Category: My Master’s Experience

Attending a Master’s Part 5: Comp Exam & Mini Thesis

Okay. You’ve finally finished your courses and taken your final exams. You are so close to being done you can almost taste it! And then FREEDOM!

Well, at least for a bit. If the goal is medical school your freedom will be short lived. But hey! At least you’ll get a fancy degree!

What is on the exam?

160 questions are on the comprehensive exam. The breakdown includes 20 questions exactly from each “core” class. No more, no less. Each professor typically holds a review for their class. Sometimes they will hold multiple. So, if a professor teaches more than one class, you will have more than one review with them (usually anyways).

These are the following core classes:

  • Anatomy I
  • Anatomy II –> You will have one review (or at least we did) for both anatomy courses.
  • Physiology I
  • Physiology II –> Same thing as anatomy, one review. Or however Dr. Anderson does it for that year.
  • Molecular–> We had 3 reviews, one for each professor that taught.
  • Biochem –> we had 3 reviews just like molecular.
  • Epi –> He had us pick questions during the review. DO NOT SOLELY RELY ON THIS. Maybe all of the questions we picked ended up being on the second chance exam? But not many of the questions we picked ended up on our exam…
  • Immuno. We had a review, but in our year immuno was in the spring so we didn’t need that much of a refresher course.

Some of your professors will point you in somewhat of a direction, but others will tell you to basically know everything from their course.

Additional Information on the Comp Exam:

You will have 2 weeks to review. A week of straight reviews, and a week to study completely without any other commitments from the school. Or at least that is how they ran it during my year (2017-2018).

You will also have 2 tries to take it. The first try, and then if you don’t pass, you take it a week later. The second exam will have an entirely new set of questions, so don’t waste your time trying to remember any of the questions you had on the first exam. Professors are required to give double the number of exam questions to what they will put on the exam for this reason.

Originally we were told that we would find out later in the day what our scores were after that first try. However, we didn’t find out until the following Monday or Tuesday. It was a bit frustrating, as many of us wanted to know if we needed to start studying again. If we did, then we lost out on all that time to study over the weekend before our scores were given.

I’m not sure how many people did not pass on the first try.  You need a 70% or above to pass and they do not tell you your score. They only tell you if you pass or fail. I believe if you fail you can review what you got wrong. But, seeing as I personally did not have to go that route and don’t know anyone (or wasn’t close enough to anyone) who had to retake it, I can’t give you any more information.

Mini-Thesis:

In previous years, the students had to do a presentation in front of their class and their administrators. Long story short, that was cut back due to students having a bad relationship with a former dean and their ability to get into KCU-COM. I won’t necessarily go through all the juicy deets that were handed down, but apparently “all the rumors are true” from a previous student.

So. In order to avoid that monstrosity, our year had to do a mini-thesis. It could be on anything we wanted, but it had to be 25 pages. Which was SO. DAMN. HARD.

IDK about you, but uh, I didn’t have a ton that I wanted to write about. Either topics were too broad or too narrow. It’s hard to write something decent when you have a page limit. I understand having a thesis is long, but in majority of those cases you are going through every painstaking step from start to finish. And you are doing all the work. With a mini-thesis, you are basically just doing a literature review.

In E’s case, he used the data that he collected from some of his published papers, but overall he just did a lit review based on a topic that he had already written several papers on. He was also very well versed in his subject. So he didn’t struggle as hard to find his resources as I personally did, just because he already knew where he was getting most of his information from. His only big obstacle was writing.

I chose to do mine on an ENT topic (since I had worked in ENT last as a scribe and it was the most interesting to me at the time) and antibiotics. Mine was definitely hard to find information on. Well, good information anyways.

But I digress.

A lot of people had issues writing this mini thesis.

The other issue we had is different professors had different levels of caring on how well your mini-thesis was. Some of them automatically gave an A if you turned it in and hit the required page numbers and required amount of resources. Mine, however, wanted to act like we were actually getting published and expected a lot more. Which was very unfair, given how some professors didn’t have high standards.

Ultimately, none of the professors really wanted to deal with this mini-thesis. This, and in combination with it not being uniform (a complaint of ours) lead to them scrapping this as a potential end of the year project on top of the comprehensive exam.

For the 2018-2019 class, they didn’t have any projects to do. The COB professors must not have agreed on what end of the year project to have the students do OR just didn’t hammer out the details for this year. Who knows, maybe they won’t do a project anymore!

Hope this helps. Cheers!

Attending a Master’s Part 4: Graduation!

E and I on graduation day!

Ah, graduation day! Finally!  You’ve finally made it!

Well, sort of.

Hopefully in the coming years the schedule/calendar works out a little bit differently than ours did.

