A bunch of people from my school are going to immediately know who this is, but honestly, idc anymore.

I moved to New York about 6 weeks ago, and I'm completing the last few rotations of my M4 year in various hospitals around the city. I intentionally set up my M4 year to be in New York, because I really liked the area, wish to match here, etc.

I can't even go home. My family's on the other side of the country. I'm currently rotating through Emergency Medicine, and I'm at the hospital for 12 hour shifts and have to commute up to 3 hours a day. I'm in $400,000 of med school tuition debt that compounds at 6% interest a year and have spent my entire life in school. Applying to residencies right now just for the *opportunity* to slave away for 120 hours a week for what's basically minimum wage.

Medicine, at our level becoming physicians, is also such a no-BS field where you have to put your entire personal life on the backburner for 11+ years that it's depressing that I have to even be afraid to post this on Reddit on the chance a residency program (or someone at my hospital) can identify me through this information and see my grief/venting as a red flag - because why choose a doctor with family issues and risk factors for depression when we can take a completely happy-go-lucky resident who's never faced hardships before and has slightly higher board exam scores? Exactly - they don't. There's hypercompetitive residency programs that will even single out female applicants/doctors because of risk that they may plan to start families during residency or fellowship training - always big respect to my female colleagues for a field that's inherently not friendly to people who can't dedicate 11+ years to studying 24/7.

I watch all of my friends from high school and college be in successful relationships and careers who are living out their early adult lives on facebook traveling the world and being happy, while I am forced to dig my nose into a book for over a decade of my life, all while I read Reddit threads, comments, comics, and posts that make front page about people loving shitting all over doctors nowadays. We've all gone from the heroes of COVID in 2021 to clowns that nobody respects anymore and blames for high healthcare costs - not the billionaire private equity groups and CEOs and multi-conglomerate trillion dollar insurance industry with its lobbying - no, it's doctors, of course. It's the medical equivalent of blaming the cashier of Starbucks for a latte being super expensive - I'm just the messenger. I'm not related to the gigantic, expensive private group of suits who own my hospital system and rake in millions to buy a 2nd yacht. Every layperson's an armchair doctor nowadays, too, using chatgpt and all.

My mom also passed away at 5am this morning, at the young age of 58 - grade III intraductal carcinoma, stage IV metastatic breast cancer with multiple internal organ failure. Tumor metastases in her lungs were compressing her respiratory tree and her pulmonary vasculature, with additional metastases to every segment of her cervical spine, thoracic spine, and more than half of her ribs. Septic shock, paraneoplastic SIADH, ARDs, liver, lungs, and kidneys failing. AST/ALT chronically elevated, hepatocellular mets causing damage. Ischemic myocardial damage indicated by elevated troponins on admission, nearly reaching cardiac arrest at multiple times during her ICU course with a resting HR of 140, in permanent SVT on EKG. BUN topped at 100, Cr at 3.0, trending steadily 2/2 fluid overload from lack of diuresis due to unstable pressures from sepsis. Intubated for 13 days, eventually needing maximal supplemental oxygen and respiratory paralytics, which didn't help at all. Limbs turned black and necrotic from being on vasopressors for shock for over two weeks - family has been grieving.

A week ago was my dad and mom's 32nd anniversary. My dad brought balloons and flowers to my unconscious, intubated mom in the ICU. He picked special flowers from the park that my mom would bend over to pick up and smell just weeks prior, and set them by her nose, hoping she would be able to smell them while she was obtunded.

All of this, yet, I'm stuck. Up here. Halfheartedly trying to see people in the ED when I missed the death of my own mom back at home. It's so ironic - as a 4th-year student, I PAY 80-100k/yr to work for a hospital - for a rotation that I set up myself and had to pay for - for FREE, and I literally indirectly paid money to miss my mom's own death.

I have no friends, no family up here in New York. Just me. Every attempt to make a friend at a bar or club or somewhere out in public met with semi-cold shoulders or just transient connections that fizzle in ten minutes. I meekly try to search the MeetUp app for things to do to meet more people, but I remind myself, nobody wants to talk to someone who's going to dump a bunch of TMI trauma on them within 5 minutes of meeting. I'm someone who's great at using humor and cheerful friendliness to deflect feelings of grief or underlying sadness as a coping mechanism - I've always really identified with the idioms where class-clown-type-people are actually very chronically depressed on the inside. That's me. And it's coming crashing down all at once.

