Diagnosing Med School: Frontiers in Medicine - Curriculum Refresh

Welcome back to another episode of our story. The College of Medicine's very own student focused podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Katie Smith, and today we have an amazing episode. We have several guests. This is part of our Diagnosing Med School series. Joining me today, we have Dr. Teresa Scordino, a pathologist and the Associate Dean for Student Affairs here at the OU College of Medicine. We have Dr. Steven Clayton, Assistant Dean for Assessment and Evaluation, College of Medicine, also one of our neurologists here. Dr. Ali Regans, OB/GYN, so one of my close colleagues. She is our Assistant Dean for Clinical Curriculum. And finally, we have one of our fabulous basic science colleagues, Dr. Chris Miller, Assistant Dean for Preclinical Curriculum. Today, we are going to talk about the new curriculum coming to the OU College of Medicine. This podcast is one that you're going to want to really digest. It's going to be full of such amazing insights. So let's get started. [Music] Welcome, everybody. We're so excited to have you. I'm going to have you guys give a brief introduction of yourself, including your education and how long you have served in your role. So we'll start with you, Dr. Scordino. Oh, boy. It just starts. So my name is Teresa Scordino. I'm the Associate Dean for Student Affairs and St. Dr. Smith. So I actually, my educational path was I went to the University of South Florida for medical school. I did a residency in anatomical clinical pathology at Emory. And then I did a one-year fellowship in hematopathology at Stanford before coming to OU in 2012. So when I got to OU, I was a course director. For a while, I was then briefly assistant dean for Preclinical Curriculum before moving over to student affairs in 2022. And I've been in my current role since July of 2022. Awesome. Dr. Clayton. Yes. So I am actually an alumnus of the OU College of Medicine graduating in 2014. I did my residency in neurology here at OU Health Sciences Center. And have been on faculty since 2018, where I started out as our neurology clerkship director the following year, took over as one of the neurosciences course co-directors. And then I've been in my role as assistant dean since July of 2022. Dr. Regan. Hey y'all, I'm Ali Regan. I'm the assistant dean for the clinical curriculum. I am also an OU grad. I did my medical education here at OU. Stayed here for my obstetrics and gynecology residency training under your wonderful host Dr. Smith. And then became faculty here in the Department of OBGYN. I spent some time working in the clinical education realm as the associate clerkship director for the OBGYN clerkship, as well as in the pre-clinical realm as the course director for the MS2 reproduction course. I then moved into my current role as the assistant dean for that clinical curriculum. I've been in that role for two years and faculty for five years. I see a pattern emerging. Dr. Miller. The pattern continues. Dr. Chris Miller, I received my PhD in biochemistry, molecular biology from the health sciences center in the 1990s. And then what works as a faculty member at Oklahoma Christian for 25 years. Join the faculty here at OU 10 years ago and have been involved with medical education all of that time for about 30 years and have been the assistant dean for the pre-clinical curriculum for a little over three years now. Awesome. Okay. Our topic today is a big one. We are going to talk about our new curriculum, which is officially titled Frontiering and Medicine. That everyone in this room, at least of all me, but all of my guests have been working super hard on making come to life. This curriculum has been in the work since 2018. Really when we started talking about what does it mean to change our curriculum, what does it mean to compress our pre-clinical, what is the goal for our students and how do we help our students? You know, find the most success in a changing landscape of medical education. And so my first question for you, Dr. Regans, in broad terms, what really is this new curriculum? How would you describe it in terms of major changes? So if we were going to look at this from just kind of a bird's eye view, you know, we can definitely dive super granular at some point of desire. Really, the biggest changes overall is we're transitioning from our current model of kind of a four year MS1, MS2, MS3, MS4 format into a three-faced curriculum. So we'll now have a curriculum that is made up of phase one pre-clinical education, phase two, clerkship year, and then phase three post-clinical education. We are going to be condensing down the time that students spend in their pre-clinical education from the current format of two four years to making that instead an 18-month portion of their education. This will allow students to transition into that clinical portion of their education earlier. They'll still spend one year in phase two, which is going to be that clerkship phase when they'll take our seven core clerkships as well as selectives of their choosing for career exploration. And then they'll transition at the end to approximately a year and a half of what we call the post-clinical phase or phase three. They will again be entering that time period after a clerkship sooner than they did previously, which will allow them more time again to both explore career options, but once decided on a specialty, really dive into kind of specialty specific experiences that will