Dr. Jane Machi, Assistant Dean, Admissions and Recruitment at the Medical College of Wisconsin, explores the MCW Fusion Curriculum – and completing med school in three years.
Welcome to the 511th episode of Admissions Straight Talk. Thanks for joining me today. Are you ready to apply to your dream medical schools? Are you competitive at your target programs? Accepted’s Med School Admissions Quiz can give you a quick reality check. Just go to Accepted.com/medquiz. Complete the quiz and you’ll not only get an assessment of your chances, but tips on how to improve your chances of acceptance. And it’s all free. Again, use a calculator at Accepted.com/medquiz to obtain your free assessment and those tips that I just mentioned.
Our guest today is Dr. Jane Machi, Associate Dean of Admissions and Recruitment at the Medical College of Wisconsin. Dr. Machi earned her MD at the Medical College of Wisconsin and is a proud alum, as you’ll hear shortly. In her clinical practice she specializes in pediatric emergency medicine, in addition to serving at MCW as an associate professor and associate dean of admissions.
Sure. The Medical College of Wisconsin has a campus in Milwaukee, and we have two regional campuses, one in Central Wisconsin in a city called Wausau, and then we have a campus in Green Bay. We’re a private institution. Our Milwaukee campus has 50% of our students from Wisconsin and 50% are out of state. And then our regional campuses are really geared towards replenishing the physician shortage that everyone is facing. We’re not unique in that regard, and the regional campuses were opened with the hopes that the students that we train there when they complete the residencies will return to Wisconsin.
Predominantly, those campuses are geared towards Wisconsin residents, so close to 80% on each campus come from Wisconsin. I think one of the most unique things about our curriculum in particular, which our students rave about all the time, is our scholarly pathways. On the Milwaukee campus, they have opportunities to dive deep into a topic that they’re really passionate about. Some examples are we have an urban and community health pathway. We have a global health pathway. We have a patient safety and quality improvement pathway. We have research pathways. The students can choose.
They go through a series of orientations to each of the pathways, and they choose and they do a scholarly project typically in their first two years. And then on the regional campuses, they also participate in a scholarly pathway, but there is one, and that is the physician in the community pathway. I should say that our Milwaukee campus is a four-year campus, so our students spend four years with us. The regional campuses are three-year campuses, so you get out of medical school one year earlier. The target specialties for those campuses are really primary care and psychiatry oriented, and those are the types of students that we try and recruit.
We know very well that students may change their mind once they get into medical school. They may find another field that they’re more intrigued by and want to spend more time in. There is an option for them to do a fourth year if it’s necessary, depending on the specialty that they’ve chosen. That’s a little bit about MCW.
Although we do have students from our regional campuses who do choose to go into OBGYN and many of them have done it in three years. Many of the specialties that you might think take four years to get into, we have had students match into residencies after the third year. A fourth year is not always necessary for all of our students. But some that require that additional year, like emergency medicine, there are special rotations that they have to do that they just can’t accomplish in three years. The curriculums are comparable. The regional campuses, it’s very accelerated, so there are no summer vacations.
On the Milwaukee campus, there are breaks and the regional campuses don’t have those breaks. That’s how we are able to get them to complete all their requirements in the three years. There are not as many electives; there’s no more time for electives. That’s really the big difference. We’re going to get to the curriculum in a minute, but the initial first two years, they’re done together with our Milwaukee students. The regional campuses participate in the same courses. They’re just doing it in their geographic areas.
They have their own Sim labs, their own anatomy labs, their own resources on each of the campuses, and they do their rotations in their regional geographic regions. The Green Bay students will stay in that area, and the Central Wisconsin students actually will spend time in hospitals that are in all different rural areas in that central part of the state.
There is by virtue of their locations. A predominant shortage of our physicians in Wisconsin are those that practice in rural areas. One of our focuses is that we would like our students to be interested in rural medicine and want to return to a rural community to practice to fulfill those needs in our underserved rural areas.
No. I will say that the Discovery Curriculum will be replaced by the MCW Fusion Curriculum starting July of 2023. We’re about to start a different curriculum.
We’re really excited about it. It’s been a lot of hard work. There are many, many people that have been involved in developing this curriculum. Rather than having year one, year two, year three, year four, it’s actually a three-phased curriculum, which I think many medical schools have gone to, where you spend… It’s no longer two years of traditionally what we think of basic science. That’s been decreased in its amount of time. On the Milwaukee campus, they’ll spend 18 months doing their early clinical exposures. There are doctoring threads, learning communities. The scholarly pathways will not go away.
That’s the one thing from the Discovery Curriculum that is coming intact to the MCW Fusion Curriculum. The regional campuses will do it in a shorter amount of time because they don’t have summer vacation. They will get it all done in a briefer time. Phase two is basically what we traditionally think of as the core clerkships, and that’ll be 12 months. And rather than spending block times in specific rotations, they’ll be divided into areas like inpatient medicine, outpatient medicine, and then the surgical specialties, and they’ll spend a year doing those. And then the third phase is really sort of the self-discovery phase where students can really individualize their education.
If you want to be a surgeon, you can do a lot of different surgical things and rotations, electives, and focus that fourth year or that phase three… See, I’m in the fourth year. Phase three.
I have a whole new language to learn. In phase three, it’s really individualized and we’re really wanting to prepare our students to become really good residents, have them be prepared to start their intern year when they graduate.
The only real screening that we do is basically for basic eligibility criteria. Making sure that their undergraduate credits are coming from either a regionally accredited US or Canadian medical school. That’s the biggest screening that we do. And then if you meet the eligibility criteria, you’re sent a secondary application and given that opportunity to fill it out.
I think one of the big things that I think the secondary allows us to learn about the applicant is how they see themselves at MCW. Did they do their homework? Did they look on the web? Are there certain things within our curriculum that they’re incredibly interested in? How do they see MCW preparing them for the future? Everybody tries to hesitate to use the word fit, so I’m going to say align. Do they align with MCW’s missions? Can they see themselves being a student at our school? That goes for all of our campuses.
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