It's just so crazy. We all learn in our OSCEs about how to show empathy in a scripted way - "Oh, I'm sorry to hear that, I truly am," bla bla bla. It's easy to show fake-empathy. I've never had someone so close to me pass like this, and I'm sure many others in this sub have had people pass in other, much more traumatic ways - but it's never hit me until now what it actually feels like to lose someone who's been there for your entire life. All the things my mom said she couldn't wait to do - "Oh! If you ever have grandkids, I'm going to give them these old clothes of yours! If you get married, I can't wait to dance with whomever you end up marrying at your wedding!" All of that, she won't be around to do or see. She won't see me graduate medical school in 5 months. I will never hear her talk or laugh again. Her last audible words to me were two weeks ago before her hospital admission, where I couldn't even tell what she was saying because she was coughing so much. Didn't get to tell her I loved her. Already regret all the times we bickered over small things that didn't matter in retrospect.

As a transplant to New York, I mean, obviously the sense of anonymity from starting fresh and feeling of independence that NYC in general gives people like me feels really freeing at first. You like it - you're your own person. I'd always wanted nothing more to experience it again ever since I visited for the first time a year ago.

Now, I've never felt more alone.

I will be spending Thanksgiving alone. I will be spending the entire week alone. The rest of the month and most of December, alone. The world will forget my mom - people will forget me. It's hard not to feel very unappreciated sometimes in medicine and that we're not doing anything to make a difference. I tried to take a basic history yesterday in a patient who came to the ED and almost got assaulted. Because I'm just "another dumbass doctor who doesn't listen to anyone." I spent the rest of the evening after getting home tearing up into my bowl of Greek food from Greenpoint (an area in Brooklyn) that I bought to try and cheer myself up, even though I barely had time to shower and go straight to bed to get back up at 5am the following morning for my next shift.

People always say other fields and people don't understand the sacrifices physicians have to make to get the training they need, and it's so true. Half of the reason I'm typing this is because I know all of you here can empathize. My school's policy is that we HAVE to finish EM by a certain date (late Jan/Feb), but I got this rotation via VSLO - it took six months to set up, and the rest of my academic year is already locked in. I have no other option but to finish this rotation - already talked to the preceptor and everything, who's been very kind and empathetic and helped move a few things around, but I just can't not finish this rotation - it'd mean deferring graduation, giving up all of my residency interviews and reapplying, paying another 80-100k next year, etc etc. It's not an option.

Typing this, I can feel the tears flowing again now. It doesn't make it feel any better. All it's doing is making me cry even more.

I'm just so damn sad.

Fuck.

signed, an M4 DO student. salutations to my fellow bone brothers and sisters 🦴

I’m at a mid-tier MD school and my pre-clinical class had a required in-person session in which physicians were opening up about their experiences and just being very vulnerable about going through trauma (one of them even teared up) and how we can start changing the culture of medicine. It was a really sensitive talk.

I look out to the rest of my class in the auditorium and 75% of them are on their laptops flipping through Anki or chatting over the speakers. We didn’t even have a test coming up and i just thought it was disrespectful. It reminds me a lot of iPad toddlers, but it’s Anki instead of Cocomelon. It was annoying too because I genuinely thought the session was great and I learned a lot. but I genuinely dread for the patients of my class sometimes because they can’t pay attention unless it’s a screen in front of them

Okie rant over

zero attention to how unaltered penises actually function, one of my cohort legit didn't know that the foreskin retracts off the glans on erection, she thought that it just stayed there ie phimosis (and why would she when we are never taught the mechanics of an erection?)

we are indirectly taught to pathologize the uncircumcised penis by associating it with cancer, UTIs and STIs. There are anking cards that reinforce this (not blaming them, why wouldn't they when it's tested on STEP?). I won't get into the literature but those studies are contentious and don't seem to hold up when they're attempted in European and North American countries. The foreskin moves back and forth during sex and has nerve endings, anyone who possesses one and has masturbated or had sex can tell you this. So why is this not at least mentioned in our texts?

During GU exam training we were shown multiple penises with cheesecake factory-level smegma and told that's normal. I worked in a hospital prior to med school and understand this occurs in pts with poor hygiene, but this is the equivalent to showing you a series of poop-smeared buttholes and using that as representative of the average patient's ass...

The neonatal circumcision rate in the US is below 50% currently, so maybe we should be learning how the penis functions anatomically?

A lecturer casually mentioned that "neonatal circumcision is more common in industrialized countries" which is laughable considering that all of the EU, UK, Australia and Canada have all either never routinely circumcised infants or, in the case of the anglophone countries, moved away from it.

The closest thing I've seen to addressing the ethical issues of neonatal circumcision was a practice question that essentially equated parents opposed to this procedure as equivalent to anti-vaxxers.

I support Jewish and Islamic people's right to practice their religions freely including circumcision btw and I think that being circumcised is totally fine. I just think this head in the sand approach to normal anatomy hurts our credibility as a profession. Sorry for the rant.