help to prepare them for residency. Awesome. That's a great description. To Miller, this question's for you. Tell us kind of the why behind the new curriculum. When we first started thinking about this 18-month pre-clinical curriculum was kind of gaining steam and ground, we had some logistical issues. We knew our students wanted more time in the post-clinical phase, but how are we getting our students an advantage with this new curriculum? Well, I think in several ways. And I think it's important to start off, we always talked to our students about evidence-based medicine, whether such a thing is evidence-based education as well. So even though this seems rather new to OU, these are proven pedagogies that have been used effectively at medical schools for at least the last two decades. And so we're somewhat following a trend of moving to an 18-month pre-clinical also to a flipped integrated pre-clinical curriculum. A lot of the stems from a large survey we did from among our students, our faculty, our alumni, community partners, community leaders, where we analyze the survey results. Both quantitatively and qualitatively came up with several themes, one of which was earlier clinical experiences, one of which was less traditional lecture format and other very important was more career advisement, more mentoring, and those kind of things. We built a curriculum around that that allows students to have clinical experiences throughout their pre-clinical phase three times a semester, which we feel coincides with the case-based learning and the problem-based learning will do. And there are other courses that allows them to integrate what they learn in class, see how that performs in a team-based setting in the awards. We've also are moving to a more in-person approach where there's been a lot of time with the faculty in small groups and large group settings where those faculty can model professionalism, teach clinical reasoning, and all kinds of things. So we feel like it's a holistic approach to training doctors in kind of a modern context of how they're going to approach. So it'll get them ready to start the third year in the clerkship phase, much more ready to be a part of the teams on the awards than just an active bystander. Yeah, awesome. You described some things that for sub-added to either has been a traditional med school experience or has been an under-dead kind of preparing to come to medical school might seem nontraditional. Can you give us some more insights into maybe the personal professional development or some things that students might say, like, I didn't know med schools did this, you know, some of the more unique things that are coming into the curriculum that you're excited about. Yeah, let's start with the personal professional development. So there are lots of things that students need to learn to be a productive, active clinician once they graduate at the end of four years, and that can start in the pre-clinical phase. So our personal professional development series talks them about all things, about becoming a doctor. We work them through how to approach evidence-based medicine and incorporate in your practice. We'll be talking to them about social determinants of health, those kind of things, how society impacts their patients' ability to access health care, how we try to provide that care in difficult situations like rural and underserved areas. Our students will be talking with people from the OU Health Care System about health health health care systems work. How does billing work? How do you get consent for your patients as well as the traditional things like biostatistics and other things? I think the other things that are kind of unique is as opposed to someone lecturing to the students for 50 hours. Students will be assigned topics to study and then show up in a setting where they're working in problem-based teams of sticks with facilitator that will kind of reinforce and teach the clinical reasoning aspects of the medical knowledge they've been asked to study. I think also our case-based learning will not innovate of our new, it's a new approach in Oklahoma that students might not be as familiar with, where you know based on what we've done in these large group settings and in the medical knowledge portion of the courses, they will be on a team of 9 to 10 students with a faculty facilitator in every week, have a case, align to the curriculum for that week that we go into great detail on what are the differential diagnosis? What type of diagnostic see use to come to a final diagnosis? What are the pharmacists? They're therapeutic interventions that we need to treat that patient, what are the prognosis? So I think there's a lot of things that while not new to medical education are a little bit new to this part of the country and the other innovative thing I think is what students have had these shorter curriculums very few have gone to a true third party resource for the medical knowledge component. So a lot of our students and a lot of the students that will trick on the future will be familiar with the first aid series and the people that produce first aid also produce an online curriculum. It's very robust, has large question banks, lots of feedback, very good in-depth medical knowledge and topics that align very well with what we've thought in the past. So we're looking forward to a new approach. That's amazing. I think the Marlboro Listers might not be as excited as the PPD as the clinicians in the room but as people who