An inside look at the impact of COVID with Darrell Nabers [Show summary]

Darrell Nabers, Assistant Dean for Admissions and Recruitment at Loyola University of Chicago's Stritch School of Medicine, shares how the school is adapting its program and admissions policies to life in the time of COVID-19.

Changes to Loyola Stritch's program and admissions practices as a result of the COVID pandemic [Show notes]

Our guest today is Darrell Nabers, Assistant Dean for Admissions and Recruitment at Loyola University of Chicago's Stritch School of Medicine. Darrell earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Whittier College and Golden State University, respectively. He then held various admissions positions from 2000 to 2005 before joining the University of Chicago's admissions staff where he served in different roles until 2015. He joined Loyola Chicago Stritch in 2015 as Director of Admissions and became Assistant Dean for Admissions and Recruitment in February 2019. Darrell was a guest on the podcast last year for Episode 325. Our latest interview focuses on the changes to Loyola Stritch's program, and specifically its admissions practices as a result of the COVID pandemic.

How is the Loyola Stritch medical school program different today due to COVID-19 than it was a year ago? [2:19]

It's very different. One example would be the fact that I am speaking to you from my home and not from my office. We as a staff have been working from home since March 20th. There have been discussions about when we'll return to the building. They have not yielded a decision, and because we're part of a larger institution with an undergraduate campus and the graduate campuses, that has to be a unified decision. As a health sciences division, we have been able to advocate for our third and fourth year students to get back into their courses, which has happened.

So we have third years who are doing mostly didactic-structured content for the first couple of months before they begin their rotations. The fourth years had to take a pause on their clerkship training when the COVID crisis hit, and this allowed them to make up the clerkships before we had third years overlapping with them. That's a difficult thing to do, to have two classifications overlap and then the third shift. Once the fourth years make up the clerkship rotations in the next few weeks, then the third years will move into theirs, but they're currently participating in clinical simulations and exercises and mostly virtual content, but we'll be back in the clerkships soon. And then of course, the fourth years move into their sub-I’s and electives.

For the first and second years, we are virtual. So there's an asynchronous curriculum which allows students to log in and conduct their coursework. There are also live lectures that are provided through a virtual platform. The goal is to bring both groups back at some point this year. We have preliminarily determined the early part of October for the first years to be back on, to actually be on campus for the first time. It's just going to require attention to the different health mandates by the state. Our main campus made a plan early to bring undergraduates back to campus,