is no, no, we want everyone to get to amazing. So fine, if you, if you need, means you need to take it again, like let's do that. So yeah, so those are some other things about, about Pisces, but it basically is just the name given to the new force. And it's again, it says flip classroom kind of integrated. I mean, I wrote down, stands for principles integrating science, clinical medicine and equity. That's what it stands. That's the acronym, but yeah, it's easier to say Pisces. Okay. Now, I also noticed the preparing for the call that research is another important focus at Boston University School of Medicine. How important is it for applicants to have done research before applying to the school? Yeah, it's not at all required. And we have people that come here that haven't done research. But I would say that the majority of our applicants and the majority of our matriculants have done some research. I mean, we are, we're a big research school, but what I would say is the reason that that's most important is because we really need people to be intellectually curious and we need people to be, we want everyone to be the kind of person that loves to learn and just wants to keep learning for their whole life. And so having done research is really evidence of that. And if there's not research, then we want other evidence that you're the kind of person that likes to learn and tries to learn as much as you can all the time and is capable of doing so independently. And that's really because that's what medicine is. And you know, the other thing about us being a big research school is it's not so much that we are trying to to turn out PhD researchers, you know, as, but I will say that a thing that we do turn out a lot of that we feel very proud of is we have a lot of people that go into academic medicine. And if you're going to be an academic medicine, that means, okay, you're going to work in a big academic medical center. You'll be doing some research, you'll, you know, you'll be engaging with the scholarship, you'll be furthering the discipline. So it's not that we're trying to like identify the next great Nobel prize winner. It's more that we are trying to cultivate the type of intellectual curiosity and skill and interest that will help our graduates contribute to the practice of medicine in that way with that sort of academic intellectual focus. Hey, great answer. Thank you. Let's turn to the application itself. What does a holistic approach to medical school admissions mean at B? Yeah. So it's a great question because everybody says that they do holistic review. And, and then you're like, what does that really mean? So I think that one of the clearest ways to describe it is just actually to describe our process, which I don't think I did last time we talked. Please. Because I've started this more. So, and I've realized it's, I think it's kind of silly that medical schools don't just just tell the process. So this is what we do. First of all, a human reads every single application. Last year we had 10,600 and some applications and a human reads every single one. And I'm not even kidding. It's really true. So the applications are reviewed and we use a structured rubric to make sure that each application is evaluated that we're looking for the same things in each application. And those things include things like research experience, clinical experience, your distance traveled, your mission fit. How will you fit with our mission? So we look at a bunch of different things. Each application, so there's a special team of reviewers that does the initial reviews. All these people are part of the admissions committee. It's about 12 or 13 people. So we all use this structured rubric. We read the applications. We evaluate them with each of those different metrics. And then we give a score to each of those different metrics. And then we tell the reviewers, do a big bunch of reviews like 20 or 50. And then at the end of that 20 or 50, go back and the top about the top 20, well, yes, your top 20%. You should designate those for interview. The next 20% we hang on to in case we have more time for, you know, time for more interviews. Because we never know actually how many people are going to get. And then the bottom 60%. We say, sorry, it doesn't really look like you're going to be competitive in our pool. Then you get invited for an interview and a different person who is not the person that reviewed your application will be your interviewer. That person reviews the application with a slightly different focus. And so they that interviewer is also a member of the admissions committee. Also member of the admissions committee. Also a faculty member and they review the whole entire application. We don't blind it. Some people feel as though holistic review is better accomplished. If you blind the interviewers or certain committee members to certain aspects of the application, I actually think that makes it not holistic because then you are no longer looking at the whole entire application. To me, you're trying to figure out, you know, what you're trying to figure out when you're looking at academic metrics is how well prepared is this person to do well in medical school. And so to do that, you need to understand the whole entire application. Anyway, so the interviewer then reviews the whole application, conducts the interview, which is a semi-structured, very conversational interview, takes about 45 minutes, and then they write up a report. The interview report gets appended to the application. And then we have two selection meetings, one at the end of November and one in February. And the selection meetings, the whole committee comes together, we break up into teams of four or five. Each team gets a stack of applications. Again, these are not applications that you reviewed or interviewed. And then they go and they discuss each one of the applications and make a recommendation about whether to accept projector waitlist. So that's how we do our process. And I guess a couple of points to highlight there is that, again, you actually, I said a