started in practice and had no idea how to bill, you know, you're a resident, you're not really sure if you're getting consent correctly all those things. Those things are going to be huge and give our students a huge leg up on their future. So. And one of the other things that we have already kind of started to pilot and integrate with some of our current preclinical classes but will be expanding upon even further within the new curriculum is our learning communities. You know, most people who are familiar with medical education at OU are probably familiar with our module system. That's kind of your home room where you have a group of close-knit students that do a lot of activities together especially in those first couple of years of medical school. We have again kind of echoed systems that we have seen work well at institutions across the country and started to build up what's called a learning community which is giving kind of a structure to that module group where it's not just a home remaining more but actually a group of students with two faculty mentors. That's been a lot of time talking about some of these personal and professional development sort of topics. So that way they can be done in kind of small group meaningful ways with the faculty member that you really grow to know and trust over the course of your medical journey. We're going to be building that up even further in the new curriculum with concepts such as professional identity formation. So we spend so much time during medical school learning about other stuff, learning how the system works, learning how the knowledge component works, learning how to see patients, evaluate patients, examine patients. But we've not in the past really given students very many tools to look inward and learn about themselves during this journey and how important of a component that is in not only deciding what type of physician you're going to be in terms of specialty but more importantly what type of physician you're going to be in terms of how you interact with your patients and what's important for you as a professional moving forward. Yeah, I think one of the things that ties all of that together is the big theme is students will spend a lot more time with faculty who already practice in clinicians and educators. And I think that's a big deal in this new curriculum that rather than seeing somebody over Zoom, seeing somebody on the video that they'll actually be spending time seeing how clinicians actually live their lives, how they run their practices, talking to them about how they do physical exams and things. So I'm really excited about that part of the curriculum. Yeah. I do want to add one thing because I know we've been focusing largely on the personal professional development aspect of everything. I don't want to neglect the medical knowledge piece too. As I said, being an alumnus from this program, the last time we did this level of a curriculum rebuild was actually when I was the first cohort to think during that time and one thing that I want to testify to as far as all the work that we've put into building this new curriculum is how much is integrated, right? It's not just sitting in a lecture in a siloed out course. We've really done a lot of work on trying to figure out, well, how does this subject matter pertain to what you see on the clinical side? Or again, how it might impact the systems that you work in in the future, et cetera? And so I'm just really, really excited to see that the things that I think had been envisioned even a while back that may not have come to fruition. We're finally getting up off the ground and are able to really build robust integrated curriculum for everyone. Awesome. I'd like to say, I appreciate you saying testify. I think it's the first time set on the podcast, but probably should have been said much later. Okay, this question, next one is going to be for Dr. Squardino. The Office of Student Affairs, we're sort of para-curricular, so we support the student through the curriculum, but really most of what we focus on is things outside the curriculum. You know, their wellness, their career advising, you know, all of the things that are going on leadership around their studies. So tell us a little bit about what advantages our students will have in this new curriculum outside of, I say the classroom. They're not going to be in the classroom much, but outside of the true curriculum portion. Sure. So a lot of the elements that have been described are going to translate to more and earlier opportunities for mentorship. So the learning community mentors being there as a resource for students, the personal professional development sessions that are going to kind of get them ready to become physicians, kind of more and earlier shadowing sessions, interactions with their small group facilitators. You know, all of these things are going to get the students kind of earlier contact with people that can provide mentorship and can assist them on their kind of career development pathways. The other thing is just the way that the curriculum is structured. So with our current curriculum, you know, the third year ends and students have to immediately prepare their residency applications. By moving the start of clerkships six months earlier, that is going to open up a window where students have a little bit more time for career exploration before they have to make that residency decision. They have a little bit more time for resume building before they're going to have