Tag: KCU-COB

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!

Immunology Block

Oy Vey!

I tell myself I’m going to do better every single time, and that I’m going to change into better study habits, go to class more, stay on top of things, and live my best possibly healthy self while here.

Courtesy of giphy.com

Yea that’s a joke. Maybe I should look into hiring a personal life coach/motivator, because my self techniques are definitely NOT working right now.  I’m halfway through my first semester of medical school and I still have a lot of work to do. Not sure if I’ll ever get on top of things, but just like always, I’m at the crossroads of just finishing a block and about to start another. So of course I think I’ll miraculously change my current set-in-stone habits when in reality they will probably just get worse.

But let’s get into what you are all really here for. How does immunology in medical school go and how did I approach it?

COB Immunology vs COM Immunology

For those of you new here, I did a one year master’s program at KCU, which happens to be the current medical school I attend. The master’s program I attended is affectionately called “COB” for college of biosciences, while the medical school is designated as “COM” for college of medicine. If you are interested in going into the COM program like most of the students who partake in the COB program, then here are some things you should know:

Books

The authors of the book(s) that you use in COB and COM for this course wrote 2 versions: A large, very detailed more molecular based version of things and a smaller, more condensed version of things. As you can see, the blue book is larger and thicker, and it has a TON more text in it. The purple one is smaller and thinner, and honestly even though the chapters are about 20-25 pages each, the figures take up a lot of space/pages. In reality there really isn’t that much text.

The figures are the same. The content is the same, with the exception that one is paired down. And of course the authors are the same, so literally it’s the same book, just one is more detailed and one isn’t.

Why? Well in COB, it is a program designed to yes, help you get into medical school because it’s all hard sciences, BUT it is also geared towards those that are interested in becoming scientists and researchers. The whole time you are in COB quite honestly you learn SO.MUCH.MORE.DETAIL about a lot of these core classes, because they are assuming you may decide to research. You need this background and minute detail in this case.

Whereas in COM, you really only learn a very general overview of things and then at the end they hit you with a lot of clinical stuff which honestly, I did terrible in.

Detail:

Again, you learn more detail in COB than COM as noted above. Say for example, the molecular pathways of activating T and B cells, we had to learn every single step in COB. Every step! And then only ended up getting like 2 questions on it. Ugh I was so mad that I spent all that time on it. But, we needed to know those pathways in molecular for the next test block, so it just made me lazier in studying for molecular at that point in time.

In COM, you kinda learn the activation pathways for T cells, but it’s really general. There aren’t really any specific names for the enzymes involved (there are a few key ones to know/go over) and then it’s like here’s the pathway but you just need to know what happens in the end. For B cells, the book didn’t even really discuss it much. We had a few practice questions on it but NONE on the exam.

What I’m saying is the focus is very different between COB and COM, even though it is taught by the same people.

Questions:

Dr. Shnyra teaches the COB immunology course AND the COM course at the Kansas City campus. Dr. Bowden teaches the immunology course for the COM students here in Joplin. They teach slightly differently, but overall it’s the same stuff as they go off the books. Both teachers ask questions very similarly on exams. Just like in COB, in COM Dr. Shnyra sends out practice questions. And just like in COB, you need to pick the most correct answer out of the bunch. Dr. Shnyra has a ton of questions by the way in a bank, so if you go from COB to COM, you will get new questions when he sends out the practice sets. Most COBer’s used both the old questions from COB and the new ones sent to us during our COM course.

Breakdown of the Exam:

The midterm consisted of 65 questions:

Histo: 15 questions

Immunology: 50 questions

This first test heavily tested if you understood the difference between innate and adaptive immune systems, and if you could tell the difference between MHC class 1 versus class 2. It is very similar in COB, as this course tends to be taught more broadly at first then narrows in to more detail as you progress.

Final: 85 questions from immunology only.

The final was cumulative, minus the histology information.  Unfortunately because the midterm was easier for me I didn’t try to hard on the second test. Which was a massive mistake for me (I seem to making a lot of those here). Either way, in both COB and COM they really like to test hypersensitivity, because that is very relevant to your future patients that you will be treating. In COM there are more diseases you are tested on, but are more rare when treating patients in real life (but still need to be aware of).

How I studied:

#notsponsored

I completely filled up my sketchbook between biochemistry and musculoskeletal, so I had to get a new one. They are by this company called Denik, which you can find at Michael’s craft stores.  I like that the covers have more strength and girth to them than the hardcover sketchbooks, but are still soft and mold-able enough that I can move them fairly easily. They are a bit more expensive, but the money you pay goes towards schools in less privileged countries. Which really means I feel less awful about spending the money. Totally wish this was sponsored but long story short, I like their sketchbooks.

So much so I ended up buying 3.

I didn’t attend class very much although I heard great things about the Joplin professor for this campus. I found myself not able to focus very much sitting in class over the past few weeks, and felt it was better to try to self-study. There are pros and cons with that though.

Immuno notes

Pros include that I could sleep in and go at my own pace. Especially since I had a hard time paying attention in class, it was better that I didn’t feel I was wasting valuable study time and using it for something else instead.

Cons include that I am a terrible self motivator. And really didn’t stay on top of things very well.

But because I self studied, I actually ended up reading the book from cover to cover. Each lecture was correlated with one lecture, so instead of reading the powerpoint slides and just trying to piece things together from there, I read the book. There was some great background and explanations with doing it this way, but also a lot of additional information that wasn’t super necessary/on the lecture slides.

The extend of signaling, which my version was more detailed than the class version.

I also didn’t really feel the need to look at both campus’ lectures this time. Because each lecture has to correlate with the learning objectives posted, each of those learning objectives came from the book. If I felt I needed more explanation and couldn’t get it from the book or my campus’ lecture slides, I would hop on over to the other campus’ slides to see if there was a better explanation there!

I also did a lot of concept maps and drawings for immunology to help organize my thoughts in my book. My first pass was reading the chapter, the second pass was making notes on that chapter, and the third pass was reviewing the notes and/or looking at lecture slides. I would have done slightly better if I spent more time on the last 2 lectures as there were many questions about diseases and disease pathology that I just couldn’t answer on this year’s test.

If you have never taken immunology before, I still stand by using “How the Immune System Works” by Lauren Sompayrac (which was mentioned in one of my COB posts). It doesn’t matter which edition you get, in fact you could still get the 2nd or 3rd as it is much cheaper than the newer one. They don’t really change. I currently have the 4th and I believe E has the 5th version. Literally the same book except a different color cover.

This breaks things down really easily and helps explain some basic concepts in immunology. There are also some great figures in this book regarding pathways that sometimes Dr. Shnyra uses (not sure about Dr. Bowden) but in general can help make things understandable. I recommended this book to several other first years and they got great mileage out of it.

Scheduling:

This was a 3 week course. Our midterm was on the second Monday of the course, and our final was on the last Friday of the 3 weeks. As medical school is progressing, we increasing have other testing and competencies thrown at us that aren’t just involved in the core course we are in.  During this block, we had our first experience with 2 tests in one week on top of an SP encounter (or our practice sessions on how to interact with patients using actors). If you head on over to my Testing Schedule in Medical School post, this will give you a broader view of the amount of testing/competencies I’ve had so far.

Thankfully we didn’t have anatomy lab this time around on top of learning how to deal with juggling multiple testing situations this time.

As always, comment down below for things you found helpful or would like to hear about next!