human reads every application, but actually like, by the time you get to the stage of having a decision made, you've often had like four or five person hours of attention on your application between all these different people, bringing a lot of people into the decision making process and the analysis really helps to kind of mitigate bias. And that's because you don't, and the particular type of bias it helps get away from is what would be positive bias for some people. Like for example, I went to Colby College and I was on the, I was a cox and on the crew team. So if I read an application from somebody that happens to come from Colby College, I'm sort of naturally inclined to be like, Oh, awesome. Yeah, go team. But that's not fair, right? Just because we happen to go to the same college, that doesn't make any sense. It doesn't make them better. Or maybe somebody was on the rowing team at a different school. Yeah. And it's just, it's right. Exactly. It's just that's the kind of thing like this and it really shouldn't influence your factor. So that's why you have to get it. But some of those things are going to happen some of the time. But that's why we have a bunch of different people involved. So the other factor would be if somebody reads your application in the morning, as opposed to in the afternoon, right? They're tired. Exactly. Or you know, they're tired or whatever. They're in a bad mood. So that's why having a bunch of different people involved with the process. And this happens occasionally that well, you know, the selection team will say, this interview, this interviewer seems like they didn't, they don't seem as impressed with the candidate that we are. I don't, that seems funny. You know, so that's how the decisions get made. That's what we do by holistic again. Everybody looks at that whole application throughout. It's because we really believe that context matters and we believe that the whole application matters. If you have a lot of strength in one area and you're less strong in the other area, well, maybe we said that's okay because we think that your strengths that way your weaknesses relatively speaking. Because I assume that most candidates are not strong across all metrics. Right. Right. It's more likely that people would be mediocre across all metrics. Okay. And that is, it's, I feel sort of that's actually, it's probably the people that I feel the most bad for because I think they, they were just trying to follow instructions and do all the right things and they did, but makes them not stand out that much. Check in the box. Yeah. Box check. Yeah. Right. Right. Wow. That was great. Thank you. I'm going to have to add that to my, my questions. What's the process at your school for? I think that's a great answer. I just, I feel as though I am, I'm very comfortable with our process. I think it's a good process and it's perfectly fair for people to say why on earth do you do that? And, but then I should be able to defend it. Say, well, this is why we do it. Right. And it, it also, it contributed to a more complete picture of every candidate from multiple, from people with multiple perspectives. Right. Right. So all right. Let's move on. What do you hope to glean from the secondary that you don't get from the primary? Yeah. That's a great question. So we, we have a couple of extra questions on the secondary that really help us understand who individual applicants are and what they bring to the table. And in fact, when I'm doing my initial application reviews, that's actually one of the first places that I look. Yeah. Because we have, for example, a question that I can't remember how it's worded from the applicant side. We, we refer to it as our educational history question. But basically we say, if there's anything else about your education that you'd like to tell us that you feel has an impact, you know, had an impact on you, please tell us here. And that is really helpful because, you know, sometimes somebody says, well, I, I'm trying to think of a good example. My, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my parents were in the military, and I attended or my, you know, whatever, for some reason, family's stability or my parents were in the military. And so I, I moved and I attended, you know, six different element elementary schools in five years. And then people usually say something positive. So I learned how to make friends and get along with people. But it's, it's just kind of helpful to get a sense of how things were. Or sometimes people will tell us about an interruption in their educational experience, not COVID. We have a separate question for that. But that meant that they, sometimes people use that space to tell us if they had a dip in their college grades, for example, and they'll say, well, this was the semester that I was diagnosed with lupus or whatever, I don't know, depression, something like that. So that is really helpful to be able to put those things in context or, and a really great example of that is students who did one of the special programs where they, for sort of academically talented students in underperforming high schools where they then get mentorship and a big giant scholarship to go to some elite college. Those students often take a little while to get their footing in college. And so they may have a lower overall GPA and an upward trajectory or they may have problems with a certain type of class. People use that space to explain what was happening. Then it's so helpful for the context for us to understand, oh, I say, okay, so the problem here is not they can't do chemistry. The problem is they were totally unprepared for college level chemistry because they did not have, you know, adequate high school preparation or high school, top-notch high school preparation or whatever it is. So that is really helpful. This is actually why we send every single applicant to secondary application. It's because we want that information before we simply look at somebody's grades and say, nah, this isn't going to be good enough, you know what I mean? So it's so we have all of