to submit their applications. So I think that combination of more mentorship and more time is going to make students feel a little bit, you know, more comfortable and more, you know, supported with making those career decisions. Yeah. Time is a huge advantage in this curriculum. The more time our students have to learn about themselves as Dr. Wiggins talk about the professions that they want to enter and then, you know, about what they need to do to prepare to gain a residency spot. All of that is advantageous to our students. So I think this curriculum that you guys have built is going to really benefit our students when they are ready to enter graduate medical education. So, okay, Dr. Clayton, as the assistant for assessment and evaluation, it's right there in the name. Tell us about how our students will be evaluated in the new curriculum. What will be the same? What will be different? What are we still working on as far as evaluation? Sure. So I think I need to take one giant step back because admittedly as a student, it probably wasn't what I was thinking about as how am I being assessed, right? So for those. You were not thinking about your grade that you were going to get. I was thinking about my grade, but I wasn't thinking about the exact mechanisms for it. Okay. So it's weird. I kind of have to take a step back and a weird step forward. You'll understand why in a second. So as we get into residency training as we become doctors, there's actually something called these milestones that all residency programs have. And we've been doing this since 2013. Ironically, medical schools really haven't had a standardized set of milestones that's true for all medical schools across the country. And so we recognize that there was a big gap as we just alluded to in residency preparedness and how students set themselves up for success in that application process. We really wanted a mechanism to better assess where students were at leading into the residency program. So we had a big working group last year that spent several months kind of pouring through what all the existing residency milestones sets were, that way we could develop our skills. develop a medical school level set of competencies and milestones that would be more generalizable regardless of whatever residency program you went into. And that's what have formed a lot of our personal professional development, curricular series, topics, et cetera, et cetera. So I say all that because based on those competencies and milestones, that's what our new assessment system is going to be built around. Where I think that may have the most impact is on our clerkships. Obviously, we've been having clinical evaluation forms for many, many years. And I think there's been some frustration historically, both on the student side and the faculty side on, is it really measuring what we want students to be able to do? And that sometimes gets lost in translation where we're converting it to numerical grades and those kind of things. So I think just on a personal level, one to one, when you're working with clinical preceptors, what we're really excited about is formulating a new assessment system as far as you're one on one interactions to where you would get more detail narrative feedback geared towards the milestones or competencies that you pick for yourself in that experience that you want to excel at. I think having this more narrow focus and targeted approach to what each student wants to get out of that experience. On the back end, we'll have much greater impact in things where you're at right now, what you can improve on, rather than just getting a grade and, you know, they're being a little bit of confusion, maybe on what that grade even translates to. So that's kind of the main thing that I think this can be impactful. What we don't have outlined yet is again, kind of the new wants way that this will work. So I think as we move forward, we're excited to see the ways that this can work even on a pretty clinical side, especially when we have a large group of 160 knowing that we have the learning community mentors and our learning specialists. We're really excited to look for ways that we can do this approach even before the clerkships whenever you're working with clinicians. So that's what we're actively working on right now. So those are kind of the big things. You know, as clinicians, I think we all, and medical educators, once you're in medical education for a while, you can kind of feel the like, okay, this student gets it, you know, they're moving along and this one maybe isn't in that right place. But I think you pointed out not just on this student side, they're trying to achieve something, but for our faculty to be able to really kind of make that granular of, this is where you're doing well, this is the deficiency, I see, and how are we going to work on that. And I think that's really important for our students, just, you know, to have an environment that allows them to improve based on some objective measures and not just floating out there going, I think I'm doing okay. So that's really exciting. Okay, there's a lot of things happening, a lot of change. As a mentor of mine, I used to say, just keep telling yourself, change is good, I love change. So Dr. Regan, what is happening right now to prepare us for the new curriculum? Can you tell us a little bit about like, we're in the spring of 2025, what will happen when and what are we doing now to prepare for that? So the new curriculum is going to