Overall Comments: |
BASIC SCIENCE (years 1 and 2) is considered by most students to be a WEAKNESS of Brown's education. ANATOMY is excellent, with dedicated lecturers, great graduate teaching assistants, strong structure, and 4 students to a cadaver. PHYSIOLOGY is fair. Dr. Hai, who runs the physiology course, is also very dedicated, but physiology lectures vary depending on the organ system. Dr. Hai's (cardiovascular) is great. HISTOLOGY is VERY POOR (Marjorie Thompson) and it's very clear this professor does not want to teach the course, nor does she care whether the students learn. She comes to class late every day. PATHOLOGY (Dr. Dumenco) is TOP NOTCH -- truly probably among the best in the country. PHARMACOLOGY is poorly taught and could be improved, but we got by. I'm not sure that pharm at other medical schools is usually much better. At Brown, it's not taught by physicians but by PhDs and a pharmacist. At some other places that I know, anesthesiologists (MD's) are involved in pharmacology and I think this would improve relevancy somewhat.
USMLE PREPARATION in 2004-2006 has been VERY POOR. The former dean, Steven Smith, used to walk up and tell the class, "You don't need to study for the boards." Not true, and in 2004 and 2005 15% and 20% of students failed the boards respectively (compared to national average of 7%). This has been a big heads-up to the administration, and with a new Dean of Medicine and a new curriculum development committee the school is working on fixing up the basic science curriculum.
ACADEMIC AND CAREER ADVISING is VERY POOR. Academic advising in the first two years has been virtually non-existent. My first and second year "advisor" was the "learning specialist" hired by the medical school to work with students with learning disabilities. He knew nothing about medicine and couldn't tell me anything I didn't already know about study skills (his own area of expertise). During meetings with him, he would spend most of the meeting time answering personal phone calls and chugging a bottle of Pepto-Bismol for his "acid reflux." (I personally suspect he may have been an alcoholic.)
Many of the deans and higher-level administrators are or were board certified in FAMILY MEDICINE. The FAMILY MEDICINE DEPARTMENT HAS A LOT OF POWER in the medical school, and I believe this has a few positive and a few negative things. I believe family medicine values were employed to do a great job in selecting top notch students who are for the most part socially conscious, bright, and concerned about the relational aspects of patient care. That was good.
However... advising and SUPPORT FOR NON PRIMARY CARE CAREER CHOICES is VERY POOR. You want to go into family medicine? You will get endless resources, support, mentoring, community projects, and research opportunities. However, you want to go into something else? You're on your own. The medical school will send you a brochure about how to make specialty choices -- from the American Academy of Family Physicians, no less -- and leave you to it.
Brown is a new medical school that's only been around 30 years. Its lack of organizational systems and structure is a SERIOUS FLAW. Because there are no real systems in place, its day to day running is entirely dependent upon a few secretaries hired to do the job. Many students feel they come in for work at 9:55am, take a two hour lunch break plus several smoke breaks, and leave promptly at 3:55pm -- for three out of five work days a week! If you have an application deadline approaching but the secretary has called in sick or is on vacation, forget it -- you're screwed. There is no system in place to make sure everything flows smoothly without particular persons. They lost TWO out of my THREE my letters of recommendation for residency and I had to ask my writers to re-send them. How embarrassing.
Grades are Honors/Pass/Fail with a narrow margin for honors, and there is no Alpha Omega Alpha chapter. I have been informed that the Dean's letters (MSPE) from Brown are not well written and don't look great compared to Dean's letters from other schools. All of these factors hurt us a little in the residency application process.
Onto the clinical rotations (MUCH BETTER news, in fact they are mostly EXCELLENT):
The hospital facilities are excellent and the range of disease you see is amazingly great. You get experience in a Level I Trauma Center with an emergency department that sees 120,000 patient visits a year -- the fifth busiest in the US. You also get excellent experience in a high acuity community hospital (much harder work than the trauma center), the local VA hospital which is typical of all VA's, and a few other locations.
MEDICINE clerkship is EXCELLENT. Broad range of disease pathology, with residents who are well chosen and who mostly are happy and conscientious.
SURGERY is so-so. You will get all the bread-and-butter you need. You won't get some of the juicy cases you'd see at other hospitals nearby. Brown is right in between Boston and New Haven. No heart, lung, or liver transplants occur here. No pediatric cardiac surgery occurs here. There IS bread-and-butter neurosurgery and bread-and-butter orthopaedics. The rare stuff goes elsewhere.
OB/GYN is in a good hospital with a good residency program (huge volume of deliveries annually, among the top 10 in the US in terms of deliveries). Student experience is not as positive as it could be on the labor & delivery floor, as the labor nurses at Women & Infants Hospital in Providence are often extremely unprofessional to students (and patients as well). The experience provided by the hospitals numbers should be excellent, but the nurses unfortunately are not good.
PSYCHIATRY and PEDIATRICS are bread-and-butter. Good experiences.
The MATCH LIST IS EXCELLENT with many students getting their top choices, at top-ranked residency programs. Brown students are good to begin with, and they aim high in terms of residency. They probably seek residencies with prestige/reputation at a higher rate than most, and they seem to land them as well. Oftentimes I think this is IN SPITE OF Brown, which has dropped the ball multiple times in terms of the pre-clinical teaching, the preparation for board exams, lack of good advising, and multiple administrative errors.
If you come to Brown, I have no doubt that you would do well. Brown students land great residencies. But there are some glaring weaknesses that need to be fixed and that fortunately have raised enough red flags to earn some attention from the administration. I came to Brown because I really did share the administration's values for patient care and the importance of the doctor-patient relationship. However, my interests changed and I find that Brown has been unable to support the needs of a student body which is increasingly 1) not interested in primary care, and 2) interested in building a competitive residency application with strong board scores and strong grades and good career moves. We graduate from Brown knowing that it's not because Brown did well, but because we did. |