We had our graduation ceremony before we could actually graduate or finish the program. So at that time, we still had final exams, our comprehensive exam, and our mini-thesis due! This meant that graduation was conditional: You had to pass your finals and comprehensive exam, and you had to have turned in your mini-thesis and gotten at least a satisfactory job by your advisor before they could let you graduate. Which means a little bit more stress added onto your plate, especially if you were on the cusp of potentially not passing a course.

I’m assuming that the reason we had it so early was due to reservation of space many years ahead of time.

Because that is literally the only thing I can think of as to why the schedule worked out the way it did.

Negative Side of Walking Before the End of the Program

I walked the stage a month before I could actually be done with the program. Even though it was an amazing memory and I had a great time with my friends and family, I wish we didn’t end up graduating a month before I had all those hurtles left. At the time, it almost gave me a false sense of hope that I was done when really I still had the chance of not passing the program.

You had all the excitement of “graduating”, wearing the cap & gown, your family being in town, and walking the stage. Yet you had the let down of not actually receiving your degree and knowing full well when the weekend was over you had to go back.

See this face?

Yes. That is a proof photo. I’m to lazy & broke to buy the real thing okay? Okay.

Yea this was the my face the whole time only because I knew how much shit we still had to do.

Our graduation day ceremony was held at the same time as the graduating medical school class. So while they were all excited because they were actually done, most of us COB students were like okay yea but like I have to get back to studying so can we be done?

Courtesy of wifflegif.com

There were several classmates who did walk in the ceremony, but ended up not graduating/passing say their comprehensive exam or their finals. So this ultimately ended up being like a slap in the face to some of my classmates because they got to walk during graduation, but couldn’t obtain their degree. (In some cases they let you repeat one course so you could get your degree, in others they didn’t).

I’m hoping that in the future, the school will try to take that into consideration for the upcoming classes. But just the ceremony itself was a lovely ceremony and I’m happy my mom got to fly out to watch me walk across the stage.

We ended up having the ceremony on May 5th, and we took our final comprehensive test on June 1st. In early July I finally got my diploma mailed to me! Yay!
Positive Side of This:

Well 1) you get to graduate (as long as you don’t throw the towel in after the ceremony). 2) You get to walk. 3) You are almost done!

It was also very nice to have one of my favorite professors hood me during the ceremony! About a month or so before we were set to graduate we got to vote on two professors who would hood the COB students. We chose Dr. Anderson and Dr. Zaidi.

I believe the med students either choose a faculty member that they jived with or a family member who is also a physician to come hood them. There were even some couples and parents who got to hood the graduates! So in my case, I don’t have a family member who serves as a physician, so I will probably have a professor. In E’s case, he has a family friend that he could ask. And if his little brother follows in his footsteps, E would be super happy to hood him!

Our keynote speaker at the ceremony was an active female physician who practiced in a women’s oncology unit. She is a KCU alum and her story was incredibly encouraging and inspiring to hear. If there is one thing KCU knows how to do, it is pick alums who’ve had incredibly inspiring stories. Looking back, both keynote speakers for our white coat ceremonies  for Joplin and KC were inspiring and fantastic as well!

They even had a 3 star general (who is also a D.O.) who spoke at our ceremony. He stated he was the command surgeon at the base during the Blackhawk down mission in Somalia. Talk about crazy. Also, can I say I’m thankful that I’ve only had to stay on US soil and go to school, living my happy little life? Because I am. I wouldn’t do well in a combat area. Or with pirates. Unless I pretend to be a pirate for Halloween…

But any who, let me reel it on back in from my rambling! It was encouraging to see the numerous amount of medical students graduating. It meant that someday I could too. And what do you know, I got the call to take me off the waitlist literally 3 days after we graduated that weekend.

Giphy.com
Looking Back:

I cannot believe a year ago this is where I was. I’ve stated this before, but I really did not want to initially do a master’s program. I was so incredibly against it.

But honestly, when I made that last minute decision to move to Kansas City, it was one of the best moves I could have done for myself. Both academically and personally. I’ve said this in my Looking Back post; I needed to change the scenery, and the people.

A year ago from graduation, or the beginning of May, I was uncertain about my future. Am I getting into medical school? If not, how do I decide to use my master’s degree? Do I continue to pursue medicine? Where am I even going to live?

So many unanswered questions.

All of which I just needed to let the universe roll forward and to let life take the reins. So much has happened in this past 1 year alone (which honestly hasn’t felt like a year has gone by if I’m being truthful). Both fantastic things and some really upsetting things have occurred.

But I am grateful for the opportunities and growth that has occurred since graduating one year ago.

Cheers!