roll out officially starting this July. So I will maybe defer to Dr. Miller to talk about all of the big pre-clinical changes that are coming for the students that will be happening most quickly with that newest matriculating class, class one. I will say on my end with the clinical curriculum portion of the new curriculum in full transparency is one of the biggest challenges in my planning process has been accounting for what we're terming the six month overlap. So one of the challenges that comes along with condensing the pre-clinical curriculum is we're shifting the timing in which students will enter their clerkship year. The new curriculum students will be entering that clerkship year six months earlier. And so we will in the spring of 2027 have a time where we have our last class in the previous curriculum as well as our first class on the new curriculum going through their clerkships at the same time for a six month period that will create a large influx of students for our clerkships. And it's something that we have already been working for a number of years now to prepare for. And it's something that I think like I was the her mentor, Dr. Krauss. As the great Dr. Krauss said, change can be good. We actually, I just had a meeting with our clerkship directors recently and I did not pay them to say this but they all left the meeting kind of positive saying they're actually quite excited for a number of the changes that they're coming and are things that are going to be instituted in their clerkships long term. Our clerkship directors are really dedicated to not just doubling down students everywhere and kind of doubling the number of students having the same education but instead looking for opportunities for our students to have new experiences that they previously would not have had the opportunity to have before. That includes things like utilizing our subspecialist more heavily. So for example, if you are on your internal medicine rotation instead of only seeing general internal medicine, which don't worry, you will still get to see plenty of that. You might also get to spend time with our cardiologists or our GI doctors, which ultimately are really popular fellowships for a lot of our students here at OU. So it's great exposure to those things early. It will allow some of our clerkships that previously only did inpatient to also allow experience in their ambulatory clinics to see both sides of their specialty in that sense and will also be utilizing external preceptors more. So locations off of the OU campus for our students to see medicine in a different way. It will include some of the big institutions in our town that have residency programs. So getting to see what life is like at another big hospital where some of our students end up as residents. But it also includes spending time with private practices and other practice models, things like variety care. That practice medicine in a totally different way. But we don't, we previously have not gotten a lot of exposure to when we stay kind of in this OU bubble. So I'm actually really excited for some of the things that are coming and how that will affect our clerkship experience long term. Yeah, no challenge, no change, right? So. I do want to provide one example. Because like I said, I am the neurologic clerkship director. And so just as Dr. Regan was alluding to historically, we've only ever had four different inpatient settings. Never really had a dedicated outpatient setting. So we're really excited. We've already been this year piloting having students in a two week outpatient block. Suddenly, we've also injected a two week neuroscience's ICU block. So even students who may have been interested in surgery and admittedly, maybe not so interested in neurology, right? They can be excited about being in the ICU earlier. So yeah, we're really excited. And that's just one of the many examples across all the different clerkships on where we're getting students newly involved where they hadn't been before. Anything on the preclinical side that would be of interest to our audience learning, what's happening now? No, not really. That's a joke. No, it's been crazy. We started this process like said in 2018, but really it kicked off in the late fall of 21. Then we had a retreat in 2022. So look for a little over two years, quite a number of the faculty that our current students see on a day-to-day basis in both the preclinical and clinical phase had been working extremely hard to also build a new curriculum at the same time. So we're flying one plane and building another at the exact same time. So some of the things that have been going on, we have had to build out a whole new organization. So we have phase directors that oversee the vertical and horizontal integration of medical knowledge and clinical reasoning in the preclinical phase. And then underneath them we have Tim, what are called thread directors, which would be new to the curriculum. So a good example, everybody loves Dr. Mary Moon. So she's the anatomy and embryology thread director. So while there's no human structure course in the curriculum, there's anatomy literally in almost every course. She is the thread director charge with making sure that we get both horizontal and vertical integration in those courses. So the students get the anatomy they need to be successful, not only on step one, but later in their clinical careers. And we have ten of those, they're discipline based and we also have lots of new course directors. Course