Read the April MSC Meeting Minutes

Indiana University School of Medicine
Medical Student Council Meeting Agenda
April 18, 2018
Theme: Phase 1 Curriculum

1. Call to order, Opening Remarks, Approval of Minutes
2. Center Reports 6:00 – 6:05 PM

Bloomington

• MUMPs had an open house and we had a classroom talk. We are looking forward to a wellness program put on Elizabeth Davis and we are doing a hike with the Indy campus.

Evansville

• We had Dean Walloch come down last week and we had a food drive last weekend. We have a homeless drive coming next week. Our student center will be opening in this June.

Fort Wayne

• We had a physician showcase for local doctors to come talk about their jobs and tell us what they do. We had current third years sit with new third years about what to expect. Our neuro SIG is doing a presentation about MS.

Lafayette

• We just participated in Purdue’s Spring fest and SPring banquet. The 2nd years got their scores back so that was stressful.

Muncie — they have class and were not present.

Northwest

• Last saturday we had an event where grades 4-8 came on campus. And we are having a spring banquet in May. There is an escape room planned this weekend and there is a competition between the MS1s and MS2s.

South Bend

• Ethics SIG had a celebration. EM SIG had an event for central lines, US guide and we had a suture session with that SIG as well. We had 2 more clinic days and a Women’s day coming up soon.

Terre Haute

• We just elected a new board to our Molly Week free clinic. We had our faculty student awards banquet. The students that stay for the rural health program give their presentations soon.

3. Class Officer Reports 6:05-6:10 PM

Ronit Patnaik,  President, Class of 2018

• Biggest thing is senior reception is coming up. We are looking for help on May 11th from 4:30-6:30. We need help with registration and volunteers. I just want to reiterate what Savannah said, just reach out to us! In addition, we want to make a sense of community throughout IUSM and keep representing your students!

Kishan Shah, President, Class of 2019

• Winding down 3rd year and people are finishing up SHELF exams. So that is outrageous and exciting. The strategic survey that we all filled out, we got 95% participation and got 2500 dollars for our match day celebrations. For connections day on Friday, there is an event at Punch Bowl social from 2-5 pm. Relax, have some fun and come out!

Zain Abedali, President, Class of 2020

• We survived Step 1 which is awesome, we are in T2 right now and it is pretty relaxed. We are starting our rotations on Monday. We are working through MSE to get UWorld discounts through them, looks promising. Looks like the proposal will go through on Wednesday and it will help us pay directly through IUSM, rather than students paying students.

Gabe Gerena, President, Class of 2021

• Same as the class of 2021, met multiple times with Dr. Haywood and Betty for bulk purchases for Step1 and Step2 for 180 and 360 subscriptions.

4. Exec Reports 6:10- 6:15 PM

Julie Bittar- President

• Spring elections went well! We have updates from the rest of our board.

Ben Stivers- VP Leadership

• Alumni events
  • Currently in MIami, but he is running the MSC house elections. This is something that has been talked about for a while. We voted on having one third year on their original campus and one in Indy. All are running unopposed except Ft. Wayne, so that election will be going on.
  • Working on the alumni association events, like IU day is going on in Carmel right now. They are opening it up these events to our medical students. Issues are that they are usually kind of far away in the suburbs. So right now we are working with Peds SIG to pilot that and it will take place in Riley. Details to come.

Chanelle Benjamin- VP Committee Affairs

• Interview Day
  • Went really well and it went on without a hitch. All of the committee recommendations made they are getting academic standing approval. If it a dean’s appointment, you will hear later. But we are just waiting on those.

Vanni Rodriguez- VP Statewide Affairs

• Super SIGs
  • We are going to call them “SIG clusters” now and one of the ideas are that there will be an overarching event theme. You will hear a lot about that later. And there will be a unifying funding source for them as well, which will help.
  • SIG registration is due by april 31st.