those. And then we also have a question asked specifically about our school and we essentially say, you know, we take care of a mostly underserved and extraordinarily diverse population. What in your background or experiences motivates you to care for that population? And you know, there's a while, I, a while it is true that all applicants say what they think we want to hear. It's also true that some people have had a lot of significant personal experiences that motivate them. And some people have not. And that's a way to, it's very clear if people tell us about it, you know, they know if they tell us about it then then we're kind of like, okay, we're taking it seriously. So it's it's about context and fit to really boil it down. Yeah, yeah, to boil it down and fit is probably the best way to say it of all, yeah, context and fit. That's where we get that information. Okay, great, great answer. Are you at all concerned about the impact of chat GPT on the essay component of the application process? And how do you think? Yeah, I will affect medical education. I mean, you, but with your flip classroom, you're kind of not giving our students the opportunity to abuse AI, but in terms of the application process. Yeah, they use it. I mean, the faculty will use it. They'll be like, quick, somebody chat GPT this and see what we get. We'll talk about it. So yeah, so I am very concerned about chat GPT and AI just in general. In fact, I have developed this terrible icebreaker question where I ask students what they think is going to be our ultimate demise. Is it going to be climate change or AI? For the students are like really coming down on the side of climate change. So yeah, I am worried about people using chat GPT for their essays. What I understand from what I've read from various sources, including essays that are written by students is that everybody is using it. They're not so likely to cut and paste, but they are likely to get ideas from. And I think that kind of bums me out because we really actually need people who can think for themselves. And I am not crazy about having computers doing their thing. What is shocking to reflect? Yeah. But I guess I think that that part is probably here to stay. And it probably is just going to be a change in how we humans live in the world is that we get ideas from something else. So I think, you know, interestingly, the semi-structured faculty conversational interview becomes more and more important because that's where we have a chance to talk to people and find out what do you mean by that? Give me an example. Can you tell me about a time when you know that's what we have a chance to do on the fly? And chat GPT is not going to help you out there. So I think that's going to be a little bit of an offset. And I think that students own personal experiences. I think such a GPT not this year, maybe in future years, but is not yet at the point where you can just put in your resume and your activities list and have it write a personalized essay. So it'll be a little very boring template. And then you have to figure out what to say about it. So yeah, I think I certainly do not hope for more sterility in essays, but the smart people will figure out a way to overcome it. I don't know. I was, yeah, no, I completely agree that if an applicant uses chat GPT to write their first draft, they're probably using it their own way. And I haven't tried this. I have played a little bit just to see what it could do. And I'm wondering if you were to like draft something and say, edit this for me, please. You know, that I think. Yeah, that I do. don't know. I mean, certainly it can do editing. But you know, the problem is like the editing will make it more sterile and worse. You know, what it needs to be like the problem of chat GPT is that it can write a passable and very boring essay about whatever topic you tell it to. And so the problem is that you like, I guess one of the things I think is that like you you have to make it stand. There's still is a little bit of imperative to make it stand out. I've been telling students for like, I don't know, I've been telling applicants for a decade, like, do not try to stand out in your essays. But I guess now I would be like, hmm, maybe try and stand out a little bit. But please not by writing me like poetry don't just don't do that. No, no, no, no, imitations poetry anything. No, no, no, yeah. All right. What advice do you have for applicants, especially those who come from underrepresented backgrounds in medicine, as they write their essays, given both B is commitment to diversity and the recent Supreme Court decision? Yeah. So applicants and and should tell schools all about their themselves and their background. We are trying to figure out who you are and what you bring to the table. And so I think applicants should be as like absolutely as open as they are comfortable being. And that is very clear. The Supreme Court, you know, this is a free speech thing. Like applicants can tell us whatever they want. It's up to us to follow the rules. And so we are, you know, maintaining our commitment to diversity and are still trying to, you know, and we know that it benefits the learning environment to have people with all different perspectives that are having a discussion. And so we are really committed to doing that still. So what we're doing is this is, you know, we're looking at the application and trying to figure out, okay, what's what's different about this person's perspective? I just had a great, I was teaching right before I did this and it had a great example of a student who we were talking about depression. And in fact, there were two students in the group who had spent significant time in other countries as they were growing up. And they were chiming in with how depression is really, really viewed differently in their countries and how they were understood that it was really hard for people. But they wondered, you know, we had this really lively and engaged discussion about, you know, is there a point at which you're sort of being too accommodating for? So