directors have a little bit different role in the past. They don't go out and find, you know, 50 something people to lecture for 50 minutes at a time they're curriculum, but they actually deliver most of the content and build out the act of learning sessions. We've hired to this point 22 case based learning small group facilitators, 22 PPD small group facilitators. We've had to rehire all the learning community mentors. So we've got this large team that's actively right now putting the final touches on their active learning sessions for the first semester of the schedule. As far as the pow sessions have, and what we call pow sessions, the active learning sessions based on the flip curriculum have been built out for 18 months now. So we're pretty close to ready to go. We've got to retreat coming up with all the new course directors and thread directors and small group facilitators at the end of April. Just say, hey, what are the final things? You need to get going. But in addition to that, of course, we have new pedagogies in the way of teaching things. So we've got some big facilities projects that have been approved and are in the late design phase. So most students on campus now from here with the skill center, which is located on the sixth floor of Garrison. The College of Medicine will be taken over the fifth floor of Garrison with about 22,000 square foot. So we'll have two large active learning centers. We're instead of sitting in the tiered lecture hall students will be sitting at tables of six. You can kind of a banquet style seating to do their large active learning sessions. And then we've got another exciting project, a $5 million renovation of our anatomy spaces and morgue spaces that will include the incorporation of some new surgical simulation spaces. It'll be outfitted, just like surgery, suites for practice on catabere surgery. So we're pretty excited about some of the changes that are happening. Awesome. Guys, this has been really great. I think our audience, whether they're potential students, current students, even our faculty members are going to learn a lot. And I think have a greater appreciation of all the works that's going into this, but also what the outcomes will be and how great this is for our students, our campus, the College in general. I'll give you guys just one last moment to tell us that there's something about the new curriculum that you're really excited about. That you haven't gotten to share yet. If anyone wants to give a shout out to a certain area or something that we haven't touched on. That can go first, I guess. So again, having been a student here and seeing all the good things that have been going this direction, I know we've touched on it. But I'm most excited to see what kind of relationships are built between students and faculty. I think it's going to be enriching for both sides, especially as we establish a new culture for what OU Medicine looks like. So that's what I'm most excited about. So I actually had one from a student perspective and one from my own perspective. So from my own perspective, just building on what Dr. Clayton said, like, I am excited to see the students on campus. I think a lot of effort has been put into making sure that those times on campus are really high value as far as education and mentorship availability. And I also feel like having them on campus will help the student affairs office to provide them with resources and get to know them better. And I'm really excited about that. And then from a student perspective, I think the case-based learning sessions I'm very excited about. I still remember those types of sessions, which were pretty few. And in my education, but incredibly valuable, I think just teaching the students not just to learn the material, but to be able to use it to solve clinical problems is going to really help them not just on step one, because step one is a lot of clinical problem solving, but also as they move on to the next phase of their clinical rotations. Obviously, medicines become more personalized, more molecular. And so as a basic scientist, I don't want to ruin the podcast, but talking about basic science. [LAUGHTER] Thank you. You can object at any point in the answer. But I think it's going to be a great thing for students to be able to see science and basic science integrated across all the curriculum. So instead of a full-reblock of metabolism and nutrition at the end of the first year when they're tired and ready to go home, there's going to be some integration about chemistry genetics all throughout. And I think what will happen in the curriculum is not only with a large active learning session, and there's study of those concepts and how they apply clinically. But then to look at those same concepts and how they apply to clinical reasoning and the case-based learning sessions, I think we'll drive home why we actually require these things and why you have to understand biochemistry, why you have to understand genetics, why you have to understand cell biology and transport and all these things. It seems so out there, why am I having to do this? I want to be a doctor, well, as we learn more and more, and as science continues to provide new opportunities for making our patient's lives better and treating them better, I think it'll become more and more important. And I think being able to show students why this is important and have them build that into how they clinic the reason and think about treating patients and keeping patients