Anthony Boeteng- Treasurer

• Number of requests: 27
• Amount requested: $3,344.22
• Beginning balance: $8,829.69
• Current balance: $4,607.98

Rebecca Richardson- Secretary

• We are doing a statewide video update to go out throughout this week and be ready for an email from Julie or Ben.
• We will be updating the MSC website as well and all of the blogs are up to date.
• Contact Whitney Walker at wmwalker@iu.edu if you have any questions about the newsletter or need communications help! She is a rockstar!

5. Senior Speeches 6:15- 6:30 PM

• Ronit — outgoing class 2018 president. Some people from my team have called in and the rest send their regards. In the world of Drake “I was born to make mistakes, but not born to be perfect.” I want to tell you our class made mistakes and we want you guys to learn from it. Our class our second year planned this boat trip and we lost ~$800 and it was one of the first time I really felt like we didn’t communicate with each other well. It wasn’t until we really threw the vigil for Sarah is when we really got together as a team. We set up our own 2nd year show, and even though it wasn’t a financial success, it was so cool to see. We advocated for a lot of mental health resources, like the psychologist we hired. Something that Savannah worked for was a MS3 townhall and it was really great and an awesome success. And we started the peace and reflection room that we hope some of you will use. Number 1 is ee hope that someone will follow up with things, change is slow and everyone feels like the guinea pig, even though class of 2020 takes the cake on that right now. Number 2 is everyone has your back. We have some awesome deans and loud people that can make changes here. Most of the things you petition for does not affect your class, but it can affect others. We wanted to make sure you pay it forward and make IUSM better because you were here.
  • Julie — thank you Ronit for taking the time and being an amazing mentor to all of us!
• Savannah — sorry, I’m in a home depot trying to figure stuff out. Really sad I can’t see your faces. I am a class rep for 2018. I’m not going to give you too much advice, I just want to commend you all for what you all are doing. I am at awe at what MSC and each class is doing. It just keeps getting better. Continue to get your voice heard and all of your classmates voices. Continue to take care of yourself and your well being. Please reach out to me if you need anything! Be kind while having fun and continue to support each other. Your days are numbered and might be depressing, but it is the truth.
  • If anyone in the room needs anything, I am here for you forever!
• Adam — the 2018 class treasurer. This is my 4th year doing this. I and think the piece of advice I’d give is if you really want to do things and someone says no, just keep at it. One of our biggest thing is getting the senior award ceremony to be faster than it has been in the past. Yeah and always looking out for the class that some people may see as problems, just keep advocating.

