Read the Jan. 2018 MSC Minutes

Indiana University School of Medicine
Medical Student Council Meeting Agenda
January 24, 2017
Theme: Communications, Funding, SCLCs

1. Call to Order, Opening Remarks 6:00

• Julie — welcome to the first meeting of 2018. We are going to start with campus updates and then go to class updates and then exec updates. Then we will get an update from Whitney Walker, part of the communication department on the new newsletter and how to post on the new events calendar. Discussion about SCLC restructuring and then a final vote at the end of the meeting. Possible funding guides and then SCLC restructuring

2. Campus Updates 6:00-6:10

• Bloomington
  • Grant — hello and we really enjoyed the luncheon. We are working on projects with the MUMPS group. We are also working on our spring open house. We are looking forward to end of year banquet. And we are getting a new member for next year to replace me when I move to indy.
• Evansville
  • Vandenberg medical county society talked about burnout at a meeting this week with the students. Had a MUMPS event.
• Fort Wayne
  • Couple of events last week to talk about unconscious bias and talk about medical malpractice.
• Lafayette
  • Got together with athletic training and did a module with them. Have Step review goin on Saturdays and Sundays.
• Muncie
  • Last week we had exercise physiology testing results, so that was pretty cool and it was mostly for the first years. You got to see what your changes in results from the past year. Next week on monday we are continuing to talk about financing for future physicians.
• Northwest
  • Don’t have a whole lot going on. Had a proposal meeting for things coming up. Funding for wellness committee. Having a vote on it the coming Monday.
• South Bend
  • First student clinic day this past month. Had an ethics talk about the podcast called “Playing God” about triage. This next week are having an ultrasound event to practice our skills.
• Terre Haute
  • Third years are getting ready to have rural health project. Family medicine SIGs are having event here

3. Class Officer Reports 6:10-6:15

• Ronit Patnaik, President, Class of 2018
  • Congrats to the MS2 class on an outstanding second year show! Possibly the funniest one yet.
  • We need volunteers to help us set up our match day party. Class officers and MSC execs, please email Ronit Patnaik (rpatnaik@iupui.edu) by January 24th (tonight) to sign-up. We’d LOVE your help & this is a great way to figure out how you want your Match Day to go. All of you are welcome and encouraged to attend the noon ceremony at the campus center as well: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Mh2RnZxXBgIDSUD9t_xHciCC0slnRTiILTQzwfd_pZI/edit#gid=0
  • Peace and Reflection room dedication – March 6th, 2018 @ Gatch Hall 600 (Open house – 4 to 6 pm; Speakers – 5 pm) – A gift to all IUSM students & In memory of our classmate Sarah Elsarrag. I encourage all of you to come.
  • MS 4 updates – Military, Ophthalmology and Urology candidates have matched! The rest of us find out on March 16th.
• Kishan Shah, President, Class of 2019
  • We are talking to the company that sold us the jackets that messed them up. We are working on that! If people are asking you questions, it should get solved by this weekend or next week.
• Zain Abedali, President Class of 2020
  • Second year show went really well, despite the bad weather. Made around $3,000 and sold over 200 tickets.
  • Four weeks left of courses and then we will have our dedicated study time. If you see a second year, give them a hug.
  • We are going to work with the rest of the campuses to work on some transitioning resources.
• Gabe Gerena, President Class of 2021
  • Got Pathoma link to all of the class. We are trying to work on the sketchy funding (venmo and paypal). Please pay because today is the last day.
  • We have plans on building SCLC committees. We are meeting with campus reps to improve relationships and getting to know each other.                                                                                         

3. Exec Updates 6:15-6:25

Super SIGS
Funding
Budget
Interview Day
Updates for Room 122A

• New projector
• New control system
• New mics at tables
• Additional wireless mics

Ben Stivers, VP of Leadership:

• Thanks to everyone that came to the luncheon and we are getting feedback. We heard that maybe we want to make a whole day of it to allow for more networking. There were a lot of good things that went on there to determine the roles of different reps. I am going to dive into the responses to figure out how to make that better.
• We are going to have an officer orientation at the beginning of the year to make everything clearer. In addition, we are making a box account to help every campus have consolidating resources to make sure the roles and directions are clearer for each campus rep.
• Upcoming events: alumni events, so keep posted.

Chanelle Benjamin, of Committee Affairs:

• Updates regarding interview day: we are pushing it back. This will help coordinate committee communication and to create more formal roles in each committee. Over the past year, people have been going through the cracks and not doing their position. We also want to facilitate the second years because they would be taking Step around the time of interview day.
• It is currently scheduled for April 14th this year.
• Admin and Dave and members of MSC are taking the lead with IUPUI to streamline how we can work with them and their regulations. They are taking the reigns and trying to get some common ground on that.
• I have been away for a little while and some of you guys don’t know me. I advocate a lot for wellness and self care and I needed to step back a little bit. But I’m back and I apologize for the absence!

