Dean’s Message, April 2014
It’s springtime here in Tallahassee, time for March Madness and Match Day. We had a wonderful Match Day celebration in Ruby Diamond Concert Hall on March 21 and were pleased with the results for our 115 graduating seniors. This is our 10th graduating class, and we’re graduating our first three Honors Medical Scholars, who came through our undergraduate FSU Honors program. We had a slightly higher percentage of students stay here in Florida for their matches this year (39 percent), hopefully reflecting the work we’ve done in building new GME programs in Florida. We had nine residents match to our programs in Pensacola, Tallahassee and Fort Myers. We continue to do better than the rest of the country (52 percent vs. 42 percent) in primary care (internal medicine, family medicine, pediatrics and OB-GYN) and are pleased with the numbers who matched in general surgery, emergency medicine and psychiatry.
We also held our annual Clerkship Directors Meeting in conjunction with Match Day. I was pleased to interact with so many of our faculty from the campuses who really make our model work on a daily basis. They met as specialty groups on Thursday, and on Friday they had a joint meeting where Nancy Hayes provided a thorough update on our progress with curriculum redesign. We’re ready to launch the first integrated summer course this year for the Class of 2018, and we’re hard at work developing the next courses to fully implement this patient-focused, competency-based and fully integrated curriculum over the next two to three years. Multiple small working groups are engaged in this exciting process. Lynn Romrell then reported on a survey of program directors who have received our students as residents. It’s gratifying to see how well our students are perceived by their programs. Amazingly, the program directors rated 83 percent of our students in the top half of their respective resident classes. I guess we truly have created the Lake Wobegon School of Medicine, where all of our students are well above average! Romrell also presented a graduate survey that describes in great detail how much our students value their education and how well-prepared they feel for residency.
Thanks to our faculty and staff for making this medical school such a good place to learn, where our graduates are highly sought for their quality, skills and incredible talents.
Best wishes,
J.
John P. Fogarty, M.D.
Dean