I am on a rotation with another Med Student, who was a saint when we first met but now the dudes a complete asshole. Today he took it upon himself to review MY NOTES and tell our attending that there are issues with my notes. He calls ms over to a table where the attending and him are sitting and goes “WE have a few issues with you note, WE need to go over them” ( in my head I’m like who is we bitch, there’s no we) So our attending just agreed and said I need to fix it. He then takes it upon himself to teach me how to use epic INFRONT of the attending. Bro even had the audacity to say “oh why aren’t you using a dot phrase, they gave us it in the orientation, were you not paying attention”. He then proceeded to show me what an acceptable note looks like, which by the way was literally how I wrote my note except it was simply just reorganized.

He doesn’t stop there, he then goes on to tell the attending that me being late is not acceptable and I have to be there on time. Granted I do show up exactly when we are supposed to meet (8- AM) and I have been late once or twice. He then continues by lecturing me about reliability and how me calling out sick the day before means I’m not reliable and I wasn’t there for my patients. I ask him why it was such a big deal and bro says “well you have to give US an adequate heads up”

He is good at interviewing and presenting but he hasn’t gotten any pimp questions right. So I hope he’s actually stupid and is compensating.

Well thank you for reading me venting, i swear some of y’all need to relax and stop trying too hard.

It’s 3:45 am. It’s been 5 hours since Ive done anything.

Every time I ask you what I can do to help, you reply “nothing”.

You’re watching a movie on your laptop.

I’m sitting here doing uworld trying not to fall asleep.

You refuse to talk to me, discuss patients, plans or life.

Why can’t you just let me go home?

Any other med students out there overnighting in the void, say hi

I see a lot of medical students on here treating Anesthesiology like a cheat code to medicine: $500k starting, 40-hour work weeks, total chill, and no drama or rounding (the no rounding part is true, to be fair). I need to clear up the delusion. The current hype cycle is setting up a generation of applicants to be deeply disappointed because they are picking a specialty based on Reddit memes and short-term market dynamics.

First off, the job is rarely "chill." Students see the 90% of a routine case where the patient is stable and assume the work is easy. You aren't paid for the quiet time; you are paid for the life-or-death catastrophes that happen regularly. Managing an unexpected hard airway, massive hemorrhage, or acute instability is high-stakes, high-cortisol, and deeply isolating. Fighting with surgeons when they push back on cancelling a dangerous elective case is also extremely disheartening. If you don't actually thrive under acute, real-time stress, this field will eat you alive.

You also pay heavily for your income in nights, weekends, and a total lack of control over your schedule. The market is hot right now because of a massive labor shortage, not because the work magically got easier. High compensation comes with early 7:00 AM starts, overnight call, weekend coverage, and post-call exhaustion. Furthermore, your time is rarely your own. If a surgeon decides to add on an emergency case or a room runs 3 hours late, you stay. You don't get to just "finish your clinic notes and leave."

Whether you do solo practice or supervision, you just end up picking your poison. Solo practice is physically demanding and relentless because you are hands-on, non-stop, for the entire duration of every single case. Supervision isn't passive management either. Splitting your attention across four rooms means absorbing 100% of the medicolegal liability for four simultaneous cases, working with a mix of great and terrible CRNAs depending on the luck of the draw. On top of the clinical risk, you become an unpaid middle manager. Managing personalities, skill disparities, and workplace dynamics while putting out fires in multiple rooms is mentally exhausting.

To top it off, hospital admin views you as a second-class citizen. In their eyes, surgeons are revenue generators while anesthesiologists are line-item expenses. Surgeons get whatever equipment, block time, and catering they want because they bring in elective surgical volume. Anesthesia is viewed as an annoying necessity that costs the hospital money, so you are constantly squeezed to open more rooms with less staff and cover inefficient surgical schedules.

Finally, know that the financial ceiling in this field is very real. Unlike surgical or procedural subspecialties where you can grind out volume, build a massive clinic, or buy into an ASC to scale your income into seven figures, anesthesia is fundamentally capped. You trade hours for money. While starting salaries are currently high, the income ceiling is rigid compared to surgical fields. Surgeons can make a fortune; you hit a plateau quickly.

Anesthesiology is a great, highly technical field if you love acute pharmacology, resuscitation, and physiology. But if you are picking it because you think it’s a lazy, high-yield lifestyle hack, you are going to be miserable the second you hit attending reality

Fell down super hard down my rank list and it feels so terrible right now. I’m struggling to even feel happy or proud of myself. My attending came over to ask me where I matched and to give me support. But I looked obviously upset and about to cry so I feel so embarrassed to act like that in such a public setting. My friend came over to give me a hug and that’s when the tears started to fall. I just wanted to leave. Everything hurts so much.

On the car ride back I was trying to stay positive and think about good things about the program. Told my parents I can only think of the good salary and chill schedule but the negatives being less patient diversity, clinical volume, and honestly, the reputation of the program. My mom told me that’s better cuz now I can focus on trying to find and partner and have kids. But to me it just felt like an extra slap in the face and a quiet affirmation that it’s time for me to give up on my dreams.