6. Phase 1 Curriculum Discussion with FCC/CCSC 6:30-7:00 PM

• Q and A discussion with FCC and CCSC representatives
• Lauren — CCSC
• Nate — CCSC
• Joey — FCC
• Fuad — FCC
• Jack — FCC
  • Nate — I will just talk about what our committees are. We work with developing curriculum. CCSC stands for “Curriculum Council Steering Committee” and we look at LCME requirements and we look at problems bubbling up at different levels of curriculum. We often deal with things that come up in other committees, like FCC for example.
  • Lauren — CCCC is 3rd and 4th year, FCC is the 1st and 2nd years, and CCSC kind of deals with all of thems.
  • Nate — the committees really treat students as kind of “full members” and we are there to bring up issues that we hear about and things we can deal with. This brings up the next thing and we saw in the question of how to bring up issues students see in our curriculum. The best way is for students is to contact us or Julie and we can bring up these things directly in our meetings.
  • Fuad — a big thing on how to make things better for courses, specifically, is through SCLCs and course evaluations because we definitely look at those.
  • Lauren — this also applies to 3rd and 4th years. There should be someone at all of these levels to help you and funnel you to the right place. Especially so you can get something done that needs to be addressed.
  • Nate — you can definitely just reach out to us and we can problem shoot everything from there.
• Elizabeth — There are a lot of committees, from what it sounds like. How do you feel like IU is handling it. Do you think we over “committeed” ourselves? Do you think people know who to contact?
  • Nate — I think there were efforts to make it more see through and transparent, and we tried to make sure it was smaller. But I agree. There is no one site that shows you all in one place.
  • Lauren — these are primarily faculty committees that students sit on. They are very school, faculty focused. I think the point of the ACE and SCLC representatives are to kind of be the main filter for students to take their concerns to. We are trying to communicate better about them. I do think they are more at the whim of the faculty. We kind of just sit there to make sure the faculty aren’t doing too much.
  • Joey — SCLC are representatives for different courses and blocks throughout the course. I don’t know if they are doing that at other campuses. Fuad and I are working with the SCLCs around the campus and working through how we need to have a voice with the new curriculum. We tried to fill out forms, but we thought it was adding to more survey burnout. So instead, we were leaning on the SCLCs in indianapolis right before we go through and evaluate a class before our meetings. At least in the future, I think we are trying to get this expanded to other campuses.
  • Fuad — to answer your question Elizabeth, I would say one advantage is that there is a kind of “peer review” with all of the different stages. So FCC is more specific and CCSC will drive the changes.
    • Joey — FCC is more of a suggesting body, whereas CCSC is the driving force to make those changes.
  • Carynn — my question is how proposals come up and how this works in the meetings. Where do these ideas come from and what is triaged as important.
    • Nate — on example is the mandatory attendance change and that was mainly driven by the students. This was through the students petitioning and it eventually came through FCC. They worked really hard on this report. The faculty looked through those and then it went to the CCSC and looked through everything again and decided to make the change there and it happened within the next couple of days after that. We see changes through the LCME, a lot happened there. And we of course do a lot of changes from clerkships.
  • Joey — we do a lot of changes in FCCs through the course surveys. We need an overwhelming majority to make any changes. So for example, if we only have a 25% fill out rate, it will be hard to make change. Students, us, can make changes too in the meeting, be we really just function to make sure the voices of the students are heard.
    • A concern right now, is that you have to pass the class overall in addition to the NBME. We are going to talk about this at our next meeting and right now we are not at liberty to say where the committee is at in discussing this topic. But we are going through and talking about it.
      • Joey — as far as the NBME requirement, Dr. Harrington made the argument that if the student was passing the class well they would blow off the final. I explained to them that the NBME is some of the best resources we have to study for Step and we are all type A students that more than likely won’t blow this off.
    • Lauren — the next question is the difference between SCLC and ACE. SCLC is a course liaison and is there for direct feedback throughout the course. They can reach out directly to the course director. There was a concern with the SCLC was there were too many turnovers and the new changes are 1 SCLC rep throughout all of the courses. This would be important for continuity. The idea behind ACE is that it is like SCLC but for clerkships. This is student you can go through and talk about your experiences/questions, they should be able to find the course director and communicate with the leader. This will also be throughout the 3rd year and you can refer back to who this person is at that time. ACE is newer and some of that is still getting worked out. For example, Patricia is the ACE IM sub-I and by directly communicating through the course director on behalf of students, changes will be made because of her action. So some of the point of this is because some 3rd years don’t know what is going on. For example, in the past if you only got a pass on IM rotation, you couldn’t do an ICU elective during 4th year and got this changed through the ACE. She was able to bridge the miscommunication through the course director and the students themselves.