this is a discussion in my classroom, right? Is there a point at which you're being too accommodated that you're making it too easy? And at some point, people just need to kind of push themselves a little bit to like get up, have a routine, go to work, et cetera, et cetera. And it would actually be better for them. So we're having this very level discussion that the reason it was a good discussion was because we had people who had grown up in two other different countries who were able to really speak to their personal experiences and what they personally saw and how it changed what they thought about this particular medical topic. And I mean, that's, you have to have it. So at university. Yeah. So that's exactly, you know, we are, we know that that is helpful. We want to maintain that. We are continuing to look for applicants who will bring a different lens to their study of medicine. Okay, great. How does the Casper assist in your evaluation process? I mean, you described the process. If you didn't touch on that. So is that a part of it? Yeah, it's, it's on the application. I would say at this point, it's a very minor factor. We have found in our analysis that Casper scores, they correlate with our ultimate decision about whether or not to admit they correlate with interview scores, but the correlation is pretty small and it's not determinative. So I think we've sort of found, okay, this could be useful information. We're in the process of doing research to to see if Casper predicts medical student performance. So far, the research that's come out about that has shown that maybe it does a little bit. There's sort of a trend towards it predicting performance, but it's not a slam dunk. That's kind of my take my take home message about Casper. So I think we're still in the information gathering and research process and we'll see what we see. And if it turns out to be helpful, we will use it, we'll emphasize it more. And if it does not, then we will probably not use it. Got it. Okay. What is the common mistake the applicants make in approaching the primary and or secondary application? Probably the most common mistake is what we touched on before, which is sort of having a checkbox mentality. Oh, okay. They said, I should do research. Okay. So, all right, let me find a research lab that I can work in for this year. And then, okay, maybe I'll see if I can get a paper out of that. And then, okay, good, that's done. And then they move on to the next thing. That's probably the most common mistake that I see. I think that it's really important for applicants to go ahead and do the thing that they love and are excited about the most. I guess I think another common mistake is I really want applicants to listen to advice I really do. But I think sometimes you can get caught up in what other people think is a good idea as opposed to what what you love and want to do the most. And I think you're always going to do better if you're doing the things that you love and are excited about. It's, you know, it means when you talk about it and write about it, you will seem excited about it and enthusiastic about it. You'll perform better when you actually do those things, have bigger impacts. So, do the things that you love and then, you know, find your profession to suit those things as opposed to deciding on an ultimate goal and then trying to backfill with the appropriate stuff. Right. Now, she horn yourself in. Yeah. To a particular mold. Yeah. What makes for a great interview? You have, you don't have many interviews, right? It's just one one interview, one, yeah, one, yeah, roughly 45 minute interview. Right. Exactly. And interestingly, the Casper and MMI scores correlate really well. So, I've thought many times about whether or not we should switch to an MMI. And I don't think so. There's not a lot of evidence to say that it produces a better medical school class or more diverse. I think people feel as though it may be more objective, but there's not, again, there's not evidence to say that it's better for any reason. So, and plus we have the Casper score in that correlate. So, I'm kind of thinking, well, I think we got that information. So, anyway, so what makes for a good interview is an interview that's more, that's like a conversation. I mean, we have, again, as I said, it's semi-structured interviews. So, we tell our interviewers ask a question like, you know, from this category, from that category, these are very big categories, by the way, ask a question, start off with a softball question. So, what made you decide to go to Princeton? You know what I mean? Or whatever. Or so, I've never been to Wyoming. What's it like there? You know, like something easy. And then we ask some questions about motivation, you know what I mean? Whatever. There are a bunch of different things that we ask. But the thing that makes the interview good is when people are actually just talking to you. So, yes, answer the question. But I think for me, a really dull interview is one where people have an answer and they give it and then they stop and sit back and wait for me to ask the next question. Those are kind of boring for me. And then another one that I don't like is when people have in their minds like prepared, oh, I need to make sure that I get across these points on my application. And sometimes we can tell that you're doing that, you know what I mean? Sometimes we can even see that people are like looking at their other computer. And like, making sure they, it's not great. I try to always ask everybody at the end, is there anything else that we didn't talk about? I want to make sure that you've got a chance to say everything you wanted to say, you know? So, I try to always ask that question at the end so that people will know, will have a chance to get all their points across, you know. They should know that upfront. I know I should tell that. I actually, that's a good idea. I should let people know that. Yeah. You heard it here. That's really good. I actually never thought of doing that, but I'm totally going to do it now. Yeah. Okay. And now