Eastern Virginia Interview Recap

I was not impressed with EVMS (Eastern Virginia Medical School) or the city of Norfolk. The traffic in Norfolk was terrible - after my interview it took us 40 minutes to make it five miles down the highway. The campus itself wasn't terrible, but it was a little outdated. EVMS seems behind the curve on technology and curriculum. Their curriculum is the old method, which is much like most high schools where you have multiple courses going on at once. Most med schools have switched to a block approach where you only have one main course at one time and it is intense and condensed, but you have less to focus on. In a block/integrated approach, you may have a month where all you learn about is the kidney, but when you're done with that block, you move on. At EVMS, you have an anatomy class, a histology class, a physiology class, and some others all going on at the same time. Because of this, exams are tough. The students had just had six exams in two weeks when I was there. With a block approach, you have fewer exams at one time because you have fewer courses.

The day started at 10:00am with an interview group of seventeen applicants. We then went to a presentation by the clinical skills staff. This presentation was really useful and interesting. What the clinical skills staff does is train the students to work with standardized patients. SPs are members of the community who are trained to act out certain diseases/symptoms. So a SP may be given a case about depression and will act that way for a med student to figure out. The benefit of SPs is that they give med students a way to practice with patients in a setting where mistakes don't matter. If you misdiagnose a SP, no one gets hurt. SPs also give you feedback after the interaction to tell you how they felt you did from a patient's perspective. These interactions can be very useful and most med schools take advantage of SPs to some degree. EVMS seems to have a really developed program for SPs, but I don't think that an SP program matters nearly as much as the curriculum itself. The presentation was fun because we were able to actually interview a SP and see what it is like.

Around 11:15am we went on a tour of the children's hospital. The hospital was nice, but since I've seen St. Jude, I think I'm a little harder to impress than most. After we saw the hospital, we were given a tour of the med school building. As I mentioned, the facilities weren't bad but they weren't overly impressive either.

After the tours, around 12:45pm, we ate lunch with some medical students and also had a short financial aid presentation. By this point in the day I had realized that EVMS was not a good fit for me at all. From 1:45pm to 3:30pm I had absolutely nothing to do and sat around and chatted with a few other applicants while we waiting for our interviews.

At 3:30pm my interview started. The interview was a panel format, meaning I was interviewed by three people at the same time. Two of them were faculty members and one was a student. One of the three was on the admissions committee, and I wasn't supposed to know which one, but by halfway through the interview I could tell which one was on the committee. The format was difficult itself, but the questions they asked were the most difficult I have had as well. They asked me to compare the US healthcare system to other countries'. I don't know much of anything about international healthcare, but I was able to come up with a somewhat effective answer. The ethical question they asked later was the most difficult. The scenario started with a 14-year-old asking for an abortion and how I would handle it. Every time I would come up with something to say, they would change the scenario. By the end of the scenario, it had changed to a 14-year-old that had been impregnanted by being raped by her father. It was really tough to handle and figure out where to go with the conversation.

At 4:30pm, I was done and heading back. When I left, I knew that EVMS was not an option for me. Other than being close to the beach, EVMS didn't have much that appealed to me.

Strengths:
Close to the beach!
Warmer weather
Strong SP program

Weaknesses:
Cost
Distance from home
Mediocre program
Curriculum
Terrible town
Old technology
High cost of living

I didn't like EVMS at all. Even if they extend an acceptance to me, I would not hold a spot in the EVMS class. Out of respect for other applicants, I would not want to take a spot in a class that they may be waiting on.