Interested in a spot in Georgetown University SOM? [Show Summary]

Dr. Ellen Dugan, Georgetown Medical School’s Senior Associate Dean for Admissions and Financial Aid, describes how cura personalis, or care of the whole person, drives the Georgetown experience and curriculum. 

Interview with Dr. Ellen Dugan, Georgetown Medical School’s senior associate dean for admissions [Show Notes]

Welcome to the 459th episode of Admissions Straight Talk. Thanks for joining me. Are you ready to apply to your dream medical schools? Are you competitive at your target programs? Accepted's Med School Admissions Quiz can give you a quick reality check. Just go to accepted.com/medquiz, complete the quiz, and you'll not only get an assessment but also tips on how to improve your qualifications and your chances of acceptance. Plus, it's all free. 

Our guest today is Dr. Ellen Dugan, Senior Associate Dean for Admissions and Financial Aid at Georgetown University School of Medicine. She is a Hoya through and through. She earned her MD at Georgetown University School of Medicine and then completed her residency training in Emergency Medicine, also at Georgetown. Following four years of service in the National Health Service in rural West Virginia, Dr. Dugan returned to Georgetown and has been on the faculty there since 1990. She served on the Admissions Committee for 10 years prior to becoming the Associate Dean. In addition to her admissions duties, she is an Associate Professor in the Department of Emergency Medicine and formerly served as the Vice-Chair and Interim Academic Chair in the Department of Emergency Medicine at Georgetown. 

Can you give us an overview of Georgetown University School of Medicine's curriculum program for those listeners who aren't that familiar with it? [2:10]

I'm happy to. That's our new curriculum, which they basically started revising in 2015-16. Our graduating class of 2021 was the first class to go all the way through, so it's fairly new. It's divided up into three phases. The first 18 months of the first and second year, or the foundational phase, are made up of six blocks of core content. They’re organ-system-based modules that integrate basic science disciplines with doctoring training if you will. The doctoring courses are called "cura personalis," referring to and uniting the development of professional skills that are unique to doctoring, like physical diagnosis, communications, ethics. This runs through all the blocks. There are also intercessions that are one week long that are emphasizing topics critical to physicians in healthcare. An example would be the opioid epidemic. Then they have medical student brand rounds all through the first three years.

The core clinical phase is the third year, which is blocked out into 4-8-week core clerkships. Those would be medicine, surgery, OB-GYN, pediatrics, family medicine, psychiatry, neurology, and three two-week selectives, or electives. Then there's the advanced clinical phase, which is the fourth year, and that's made up of 37 weeks. Three of those four-week blocks are required. One is four weeks in emergency medicine, and then the other two are four-week blocks in doing acting internships where they function as interns so that they get the confidence a...