To Be...A Spartan MD

The College of Human Medicine recognizes that the COVID-19 crisis is life-disrupting for everyone. Colleges and universities are navigating this crisis in varying ways. One way is to institute a Pass/Fail grading system. As the pandemic continues, we must consider how students and applicants will be affected moving forward into the latter half of the 2020-2021 academic calendar.  Grades Through Spring 2021   Many colleges and universities have decided to continue instituting a Pass/Fail system for coursework through the spring of 2021. For those of you in which a Pass/Fail or Satisfactory/Unsatisfactory grade is rendered for any courses from winter/spring 2020 through spring 2021, CHM will accept that course grade without bias. This includes coursework that is traditionally considered prerequisite or recommended for many medical school admissions processes. The challenge for medical school admissions committees is that accurate and specific information is always preferre...

Among the countless aspects of life disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, one posed a significant problem for the College of Human Medicine: how to continue interviewing students who apply for admission. Until this year, top candidates were invited by the Office of Admissions to our East Lansing or Grand Rapids community campuses for a series of interviews. “I actually thought about this way back at the end of March when I saw that this was not something that was going to go away magically,” said Joel Maurer, MD, the college’s assistant dean for admissions. The answer, he and other administrators decided, was to interview applicants online, which posed multiple technical and logistical obstacles. Before the pandemic, applicants underwent a series of one-on-one interviews with faculty members, each on a specific topic. The college first tried to duplicate that approach online, but it quickly proved unworkable, Maurer said. A better approach was to have each student interviewed through ...