I'm actually going to get now that I think about it. I'm going to tell the other interviewers like, please do that. Make sure you don't. Hey, great. So I can just tell all the applicants. I'll have to do you. Yeah. You're going to get up. I can tell when I do my overview sessions, I can tell all the applicants like just FYI, you don't need to read full of points. I promise you, I get a chance to like say all the things you want. Okay. I'm going to give you that opportunity at the end. Just answer my questions in the intro. Yeah. Exactly. Okay. When does BU typically stop sending out interviewentations? And I'll, after you answer my question, I'll tell you why I always ask this question. Yeah. End of January, beginning of February. We extended our interviews season last year. So we historically had stopped at the end of January. And then last year, I wanted to do some more interviews. And so we extended it a bit. So then we were sending out invitations later. This year, we're planning to have our last interview day, February 16th. So I think we'll be done sending invitations by end of January. But when I say end of January, I mean like January 31st, we have, since they're virtual, if we have a cancellation, we'll reach out to somebody. Okay. Okay. Great. Even I asked this question. I probably asked it last time we spoke to, but the reason I asked this question is because there's this meme out there that if you don't have an interview invitation by Thanksgiving, you're toast. You're not going to get an interview invitation. And I have asked this question of every single medical school admissions director that I've spoken with or Dean, they all give later dates. Yeah. And this thing is still out there. That's wrong. I don't know. I would. Yeah. Yeah. So I just keep asking and I keep getting the answers that show it's wrong. Okay. Yeah. How do you prerequisites taken at a community college? Do you care? It totally depends on the situation. See, again, the whole context. If you are attending Boston University and you decide to take physics at community college in the summer instead of it BU, that is not impressive to me. If you you went to Deans, a community college in California, and then you transferred to one of the UCs. That's how you went to college, 'cause that's how you were told to go to college. So it just totally depends on the situation. I think if you're at a four-year university where the prerequisites are, you should take them there. But if you're not, then good for you for figuring out how to get an education. - Right, at a very low cost. - Yeah. - How do you view shadowing and virtual shadowing? - I, not that I'm breast. - Okay. - But I mean, so what we really want, we really do want people to have some clinical experience. - Sure. - But the reason that we want people to have clinical experience is because we want people to know what they're getting into. And the more hands-on you can be with clinical experience, the better off you are. Because what you really want to do is to test it for yourself and figure out whether you like it or not. Or like what are the parts that you really like and what are the parts that you do not want to do? I mean, every year there are people that come to medical school and they start doing their third year rotations, right? And they walk out of surgery and they go, "If I never see the inside of another operating room, that would be perfectly fine with me." Now that's actually fine, 'cause that's a relatively narrow thing. But on the other hand, if you start medical school, it will stick people. - Yeah, then we got a problem. So the more you can, the closer you can get to having actual responsibility and contact with as much of the sort of typical medical system that you can, the better off you are. Shadowing, I think, is, you can learn from shadowing, but I think the learning possibilities are rather limited because you're all you're doing is just watching. So it has to be a very unusually excellent shadowing experience to be more than that. And often when people do have on their applications, if they list a lot of shadowing, it often turns out that they were doing more than shadowing. Like they may have signed up and asked to shadow this person, but then over time they become more like a little assistant to the doctor and that's great. So, but just shadowing by itself is, I think, of limited utility. And it's fine to do it a little bit to sort of check it out. I think it's cool. Like, it's always cool to see an operation. If you've never seen an operation or see it, maybe before and like, yeah, do that. Great, if you can do it, it's cool. But, you know, hundreds of hours, not necessary, dozens of hours, not necessary. And virtual shadowing, I don't, I think, is not really worth. - No, no. There's lots of options that you can do at this point. - Yeah. - And it doesn't, do you care if it's like in a hospital setting or in a hospice or an old age home or. - No, I think. - Can you add to a clinic or. - Yeah, no, it doesn't matter. Most of those things, you know, you really get, you really get something different out of those opportunities. And I think what we really want to know is like what you learned from it and also how engaged you are in it. I mean, it's also possible to sign up to volunteer in a hospital and go to the emergency room or go to the kids' playroom and not really do much of anything while you're there. - We had a very ill child at one time. And he was in the clinic playroom. And there was a young man there sitting watching the video on the wall. He didn't interact with any of the children, not our son, not anybody else. And I knew what he was doing. And at one point, somebody, you know, like the head nurse came in and looked at him, kind of rolled her eyes and said, can you please take this to the lab? You know, but it was, it was such a waste. - Yeah. - Such a waste. Now, what would you like me to ask you? I want to give you an opportunity to talk about, you know, anything you want to say to the list, there's a kind of like in the interview, you want it, you