The Alpert Medical School did not accept transfer students for the current academic year due to alterations in its clerkship curriculum, according to Philip Gruppuso, associate dean for medical education.
During clerkships, students gain personal experience with patients, working full days under the supervision of faculty members in different areas of medicine.
Instead of having a window of six quarters to complete core clerkships in their third and fourth years of medical school, students will be allotted only four and a half quarters, Gruppuso said. Students will now be able to complete all clerkships before making a career choice.
"One important purpose of core clerkships is to expose students to the breadth of medical practice so they can make an informed career choice," Gruppuso said, adding that it "used to be that our students would be doing core clerkships so late that they would already be on residency interviews."
Generally, the amount of transfer students accepted is determined by the number of students in clerkships, he said. With the shorter span to complete clerkships, the number of students per clerkship will increase.
In addition, with the new medical education building downtown, "the class has grown substantially," said Arnold-Peter Weiss, associate dean of medicine, making it "harder to fit somebody in."
Grupposo said the Med School "didn't want to restrict the flexibility of the students" by filling the core clerkships up with transfer students.
It is very likely no transfers will be accepted in the upcoming years either, Gruppuso said.
The dwindling of transfer students is "not a huge change" though. There are "never a lot of transfer students," Weiss said, adding that students are very well informed when choosing a medical school and as a result very few drop out and create spaces for transfer students to fill.
Transferring during medical school is an "exception rather than a route to admission," Weiss said.
Exceptions include larger schools that "accept transfer students for tuition revenue" because they do not have to fully train these students, and offshore schools that do not have their own clerkships for their students, Gruppuso said. Outside of these cases, transferring is not very common.
"If all the stars line up then sometimes it happens," Weiss said.