Vanni Rodriguez, VP of Statewide Affairs:

• SIG things — I still have to meet with a lot of people to get the super SIGs in order. Plan is creating the super SIGs and Dr. Haywood and I are trying to implement this by the fall. A lot of the back work is going on this semester.
• We are going to incorporate career mentors to each SIG, which is not standardized. We want to match career mentoring and SIGs together.
• If you are from a regional campus, please let me know any advice you have going forward about the SIGs and how to best cater them to you all.

Anthony Boateng, Treasurer:

• Spent the last weekend learning about the transition that I needed.
• Towards the end of the year, we have a beginning balance of $8,829.69 and the current balance is $7,998.00.
• We have a total request of about 5 from different SIGs.
• We seem to be on the right track.
• Innocent — how is the intramural spent? The $650.
  • Tony: a student can request something through the school. The school okays team fees, but the student fees are WAVED. There is a thing called “grad bucks” and this helps

Rebecca Richardson, Secretary:

• Groupme and facebook update. Link for groupme to come, watch out for email!

4. Presentation by Whitney Walker- Office of Communications 6:25-6:45

• Communication coordinator for IUSM and I have been working with the students and faculty the last couple of months to help streamline communications!
• New IUSM Website, check it out here!
• Blog Onboarding: if you are interested in sending blogs, please let me know and we will have some formal training next month.
• Social Media Takeovers — more updates to come.
• Student newsletter: everyone should have received this newsletter this past monday. This will be a once a week letter and will hopefully decrease the emails you guys receive. It is going out once a week and I want you guys to use this form to submit content. This is also for regional campuses. I want everyone to see content and send news. This goes out every monday and everyone needs to submit content the week prior by Wednesday at noon. Does anyone have questions?
  • Elizabeth — was this week the “soft launch” because I felt like I still had a lot of emails.
  • Whitney — yes, I want to expand it to make sure that the regional campuses are included. We also want to get SIGs involved. There will be clear links for different classes and that way you want to click.
  • Julie — Dr. Haywood met with Dr. Richardson to meet with the different course directors and everyone to get increased news on that as well. Right now we are seeing things that are state-wide specific. We want to include campus specific ones so everyone is included. There can be different categories based on locations as well.
• We want to use it more to replace the listservs in the future, but this needs to be more of a gradual introduction. Please let everyone know how important it is to check this resource!
• Julie — we need to make people trust this and get different professors, committees and all of you guys on board. We are going to be sending out MSC newsletter “videos” every month. We want all campus reps to have visibility. Maybe if every campus has a little 10 second update on the video. This way we think we can have multiple ways to reach people throughout the campuses. Regional campuses: would you feel comfortable sending out a video/update to me or Whitney once a month. It would be like the MSC update that we sent out in the last newsletter.
  • Whitney — it would be relatively minor and little time in the video. Very quick and as a visual resource for news. We also will archive this on the youtube channel and it will be put on the blog page as well.
  • Julie — this will also help prospective students look to see how cool different campuses and how IUSM works. It is also an awesome way to get out your class updates and it will mean so much more from the actual class officers than Julie’s emails.
  • Whitney — they have both the audio and the updates. If you have more fun watching the video, it is an option. We are open to feedback and I’m sure Julie is as well.
  • Gabe — I would like to see this and blogs if I was a prospective student in the future. I think having both will be helpful so students can choose how the interact with their news.
• I really encourage you all to submit for further additions. Anyone can submit who has news relevant to students. For example, evening of the arts would be really useful to put in the events section. There will also be an area for a call of reflection. SIGs can also post for upcoming events. Basically anything that you would send out in a listserv to the class, you can send to this.
  • Something of interest, there is a column that goes out every week for these students. And maybe we could have heartwarming stories, interesting stories to help people be more interested in opening it.
    • Julie — this would be something like the blogs. This is included in the newsletter.
    • Whitney — yeah, I am interested in getting more student’s stories to add this so prospective students are interested and students can see what everyone is doing. You can submit these via the form and everything. Also I want you guys to have more access to the social media accounts. I want you guys to have more platforms available to show everyone what you are doing. I also want them to be very centralized and consistent.
    • Julie — if someone did want to do a person account for a student.
    • Whitney — I would reach out to me and the next meeting I will do a training for blog access, event access, etc. Basically we will setup a WordPress account and post on everything. We want it to be pretty informal and open-ended. We want everyone who wants access to get the access. It is WordPress so people are pretty familiar.
    • Where are the links to the blogs?
    • Julie — the med school is making a new website and it will be posted there. There is a section called student life, and you can post things there. And there are some interesting stories there. You can look up some examples there. https://medicine.iu.edu/blogs/
      • Gabe: when I was looking for med schools, I actually read all of these and they really helped.
    • Seriously ANYONE who is interested in all, we want you guys to have avenues to express yourself. Talk about your experience.
    • For the newsletter, there is an archive within the blogs so there will be an archive for all of the things that we list on the newsletter.
    • Someone had asked about the video vs the writing out of MSC updates. We have them all written out and there are the videos as well.
      • There are other sections as well.
    • Julie — there will be full training next month. Two things to take away (1) we get analytics from this and we can tailor future messages to this blog in the future and work about the mode of delivery. (2) as campus representatives it is our job to inform everyone and you are the point people to let everyone know that these blog posts exist and that they are a great way to get information out.
  • Julie — at the end of last year, we wanted to work on campus resource guides. Whitney put these together and they will be sent out soon. They are overall resources and campus specific ones as well.
    • Looks nice. Good job. Applause all around.
  • Whitney — still working on making sure these are accurate through all campuses. The campus representatives will work on these every year to keep these updated.
    • Julie — every campus representative will make sure that everything is up-to-date during Christmas break. We just need to make sure that this is sustainable in the future.
    • Whitney — all you guys would need to do is that the information is accurate. For example, you would just let Whitney know if one of the lead advisor contacts retired or left the school and was replaced by someone else.
  • Whitney — is everyone cool with training next week. If anyone really wants to get on this, please email me and let me know!