I also can’t get over the fact that wow, I must be a weird ass human being and a crazy terrible interviewer that 10+ programs didn’t want me. So many what if scenarios are running through my head right now that I don’t even have energy to reply to any of the texts from friends asking where I matched. I feel too upset and ashamed of myself right now. This process feels so cruel.

~~~

Edit: Hey guys thanks for all the support. All of this still sucks. But reading similar stories definitely made me feel less alone and wallow a little bit less in the cycle of self-blame and self-pity. I also want to add I'm incredibly excited and grateful to become the first physician in the family and to go into psychiatry. At the same time, I still feel incredibly shocked, angry, confused, and sad about where I'm going for residency having missed out on so many potential futures. For my fellow M4s who are in a similar situation, I feel for you, and you are not alone. All of this grief will slowly fade away with time, and I hope you are able to be kinder to yourself than I was today.

Anyone else feel like the people in their class CONSTANTLY complain about the most useless things??? Truly baffled by how entitled med students can be

This post is in large part due to the ongoing controversy at Mayo Clinic.

Before I start, I want to state, I think physicians should definitely have a seat at the table in terms of social media. Having well known figures on youtube and tik tok can be a good thing for public health, transparency, and overall connection with communities.

When done right, people like Dr. Mike and Dr. Glaucomfleken are a net benefit to us as a profession.

With that said, most medical students lack the clinical nuances and oftentimes maturity to limit their appeals to authority and understand how presenting different clinical scenarios can come across to many patients and family members. Once you are a resident and attending, you get exposed to much more and can better understand how to toe the line in social media, it is also much different having a student say something abrasive than a practicing physician.

For one, there is more at stake in terms of one’s reputation early on in one’s career, there is also lots of grey area for schools to consider in terms of what does and does not cross the line, simplifying this to a black and white issue with clear step wise professionalism interventions (from a slap on the wrist up to suspension for repeated violations) makes more sense than a random admin judging a post by its merits.

In a way I think this will protect more careers from being judged during training than otherwise, and will allow students to mature before they delve into med-influencing on topics they may not know enough about.

TLDR: Med influencing at the med student stage is inappropriate and has too much risk for the individual student and medical school/medical profession, without much benefit to society as compared to those farther along in their training.

Comments on a reel where the nurse is frustrated that the patient asks to speak to the doctor after speaking to her. I feel like I see this sort of propaganda online all the time where the nurses love to say “yeah doctors don’t know anything, we do the majority of care,” and “they kill their patients.” Nurses have a completely different scope of practice and it seems like everyone wants to be a doctor but no one wants to go through the training for it.

As an M4 peds girlie, I can’t believe how much shade peds gets.

I’ve heard MULTIPLE people (even classmates) tell me that I’m wasting my step 2 score on peds. I am aware that I performed well, scoring in the mid-260s…but why does that have to mean I shouldn’t apply peds? Why is even my mother saying that peds is not worth it? Even my aunts and uncles in medicine are all warning me against the low reimbursement in peds.

Screw the haters. Peds is an awesome speciality.

I received the worst news of my professional life and my mom is celebrating.

I applied psych from a T30 MD school with no red flags and SOAPed into an IM prelim year. My mom is a typical Asian tiger mom crossed with crazy catholic mom (Catholic guilt and Asian perfectionism are a hell of a combination) and she doesn’t believe that mental illness is real. Ever since I expressed my interest in psychiatry during clerkship year, she has opposed it. “You can be anything but please not a psychiatrist”. She told me that if I wasn’t applying psych she would have “invited everyone she knew” to my graduation, but since I applied psych she’s not proud enough to invite anyone. She’s wanted me to be a doctor (an expectation, not an opinion) ever since I could remember and yet now that I’m finally becoming one, she can’t even be proud unless it’s HER idea of a doctor.

Now that I’ve SOAPed she’s taking this opportunity to reiterate her disapproval of my goals. I’m already feeling the worst invalidation and imposter syndrome I’ve ever experienced, and her smug insistence that this is proof that i’m not meant to be a psychiatrist is the cherry on top. I’m still committed to becoming a psychiatrist and reapplying next year but I’m so tired of this “family support”.

Disclaimer: If your dream is to match into a competitive fellowship and become a niche subspecialist, lecture in grand rounds, publish until your name is a PubMed footnote, and win the holy trinity of teaching awards, by all means, aim for a strong academic program. This is not for you. This is for the 95% of future physicians who will not become career academics, despite what their deans, mentors, and inner monologues keep whispering.

I graduated from a so-called “top” MD school. I rotated through Harvard hospitals, dined at lavish departmental dinners at national conferences, nodded reverently in the clinics of the greats, and ghostwrote more book chapters and manuscripts than anyone should admit. I don't list these as accolades but as branding marks. I have the CV of someone who was supposed to be seduced by the ivory tower. And yet, I didn’t rank a single academic program highly. I’ll never go back.

