Words of advice for premeds and medical school applicants [Show summary]

Dr. Sunny Nakae discusses CUSM’s approach to training the next generation of great physicians and shares wisdom from her book, Premed Prep: Advice from a Medical School Admissions Dean.

Are you curious about CUSM? Read on for info about this new program and for valuable tips for all medical school applicants [Show notes]

How do you prepare to become a physician? How do you prepare to apply to medical school? Our guest has written the book on the topic, after two decades in medical school admissions. 

Today's guest, Dr. Sunny Nakae, is the Senior Associate Dean for Equity, Inclusion, Diversity, and Community Partnerships at the California University of Science and Medicine School of Medicine, one of the country's newer medical schools. Dr. Nakae earned her bachelor's and MSW from the University of Utah, and then her PhD in higher ed at Loyola University of Chicago. She started working in medical school admissions in 2006 as Director of Diversity at Northwestern's Feinberg School of Medicine, moved to Loyola Stritch for six years as Assistant Dean for Admissions, Recruitment, and Student Life, and then another two years at UC Riverside, again as Associate Dean, and then last year joined CUSM as Senior Associate Dean for Equity, Inclusion, Diversity, and Community Partnerships. All that experience is reason enough to invite her to Admissions Straight Talk. However, I also want to discuss her fantastic book, Premed Prep: Advice from a Medical School Admissions Dean. 

Can you give us an overview of the CUSM MD program, focusing on its more distinctive elements? [2:18]

California University of Science and Medicine School of Medicine is a community-based medical school. That means that we are really focused on training in a lot of different sites. We're focused on primary care. Our main affiliation is Arrowhead Regional, but we also have sites at St. Bernadine's and other places. We're in inland Southern California, so about 90 minutes/a little under two hours from the coast. It's a very underserved and economically divested region of California, so our goal is to produce more physicians that want to train in our region, and stay in our region, and take care of the people that live here. We have early clinical experiences, where students are placed with preceptors and clinics, outpatient settings, so they get very comfortable with outpatient and preventative care and ongoing clinical home settings.

Another distinctive element that we're developing is we've recently changed our service learning into something called Change. Students will have a similar placement with a community partner that they do on the clinical side through the Care program. Care and Change together are going to create this opportunity for students to actually learn about structural determinants of health, and what our director calls health adjacent services. It's a way for us to give back as a school, which is important for us. We want to make a departure from the typical pedagogical models that use a colonialist approach of, "We're going to come in and do what we want on our terms, and demand certain things of you, and impose our learning objectives on you, and then go away. And then a new group of students is going to come in and do the sam...