Hey @HopingMD! Just to give you more context to make an informed decision on some of the things you mentioned, I’ve split it into 2 responses since there is a character limit.
Hospital Team Experience
The one class you were talking about on shadowing nurses and non-physicians, is this course. It’s a 2 week experience at the end of Year 1 which you complete at the hospital where you did Year 1 Docent. When every other UMKC undergrad leaves at the end of finals, you stay for 2 more weeks to complete this. The purpose of it is not to prepare you for the boards. In Year 1, as a 17/18 year old, you won’t be taking anything that even remotely prepares you for boards. As a physician, you realize that for an entire hospital to work, you need a lot more than just physicians, and to appreciate that, by seeing what they do. Honestly, I would say my one complaint is that I would much rather have done it throughout Year 1 or in the second semester of Year 1, and get 2 extra weeks for vacation, but as far as the purpose of it, it serves that purpose well, I think.
Credit hours
Here is the policy on how undergraduate credit hours are calculated: http://www.umkc.edu/provost/policy-library/documents/AcademicCreditHourEquivalenciesPolicy.pdf
So, for example, in a normal 16 week semester, Year 1 Anatomy lecture meets for about 3 hours a week. So it’s worth 3 credit hours. The same usually works for MED classes in the first 2 years - LBMS (1 credit hour), Medical Terminology (1 credit hour), Fundamentals of Medical Practice (5 credit hours). These classes are all graded Pass/Fail only.
The anchor courses are more a new thing that just started Fall 2013, and that’s for your undergraduate degree that comes from the UMKC undergrad university. The med school has no say in that change really. It affects all undergrads. The one thing that is stupid I think is that if you leave UMKC, very few of those anchor courses probably transfer to other universities
Anatomy
Year 1 you take undergraduate-level Anatomy lecture with Anatomy Lab. The lecture is a normal didactic lecture in an auditorium and lab is where you work with anatomical plastic models and looking at slides under microscope for basic histology. They were 2 separate classes with separate grades.
Year 2 you take medical school level Anatomy in Human Structure Function. Human Structure Function is Gross Anatomy, Histology, Embryology, Physiology, and some Biochemistry thrown in. It’s taught by organ systems. When I had it, there were lab sessions, where you could look at anatomical models and looked at prosected cadavers to study certain cases to appreciate clinically relevant anatomy. It was kind of funny, bc as medical students we didn’t dissect but in the same anatomy course taught to dental school students (the professors were the same for both), dental students dissected cadavers. Have they now taken out even prosected cadaver viewing in that course? If so, that’s really a shame. I would double check this with a student who is there now who took the class.
Years 4-6 you can take anatomy dissection electives that are 1 month in length, which are only offered specific months:
–Thorax and Abdomen (http://med2.umkc.edu/electives/browserecord.php?-action=browse&-recid=226)
–Head and Neck (http://med2.umkc.edu/electives/browserecord.php?-action=browse&-recid=225)
–Upper and Lower Extremity Cadaver Dissection (http://med2.umkc.edu/electives/browserecord.php?-action=browse&-recid=1906)
The ones I knew who took the electives were usually people who were going into a surgical specialty or who felt their Anatomy knowledge for Step 1 was weak and had room in their schedule.