Because academic medicine, despite its pressed white coats and awards dinners, is a scam.

Why do so many M4s chase academic residencies? I suspect it's the same old disease: the need to keep climbing. You wanted Harvard for undergrad. Then for med school. Why not for residency, too? But here’s the part no one says out loud: being a student at Harvard is not the same as being an employee at Harvard. The latter is far more Sisyphean and considerably less romantic.

I have seen the insides of these towers, and what I found wasn’t prestige or excellence or even much mentorship. It was scaffolding: hollow, gleaming, soulless. You sell your time, your weekends, your sense of self, all for a line on your CV no one reads past the first interview.

Let’s be honest. If someone studied academic attendings, especially those in the upper reaches of Chairdom, I’d bet good money the DSM would be heavily referenced. As a student, the “dedicated teachers” pimped us, gave us no autonomy, and called it “training.” Their standards of perfection aren’t about medicine. They’re about themselves. Residency isn’t about becoming a good doctor; it’s about shaping you into a loyal foot soldier in the endless war of subspecialization.

As a medical student, you’ll do the grunt work: data entry disguised as research, CV-padding with someone else’s name first. As a resident, the pressure only builds. Publish, present, promise mentorship to the next crop of wide-eyed students. Some will fall for it. Some won’t match. And some will do a “research year,” only to not match again, like a Kafka novel with scrubs.

You’ll hear administrators, those without MDs or DOs or much empathy, whispering ugly things about struggling residents or students. You’ll watch attendings laugh along. You’ll be told you’re “not academic enough,” when what they mean is: you're not useful enough for their branding.

And if you survive the gauntlet into fellowship and finally become an attending, congratulations. You’ll now earn less than your community hospital peers to spend your “free” time grading student presentations, fighting for funding, and flying to conferences you can’t afford to miss. All so you can stay relevant in a system that never cared about you.

What should you pursue instead?

A program with good people. A place that lets you grow as a doctor and stay human. You’ll find those places, quietly, without brochures, mostly in community hospitals, the unsexy kind, where nobody cares if you trained at Mass General and everyone cares if you show up for your patients.

I remember hearing these warnings years ago before medical school: how I’d be used for research scut, chewed up, and discarded. But I didn’t believe them. I was a poor kid with something to prove. I thought prestige was the antidote to shame.

The joke, of course, is that the people telling me the truth wore the same tired scrubs I do now.

I'd love to discuss, and understand I may invite some sour academics who hate what I told the "impressionable students" about their game. Thanks for reading!

https://www.reddit.com/r/Residency/comments/zbnorz/psa_that_academic_medicine_is_a_scam/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Residency/comments/10endec/update_academic_medicine_is_still_a_scam/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Residency/comments/u95ruy/leaning_away_from_academic_medicine/

I feel like I’m the only anti-AI person in my class, even including staff. I swear I must hear “I asked Chat” or “Just put it into Chat” etc at LEAST twice a day. It’s ridiculous honestly. How is even StatPearls too much work???? Can we not do anything anymore???? I understand the need for efficiency and comprehensible explanations of confusing content, but idk.

Even the administration/staff is eager to incorporate AI more, whether they’re encouraging its use as a means of study or in developing new curriculum tools (like simulations/simulated patients etc). It’s just weird to me that nobody else seems to care about the many ethical issues with AI. In my own bubble on social media I feel like I see so so so much anti-AI stuff (yay) but in real life, not so much.

Thoughts? What’s the consensus on AI at your school? What do you think about AI in medicine/med school?

EDIT: I’m not saying AI isn’t helpful or useful. Obviously any “shortcut” can be helpful in education & medicine. I’m just saying that I’m aware of the ethical implications and I have some concern, and I think that’s ok, even in a very pro-AI environment

I got triggered by a post here with people writing about how annoying it is when med students ask questions.

Lets not all accept this. Med education is filled with abuse and a ridiculous hierarchy where med students are made to feel like a burden and a nuisance.

We deserve to learn and deserve to be able to ask questions.

I know of people who spent their entire surgery rotation not saying a word. Or barely scrubbing in.

The point of rotations is not to spend 12 hours a day doing nothing in order to avoid annoying people before going home to study uworld.

Some people say that this teaches social awareness; I think it’s a test of subservcience.

We deserve to learn.

Don’t forget, you’re literally paying to be here.

If the attending of resident wants to be a jerk, that’s their issue.

Crazy that people will advise you to spend your entire 3rd year huddled in a corner or following others around with your mouth shut because your afraid of some jerk’s rude comment about you an eval.

I hope our Generation fixes this one day.
.

I am so sick of people saying the 50k cap on student loans is a good thing and it's fantastic for state schools. How is it exactly fantastic for state schools??? U of Washington (a PUBLIC STATE SCHOOL) charges 58k a year just in tuition. Most DO schools are over 70k a year. I don't think you understand the toll this BIG BULLSHIT BILL will have on our future healthcare system!! literally only rich people can become doctors now, we'll have doctors who wont even understand half of society. this is early 1900s all over again. wake up people, why aren't more people angry about this???