healthy will be a big plus. Yeah. I'm in a mimic Dr. Scordy-Nose style just a little bit. When I kind of think back to myself as a student and identify what I think that would have been really helpful for me and what I would have been really helped excited about, I think, back to being a preclinical student and sitting in my window list study in my medical house, which was a terrible place to study looking back and just being so deep in the preclinical content and studying for step one and feeling like there was no end in sight. And I think the opportunity for students to be integrated both into clinical experiences right away and then have that professional identity formation component to go along with it. So you are remembering not only that you are eventually going to be a doctor and getting to see why you came to med school from the very beginning, but also having that opportunity for the self-insight piece to go along with it. I think it's going to make a really big difference for the way that students feel during that portion of the curriculum. And one thing with that that we didn't mention is that those are longitudinal experiences, even though we've focused in on it in the preclinical curriculum, our PPD course and prefectural identity formation will actually follow the students through the whole curriculum, both during clerkships having that opportunity to step away and be with that group of people and mentors again, as well as even beyond the clerkships. When I put on my dean's hat being the assistant dean for the clinical curriculum, I'd say the thing I'm most excited for is the opportunity for our students to be immersed in the clinical experience sooner and kind of like Dr. Skorg-Dino touched on really to have that opportunity to explore what it is that they want to do and discover that passion even earlier in Med School, not only to know what they want to do, but then to be able to build on it in the post-quickship phase. One of the cool things that we're working on with the post-quickship phase is developing what we're kind of tentatively calling tracks. There's still time for this to change, but working with departments to identify what they think it's important for students to walk away from Med School with in terms of experience and having close mentoring, close working with students while they're building their schedules for that post-quickship phase to make sure that they're taking things that are meaningful, not only for that exploration piece, but really to get them ready for residency day one. So I think that's a really exciting piece. Awesome. You know, when I think about when I was a student, I think about they were still writing on chalkboards with chalk. And so what I have to say as a student may not be as appropriate, but what I do remember about being a do you and our current medical students may not realize this, but as grad students, we took a lot of classes with medical students. I took cadaver anatomy with the medical students. I took biochemistry with the medical students. We took, it was microbiology and immunology, then it was an entagment, but it saw it took three or four classes with medical students. And I still have friends from those days in those classes because we were on campus together. In fact, it was kind of scary as biochemistry grad students. We had to be the tutors and the TAs for the biochemistry students in the class that we were taking. So we were learning biochemistry, Monday through Friday with them. And then I was studying about 48 hours on Saturday and Sunday because I had to go review them for that same biochemistry. And the most of them were smarter than I was. Anyway, so that it was a little bit of a daunting task, but those people in the mods, you know, we had two mods eats. There's still friends of mine today, they're practicing physicians, most about to retire. But I'm really excited that, you know, I know students are, well, we're going to have to be on-- yeah, it's going to be wonderful to the children campus. You're going to develop lifelong relationship with your learning community, colleagues with your mod mates, with faculty. So I'm only in medical education because I love students. Right? You think it's because, oh, you love science. You love medical knowledge. No, I love students. I love helping them on the journey. And the more students that are around, the better my day is. So it's a big, big deal that we're going to have this community of practice here at OU where everyone is, you know, working for the same thing, which is to provide quality health care for the state of Oklahoma. Yeah, it's amazing. I think people, as we go back to your test of my comment, I think we can all testify to relationships that we built either with our mod mates, with our classmates, with mentors, that shaped who we are today. And those people, we all have people in our lives that we would be-- our lives would be less rich if we had not had those experiences. So I too am excited for our students to get to be together, learn from each other. I learned so much just about people who were very different from me, just coming to medical school, which was amazing for my personal development and professional development. So it's going to be super fun. You guys have put in a lot of work. And as Dean, you all have very little time. So I really appreciate you taking your time today, bringing your energy to this podcast. And we will catch you next time on the next episode of Our Story. [MUSIC PLAYING] (upbeat music)