    • Nate — There is a question online: “if someone wants to reach out to these peer representatives, how do we do this?”
      • The reason for us being here is to get this exchange going on through MSC. A lot of it doesn’t really have a link to the students and it is a Dean’s committee, even though it is kind of linked through MSC. Our hope is by at least coming to MSC we can help better represent students. In term of making sure students know how to reach out to us, is probably going through mscexec@iupui.edu. We even made a wiki page for that as well. But we’d be open to other suggestions
        • Elizabeth — suggesting to work with Whitney Walker an infographic and work with how to contact and how everything is connect.
      • Ronit — another thing you could do with Whitney is sending things through the newsletter throughout the month so people can remember.
        • Joey — going forward each committee is going to have a student version of the minutes and that will go out via the newsletter.
      • Nate — ACE is the academic standards committee. They deal more with grade distribution and throughout all nine campuses. It is important for those people to look at these analysis before the LCME reports go out.
      • Steph — a question online: “what projects are CCSC working on?”
        • One of these is working on anesthesia rotations. There was a question on whether or not this should be a required clerkship. Anesthesia will maintain it’s two-week required rotation. This is an example of what CCSC works on. Every month we review an LCME standard. This is reviewing the phase 1 classes and one of the clerkships. We do this on a rolling basis.
        • Nate — I just got a question online about why radiology is no longer a clerkship. We are splitting radiology across the 4th years and during phases 2 and 3, there will be specific radiology exposure. One of the reasons is that we needed more exposure and rather than learning it at the wrong moment. We are trying to sprinkle it in before it’s necessary.
          • How do these modules work?
          • Nate — we haven’t gotten so far on how to work out the logistics of this, but we are definitely going to do canvas modules.
        • Julie — logistical question for you guys. I know you always try to have a CCSC member that is on MSC as well. Is there a way that CCSC/FCC/CCCC could have a representative come to each meeting to give an update.
          • Lauren — I think it has been like that, but figuring out time-wise how to do this. We had a couple of slides to present. We don’t want to take up all of the time, but if we had a direct thing that you guys want to hear about, that would be fine. That hasn’t been an expectation and I guess it wasn’t really clear if you guys would want that. I think that would be really useful for everyone as well. Again, Nate brought up how there are only 6-8 people. And in addition it would help because there are a lot more students here and could bring things forward at the meetings as well.
            • Julie — I think that is okay on our end. As far as CCSC, we could include just at least one person on the curriculum committees.
          • Stephanie — I think as CCSC we could put a slide together that is relevant and things that we have passed recently. There is something that came up at CCSC that I told them I would raise. And that has to do with whether students would be more willing to do a block schedule for 9 weeks of anatomy and 9 weeks of MCT, rather than concurrent classes. I would be interested to hear the student rep feedback.
            • Michelle — I know personally, I am a little bit of slower learner and I think the longer time frame to do labs and that is something to consider. Are we going to further divide our groups. Just the lab component would be confusing for logistics.
            • Tony — I asked that question before and it’s because the PT students don’t do block schedules and that was what they said.
            • Gabe — I think while we were taking the course, there were a lot of students talking about how to get used to studying and a lot of people were thinking that block scheduling would be better. Looking back in retrospect, I think it gave us time to adjust to med school. I think the time schedule kind of helped us make those adjustments. I think the block schedule could be helpful, but at the end I think the way it is now was very helpful for many students.
              • Steph — This isn’t on the table right now, but I wanted to make sure it was brought up.
            • Nate — I think the big question from us is how to better communicate with MSC. Any other ideas/questions on who the heck we are or communicating with one another.
              • Zain — I think any report from students on this committee into the newsletter would be great. I think that would go a long way.
              • Carynn — I think any type of update, there are some touchy things that could cause alarm throughout the school. Maybe it would be more things that you want our opinion on. I think that would be the best way to communicate. I think that is the best way.
              • Lauren — echoing that, being the committees are having us “invited”, while we have a lot of power, there are still faculty that have to be involved and not as student run as other committees. I think yea, things happen that don’t make a lot of sense, so there is a component of filtering. We are aware of things that shouldn’t happen and that we are kind of at the whim of the faculty.
              • Joey — the student minutes are compiled by faculty and students as well and they can pick and choose information to put them in the newsletter. It is a super new thing that we just talked about a couple of meetings ago. And we’re hoping that it can be a history kind of thing. We made the wiki before Whitney came, and we are just working on streamlining people.

7. Adjourn meeting at 7 pm