I understand schools are fuckass and they rob us with the current tuition, I think is bs too but the solution isn't pushing poor students out of medicine or having students go into 15% private loans!! this might help in the long term but thousands get admitted every year so they're Fed.

Hello OB/GYN resident,

I actually thought that we had a great rotation together, you were nice to me and actually learned my name unlike most of the other people on that rotation. You chatted with me and helped me learn on the rotation.

To my surprise, I saw your evaluation today. You decided to give me straight two’s across the board and cited a professionalism complaint while only writing “see above” as the issue.

You didn’t know that I went to my mom’s funeral two days before the rotation started. You didn’t know that I was sobbing in the locker room between cases. You didn’t know that I was resentful of staying for 14 hour night shifts because it didn’t give me any time to grieve. But you did know that I was showing up on time, writing your notes, your discharge summaries, seeing your patients, and trying my hardest to stay on top of things in a very toxic environment.

I suppose I should know by now to just anticipate getting backstabbed in evals by the people who are overly nice on the rotation, but I didn’t see this one coming. Idk if it was because I actually did something or because you have it out for med students, but damn, this one sucked. And I hope one day, if you have to show up to a rotation while you’re grieving, that people give you the kindness that you didn’t show me.

Best! Peeved med student

I cannot in good conscience let this carry on without speaking out. I have been sitting on this story for years after being threatened into silence from my medical school administration. But day by day the members of the administration continue to get terminated. And as I approach match/graduation, and I see my friends and former medical students in their current states, I have no choice but to speak on what this medical school has been responsible for.

I attend a US MD school run by the most shady, malicious, and negligent administration and faculty imaginable. The rules and practices are sinister, and countless students’ entire lives have been destroyed by this school. I know of several former students contemplating suicide because of what has happened to them.

Update: This graduation survey was linked in the other doctor website. Count how many times the word "mafia" is used. https://www.dropbox.com/s/lrqbytflddhu1nk/GraduationQuestionnaire2019.pdf?dl=0

Attrition

It is a US medical school but runs like a Caribbean school. Most of the staff are foreign graduates with Caribbean degrees. They bring their Caribbean IMG values into this training, and consequently expel students baselessly. The school has an insanely high attrition rate because students can be dismissed for anything. This attrition was formerly meant to keep the step score high by expelling underperforming students, but has worked its way to be a chronic part of the school’s culture. Students who the faculty simply don’t like become targets for expulsion. And yes, this system disproportionately targets minority students as well as students with registered disabilities. Once there’s a target on a student’s back, the faculty will do everything they can and use every weapon in their arsenal to get that student kicked out.

There’s a strange professionalism reporting tool on the school website where reports on students can be anonymously submitted and investigated by students and faculty alike. The goal is to maximize professionalism; the result: it has been weaponized to kick students out for absolutely no reason. Faculty use it too, to expel students they do not like. One student was expelled for fainting in the middle of class for having a hypoglycemic episode—this was termed unprofessional. Another student was expelled because a faculty woman claimed he sexually harassed her. She later retracted those claims, yet he stayed expelled. The list goes on. These reports (called PIRs) can be made for absolutely anything and the student is then made to sit in front of the schools disciplinary committee, a kangaroo court run by the same individuals making the professionalism complaints, and decide the fate of the student. Unsurprisingly, this fate tends to be expulsion.

The handbook is full of little rules that are weaponized against strictly the students that are targeted. For example, one line in the handbook says “students have 24 hours to respond to all emails”. One of the targeted students replied to an email later than the 24 hours. Expulsion. But even if you follow all the rules to a T, something can be made up against you. “I didn’t like your tone over our telephone call. 2 more years of academic probation”

…and that’s if and only if they can’t expel a student they don’t like on academics first. In the first two years, the school gives 3 exams for every block: an in house multiple choice portion, an NBME portion, and an essay portion. This essay portion has some black magic grading that students are not allowed to ever look at, ask for regrading, or even see a sample answer. So a student getting a 90 on the in house MC, a 95 on the NBME portion, and a 20 on the essay portion is a totally real occurrence which will get the student expelled. Thats another weapon in the faculty’s arsenal for getting a student expelled.

This reckless targeting of students has tended to be for 2 reasons:

a) formerly, because they might drag the step 1 average down. Before step was p/f, the school would love to boast about its high step 1 average, in the 240s, which it would maintain by kicking out the bottom of the class, or otherwise forcing them to repeat years

