Exemplary, exuberant: New class hits the ground running
BY MIKE GOODKIND
Before the Medical School's 86 new students met their first cadaver in their first anatomy class last week, they had already watched a dean interview a patient, and each had his own in most cases her own, actually stethoscope.
"We try to bring students immediately into the profession," said Elliott Wolfe, MD, associate dean for student affairs. And in looking over the statistics, Wolfe noted that a series of special recruitment efforts, including a weekend on campus last spring, have helped to produce an outstanding class.
Judy Colwell, assistant director of admissions, said the school managed to fill its unvarying class size of 86 first-year students "with the fewest number of offers [about 175] in 10 years." Last year, 200 offers were tendered to fill the class.
This year's class is "highly exuberant," said Wolfe. As in most past years, the new students have come to Stanford from a variety of top universities throughout the country, representing 38 different undergraduate institutions in all. Nineteen of the students came from Stanford University, Colwell said.
The new students collectively hold 74 science degrees and 19 nonscience degrees. Eighteen already have advanced degrees (12 masters, five PhDs and one JD), tying a 1996 record for advanced training.
Fifty-five percent of the prospective doctors in this group are women. That figure is down a bit from 58 percent last year, but a world away from past decades when female faces in the medical school classroom were rare.
Underrepresented minority group members are on the rise again, making up 21 percent of the new class the largest proportion since 1995's 22 percent. Last year, only 12 percent of the new students were classified as members of underrepresented groups. Minority groups underrepresented in medicine are defined by the American Association of Medical Colleges as African American, Mexican American, mainland Puerto Rican, native Alaskan, native Hawaiian and native American.
Several innovative programs may have helped the new students hit the ground running, said Wolfe.
The school held two admission weekends last spring, one to help recruit the nation's top minority students, the other open to all prospective students. Before accepting a billet, explained Wolfe, prospective students "were invited to spend the weekend on campus to reinforce that they were making the right choice of school." The 44 participating students also heard from current medical students about the special benefits of attending the School of Medicine, including research opportunities, proximity to the main Stanford campus, the opportunity to complete the program in five years at approximately the same tuition rate as a four-year program, and the relative abundance of tuition-reducing research stipends.
"It looks like it made a difference" in recruiting top students to the new class, said Colwell.
During the summer, students also received an optional reading list of fiction works that show physicians in both positive and negative light as people. Selected with the help of current students, the titles included Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis, The Spirit Catches You When You Fall Down by Ann Fadiman and Miss Evers Boys by David Feldshuh.
New initiatives starting at orientation this year included a reading comprehension and speed course specifically tailored to prepare students for the mounds of scientific reading they will face, Wolfe said. Although the course was optional, 60 of the new students signed up.
And to reinforce the aim of "teaching professionalism from the beginning," said Wolfe, the school arranged a series of talks, titled "Faces of the Community," in which newly arrived students heard other Stanford medical students describe how it has felt to face difficulties ranging from poverty to misconceptions about Muslims in this country. The idea is to begin teaching students to become culturally competent, to develop into "physicians aware of the culture of their patients," Wolfe said.
First-year medical student Brooke Mailey, who took last year off to pursue a passion for acting in New York City after graduating from Stanford in 1997, said the humanistic component of orientation kept her focused on the light at the end of the tunnel.
As students, she said, "we all realize the first two years will include an insane amount of memorizing a huge amount of material, but I think orientation helps remind us that there will be something afterward."
Wolfe gave his traditional
orientation lecture, in which he took a personal history by
interviewing an actual patient "to engage our students emotionally
from the beginning." And the Stanford Medical Alumni Association
continued its long-standing practice of providing students with
their first stethoscopes. In addition, each student received a
"Humanism in Medicine" lapel pin from the Arnold P. Gold
Foundation, a New Jersey-based philanthropy that promotes humanism
in medicine. SR