Breakout Questions:

5. SCLC restructuring 6:45-7:00

• At the last meeting we had, the luncheon, we had talked about this a lot. We talked about the SCLC and it is not entirely structured. Right now the way it works is that there are 2 SCLCs each course and they are in indy. This has created some issues so we need to address this. They switch each course. We have three options
  • (1) Keep it the way it is
  • (2) Have it become 2 indy reps + 1 rep per campus, per course (1 block long position)
  • (3) 2 indy reps + 1 campus rep campus, ONE TIME VOTE at the beginning of the year (1 year long position).
• Gabe — what do the regional campuses think about this?
  • Zach — one thing that is interesting about the SCLCs is that there isn’t a whole year is because people wanted experience with professors and leadership roles. Since there is a different one for each class and because the course directors don’t communicate. We keep having all of these small groups and when all of the SCLCs say the same thing but there aren’t any changes. I think if we had continuity for the same leaders all year, I think this would help a lot with this.
  • As a 3rd year in bloomington, we didn’t even know that Indy students had these.
  • Zain — to add to that, I think SCLCs it started with the current 4th years at the indy campus because the professor to student ratio is really big. And we started sending it across the state because it wasn’t fair that the statewide students weren’t getting the same information.
  • Vanni — since the courses are standardized, we should standardize this too.
  • Gabe — the campus reps are doing everything on top of being their campus reps.
  • Grant (bloomington) — one of the ways we can tackle all of these questions at once would be electing an SCLC that falls under the MSC and will be one semester, which is at least 3 courses. And if SCLCs are a part of MSC, they should attend MSC meetings and hearing center reps are saying. They have to be present to get all of the updates. One of the issues is that there is no organization and we lack the ability to communicate throughout the school.
  • Morgan — it is 6 weeks long and it is only beneficial to the SCLC member, rather than the school as a whole. We shouldn’t think about it as a leadership opportunity.
  • Zach — saying this is a year long position, are you only doing this if your state-wide leader is present.
    • Julie — there will be 2 Indy reps and 1 campus rep. The campus where the site leader is present, that will be the main contact person, however the others can zoom in and talk that way. You can create groupmes to talk and facilitate communication as well.
  • Grant — should SCLCs be part of MSC?
    • Julie — I met with Dr. Haywood and this is how we are approaching it. We are going to meet with people and make it official and pass by-laws. We can keep them a part of MSC and keep them as non-voting members. Or we can put them under other committees like the course committees.
  • Grant — I think both of those things sound good and as long as people are connected among course affairs, this will be good.

Phase 1 grading system — the way it worse under the new curriculum is potentially problematic. As it stands now, you have to pass the class overall AND pass the NBME as well. For example, you can pass with an average course fine, but if you fail the NBME you fail the entire course. The second question is to include some examples of why you think the way you do! If you agree or disagree, please give us your response.

• Vanni — right now, as it stands you have to pass both. So you have to kind of separate the two.
• Gabe — is it the other way around?
  • Zain, everyone — no.
• Julie — if you did fine and passed everything, but failed the NBME you have to remediate. However, if you pass the NBME and then fail the overall class you still do not pass the course. So it seems like there is too much weight on the NBME for no reason
  • If you fail the NBME, you can remediate and pass the class again, but this shows on your transcript. If you fail two courses, you have to go to the appeals committee and repeat the year. But if you fail one, you have to remediate.
    • Grant — we had a student that failed the NBME by one point on two exams and need to appeal to not have to remediate. This is a pressing issue that is obviously affecting students right now
    • Zach — I don’t know if we are seeing this as much as we do the first semester first year. I think if someone fails the NBME, this probably means they aren’t doing well on the exams. We need to address the “hell week” and the block exams are the same week as the finals for those 2 weeks, it is a little insane. I know that we also had the summative OSCE. The week was just very hectic. I think that would be one of the only reason and this can help with wellness and be advantageous for mental health
      • Phil — Stress like that, it is incredible and hard, but at the end of the day you had to prioritize and tirage the system. I think there are some benefits but it might be troublesome for the first year.
      • Innocent — out of 145 medical schools in the US, only >80% have pass and fail systems, there are very few that do not that this. What do people feel is fail to assess students learning if we move from grades.
      • Julie — well I think that is an important thing to think about.

Funding transparency at your school, do you find it transparent and would you want to use a one-page “how-to” funding to help with your questions and needs.