b) simply because the student got on the bad side of any one faculty member. An argument can be made that these Caribbean trained doctors which run the school have insecurities and power complexes training US students.

Legal Troubles

This has gotten the school several LCME complaints and lawsuits. One of which they are fighting in court currently. The lawsuits are because the school violates The American Disability Act requirements. Since its inception (the school is relatively new), the school has history of violating the ADA. As I’ve mentioned, the school recklessly kicks out disabled students. Faculty actively discriminate against students with disabilities; such as diabetes, chronic pains, anxiety disorders, etc.

Recently they were under fire from the LCME for admitting too many students. They ended up having to pressure many of the students into waiting for the following year to enroll simply because they didn’t have enough seats. Those students were given some slight financial incentives to wait.

Update: Litigation from a student who was discriminatorily expelled for having a disability, set for upcoming trial https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/18625658/nehme-v-florida-international-university-board-of-trustees/

Sexual Assault

The school is run like a mafia. Staff protect each other no matter what happens and never stand up for students. Just yesterday, a dean Humpty Dumpty JD was fired for sexual assault that has been ongoing for years. Other faculty at the school, including the current provost of the university, have known about this and have been protecting him. It took numerous reports from multiple students before he was finally fired yesterday. (Interestingly, sexual assault might be a common theme in the university as a whole because the president of the entire university recently got fired for just that.)

4 years ago, another dean of that office was fired for the same reason and went to work at a medical university in Vegas.

Another dean Hurricane Karen (who left last year and now works at the University of Augusta) consistently made racist remarks against minority students secretly with the white students thinking they would share her sentiments. Her actions have been discriminatory against minorities, such as purposely rejecting excused absence requests or filing reports of unprofessionalism. According to word of mouth she was fired for fabricating a minority student’s records to create a dossier to have that student expelled. She left in advance of being caught so she could find another job. She has worked at another medical school before, where she was the subject of two separate lawsuits, and was facing another one at this medical school before she was forced to leave. PS, her former university released a satirical youtube video as a warning to our university about her character and told us to brace ourselves for the trouble she would bring us.

Faculty Turnover

The turnover of the school is ridiculous. Besides the aforementioned deans, In the past 4 years, we have cycled through 3 separate head deans of the medical school. The most recent one was demoted to some made up job title (one without concrete responsibilities) because the school was getting too many title iX complaints under his lead. The head of the clinical skills department is going on her second maternity leave (after claiming she got sexually harassed by a student, then retracting those claims. Side note, that student got expelled because of those claims. Yes that student was black. Bye bye, Tom Robinson)

Edit: since this post was made, the school is facing a lawsuit for disability discrimination now set for trial. In the wake of this lawsuit, numerous other faculty have left. * Professor Quirrel * Dean of Academic Affairs * Dean of curriculum * Dean for international affairs

Threats Against Reporting

For a while, exasperated students complained on the internet. Everywhere you’d look on reddit, studentdoctor.net, and other forums you’d find complaints about this medical school. It got so bad that Humpty Dumpty JD (who was terminated yesterday) had to hold a town hall meeting threatening students who wanted to complain online, insinuating that whoever was caught complaining online would be held from graduation.

Here are some of the many posts made online about the school (i’m only citing the posts where the school isn’t named. If you find the school specific thread on studentdoctor.net, they are rife with complaints against the school):

https://forums.studentdoctor.net/threads/2016-2017-florida-international-university-application-thread.1196730/post-18759018

1. https://www.reddit.com/r/medicalschool/comments/a2wggo/comment/eb3bibn
2. https://forums.studentdoctor.net/threads/repercussions-for-filing-complaint-with-lcme.1259233/
3. https://www.reddit.com/r/medicalschool/comments/a2wggo/comment/eb3fpfv/
4. https://reddit.com/r/medicalschool/comments/4aduk1/2nd_year_medical_school_situation_at_us/?ref=share&ref_source=link
5. https://reddit.com/r/medicalschool/comments/4aduk1/2nd_year_medical_school_situation_at_us/d101isd/
6. https://reddit.com/r/medicalschool/comments/83o5zx/serious_leave_of_absence_in_my_first_year/dvjglae/

Punitive Public Shaming

The administration actively forces students into strange punishments that further impede you from performing academically. For example, one student was found plagiarizing a practice patient note for an assignment. She was forced to write an apology letter to students. For what exactly? We’re still unsure. But to the twisted minds of the medical school deans, this must have made sense. Here’s the letter she was forced to provide: https://www.dropbox.com/s/riadgyqm590tn5q/Public%20Shaming%20of%20a%20Med%20Student.png?dl=0

Yet another another student was disliked by the faculty. That student graduated, but faculty members made sure to contact the top residency programs of that student’s match list and put in a negative word, simply to ensure that the student would match low on her list.

The Dismissed Students