know? - Yeah, you probably even put this in the list of questions and I forgot. (laughing) I did. - I guess the only other thing that I would mention is a thing that is really excellent about BU that it doesn't always come up is the kind of collegiality of the institution. And that's true almost at all of the different levels. I mean, you know, I report to the Dean of the Medical School and also I call her Karen and I just go to her office if I have, if I need something. And colleagues in different departments get along well with each other and cooperate. And there's just not a ton of hierarchy. And I think that that attitude really sort of filters to the students as well. And so it just makes a more pleasant and more positive and more productive atmosphere. And I guess the other thing I would say about Pisces in this new curriculum is that has really, really encouraged sort of student and faculty connection and trust because you're in there engaging with each other for hours every day. And so, you know, the students know because they can see that the faculty are doing their very best to make a great class for them. So, you know, the students can tell because they might be sort of mystified about something or kind of annoyed with something. And the faculty can pick up on that. And then the next day the faculty came in and they were like, okay, okay, yesterday was a little bit rocky. I could tell people really confused about this, but I went home and I found these other resources and I just wanted to show them to you and make sure we take the time to like get everybody's questions to start out before I move on. And so from that, and I mean, I watched this happen, you know. And so then the students are thinking, oh, okay, well, all right, so this is really hard, but I can tell they're trying to do the best they can. And that it just makes the environment so positive because the students know that the faculty are doing their best, the faculty know that the students are doing their best. And so it really helps with this mutual positive regard that allows everybody to learn better and work better. You know, you can't, you're not going to do your very best to make an educational product if you think like that the students hate you and don't like it anyway. And the students similarly are not going to do their very best to learn and learn in this new way if you think the faculty don't really care and they're just trying to whatever do it is the easiest way they can. - Do you know what I mean? - We're trying to trip you up, try to work out. - So I think that really, really, that sort of just general collegial connected environment really helps a lot. And I would say the other thing that I would say is, I think that the, I really believe that the reason our environment feels like that, the reason our culture here at the school is like that, is because of the patience we take care of. We, you know, like, faculty famously will fight over office size or who gets to present first at this committee meeting or, you know, who gets to do this or who's going to move where? Honestly, we just have bigger fish to fry. We are like trying to take care of people that don't have a place to live. You know, it makes it really hard to be petty. - It's a little perspective. - You know, you're, come on. I just, how lucky. - Girl. - You know, I was, I was, you know, I met with a patient today who had all these such difficult life events happen to her recently and she was also working in a healthcare setting as like a front desk person. And I walked to that, out of that room thinking, why does she have that job and I have my job? You know, she's competent. She is working hard. She's managing her film. She's doing everything she can, working super hard and putting it all. So why does she have that job and I have my job? And it sort of makes me think a bunch of things, but one of them is, I better do a good job at my job. I'm lucky to have this particular one. Like, I better make good. I don't know. So I think we have so much of that perspective all the time. I feel like it makes the faculty here, the doctor's here, the administrators here, be more inclined to work on the big problems at hand and less inclined to, I don't know, quibble about, well, so and so guest free parking. I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. We had somebody on staff who was just incredibly upbeat. Always appreciative, thankful up the casus and she was going through a really, really rough time but always, always upbeat and appreciative. And you could ask why, but mostly it makes you, I think a little bit more appreciative for what you have, whether it's your job or your office or your house or it could be a little bit less petty. Right. Hopefully, hopefully. Yes, petty. It's like you just, you kind of have this like, look, let's keep our eye on the ball, folks. And if you can, try to-- What's really and truly important. Yeah, exactly. Right. Well, I'm sure glad you thought of what to answer to that question, even though you didn't remember it right away because it was a great answer. Thank you very much. I also think we're just about out of time. And I want to thank you again for joining me and sharing your expertise and your insight. This has been a fantastic interview and a fantastic episode. Where can listeners learn more about Boston University's Chabonian and of a DC in School of Medicine? Right. So the URL is bumc.bu.edu. Okay, great. Which is kind of long and annoying. But also, you can just Google Boston University School of Medicine. That'll work. Or you can go to the link in the show notes at it'shippah.com/541 to be used medical school, as well as to other resources that may be helpful to you listeners. listeners, thank you too for joining me. And a quick reminder, don't miss the med school admissions quiz. Find out if you're really ready to apply and competitive at your target schools. Take a look. the free quiz at xebr.com/medquiz today. This is an admission straight talk produced by accepted and I'm your host Linda Abraham. I'll talk to you again next week.