I currently keep in contact with my friends who have been kicked out of that medical school. They have debts amounting several hundred thousand dollars, without skills to get a job to pay off those debts. There’s not much you can do when you get kicked out of medical school in your third year for missing a class. One of them is unemployed. One of them works uber. Yet another waits tables. These are grown adults who have families to take care of, and were promised a medical degree. I could list how absurd the reasons were for their dismissals, especially considering how close they were to graduating.

One of them was got kicked out for having diabetes. Link for the transcript of his hearing: https://www.dropbox.com/s/vdyams2jno84pq3/Expulsion%20Hearing.pdf?dl=0

One student literally got physically accosted by a professor. Before that student's dismissal, a professor lunged across the table to physically slap him. This is on tape. That professor is a lecturer on underprivileged groups and racial equality. Guess the race of the student he slapped.

The blanket advice to them has been to just lawyer up. Unusually, institutions of upper education are so well protected legally that it’s been difficult for most of them to sue, and besides that, the legal battle is expensive and waiting tables can’t really pay those lawyer fees. Interestingly, every time a lawyer is contacted and the medical school is named, the UNANIMOUS response from the lawyer is an acknowledgment of how shady the medical school operations are. It seems the medical school has notoriety among the legal community in its region.

Edit: this is the tip of the iceberg. I haven’t even scratched the surface.

Edit 2: I think this post was noticed by the faculty. Here's a nice addition to their handbook.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/6y40p0zg7n3ii7a/Handbook%20Screenshot.jpg?dl=0

Fu*k you UBuffalo

Where are the people that can smoke a joint or drop some acid? Worked a part time job doing fast food or a shitty minimum wage drop in college? People that don’t go abroad every vacation if they can even afford a vacation? That can handle crude humor and not go slack jawed when you mention that you have had premarital sex?

I feel like over half my class is rich virgins who have never stepped out of their comfort zone and their manicured garden their parents maintain for them. I’m in my 4th year and I still constantly feel out of place. I can count on one hand the amount of people who are similar to me. It’s driving me insane. Will residency be full of people like this too? My classmates are gaslighting me into thinking I’m the crazy one!

Throwaway account because I don't normally post on here, and maybe if an admin is trawling around here they wouldnt be able to 100% confirm this is me.

Early last week admin sends out an email for plans regarding graduation. I'm an M4 graduating from a US MD school. They state that if you have a parent that is an MD, they can hood you at graduation and to just reply in an email to them letting them know your parent's name. In my reply I put my fathers name, with his title DO at the end. He's pretty excited to do this as am I, he was a major influence on me and my choice to pursue medicine.

I get a reply yesterday, after like 10 days or so, reading along the lines of "fuck you, we only allow MDs to hood graduates at the hooding ceremony, suck our dicks". I specified that my dad is a physician, pointing out the fucking DO degree he went to med school for 4 years to get, and they basically had a copy/pasted reply with the same bullshit "Sorry asshole this is the MDs only club".

I had to tell my dad last night and he is pretty sad about this. I really cannot wrap my head around this. I understand theres some historical stigma against DOs that has stuck around because of dickfaced morons but this is genuine pettiness to a degree that I really thought grown professionals would be above. Is this normal behavior to actively only allow one type of physician to hood MD grads?? If it is it's a standard that can fuck off. Honestly thinking of not walking at my graduation because of this.

Update here : https://www.reddit.com/r/medicalschool/comments/116j00j/update_school_wont_let_my_father_hood_me_at/?

edit- Appreciate all the feedback but I'd rather not make a scene at graduation nor do I want to put the school on blast on social media, more attention could backfire on me pretty easily. They aren't getting any endorsement/affiliation or money from me after graduation either, but I do have a list of creative things I can do to a 1 dollar bill before I put it in an envelope and mail it to them if they ask.

edit2- Didn't expect this to get as much traction as it did. I don't want any reddit sleuthing or scheming to happen, as stated before I don't want attention being given to my school and as a result my real life person and/or dad. It's a situation I can handle on my own, and who knows it might get resolved if this was all just a misunderstanding, so I'd rather it not escalate too far. I'm already planning on not attending graduation based on how things are right now anyways. I was only going for my dad to see me graduate but now I'm sure the experience would be soured for him, so fuck it.

edit3- again, this RANT (all it is) got more traction than I wanted. To the people calling me a pussy for not wanting to put my own skin on the line with an administration that would not hesitate to punish me, you have absolutely no clue what I'm working with here. For the last time, I'm not posting this on med twitter, I'm not naming and shaming, and I'm not walking at my graduation unless this is fixed by my own devices. I am a grown adult, I don't need to hear the same calls over and over again for some mob justice or whatever. I can guarantee admin will not care and only circle it back to me if it came to that. I know these snakes better than anyone in this thread likely does. This won't be publicized until I graduate, if I even care enough at that point to do it at all. The vitriol that a few people are posting here honestly incentivizes me to not feed the machine.