A Respectful Response to a Busy USD SOM Student

The following commentary was e-mailed to me. I will respect this students wishes to remain anonymous.


Mr. Gilbertson,

Issue 1: I understand and respect your concerns regarding the admissions committee for the Sanford SOM. However, I disagree with your method and some of your critiques.

Answer: Busy Student, I respect your option to disagree and I will reply in a courteous manner. By no means do I intend for all readers to agree. Contrary to popular opinion, President Barack Obama won the US Presidency by a slim margin of ~ 7% of the popular vote. To this point, approximately 50% (slightly less) of the voting public did not support the election of President Obama, but we recognize he is the Commander-in-Chief. The same principles apply to my blog and the administrative action we are taking with the South Dakota Legislature. We are simply trying to implement social and administrative change in the actions of the University of South Dakota School of Medicine.

Issue 2: As a current student of an affiliated program, I feel the need to protect my name as a student and future health care professional. I would write a comment on the blog, unfortunately google IDs for my email address include my name.

Answer: I understand and I am not asking ANY student to take a chance of faculty repercussion. When I distributed the link to this blog, I felt that it was only proper and necessary to include as many students to which e-mail addresses were publicly available. However, I do point out that as a future physician you are going to encounter numerous situations when you will have to defend your actions and action that you feel are in the best interest of your patient. My point, make your stand and if you feel you are correct, defend your position.

Any and all students of SOM are welcome to respond to this blog and are free to do so under the premise of anonymity. Please, please, please abide by the rules of the blog. Your comments must be factual. You are welcome to post your opinions (I am), but make sure you can back-up your comments with facts.

Issue 3: As I have schoolwork to do, I am unable to do as thorough an investigation as you have, so pardon my methodological flaws.

Answer: Please, please, please concentrate on your school work. Let me and my legal colleagues take action on this matter. However, by all means, feel free to take a contrary position (if you feel we are wrong) and write your legislative representative (either State or Federal). A lot of young men (mostly men) gave their lives defending the principles and freedoms of this Country and one of those freedoms is Free Speech (1st Amendment).

Issue 4: A simple google search yields your name as primarily a hospital administrator. So, I can understand your desire for QA measures being put into place.

Answer: I am not the hospital administrator to which some have referred. I am just a citizen concerned about the healthcare and well-being of my fellow South Dakotans. This system (i.e., USD SOM) is corrupt and it needs to be changed.

I have listed my background and motives in earlier posts … so I will not bore the audience in repeating. I am certain that the fake Gerry will be chiming in (and yes, I will delete his comments).

Issue 5: The reason why I am disrupting my studies tonight to respond to your blog is to speak in favor of Ms. Settles, who was frowned upon in one of your entries.

Answer: You are certainly welcome to defend Ms. Settles. To clarify, I never “frowned upon” Ms. Settles as you imply. I simply pointed out that this individual, in my opinion, is not qualified to sit in a decision making position on an MD admissions committee, regardless of what courses she teaches.

We are in the process of compiling a list of multiple public medical schools and the qualifications of the admissions committee members. So far, we have not encountered a similar system as employed by USD. Once the list is fully compiled, we will make that list available to the general public. You can imagine most Universities are none-to-pleased about having to turn over this list, but under the Federal Freedom of Information Act, they have no choice. We are also working on obtaining the lists from all private institutions that receive Federal research or support dollars.

Issue 6. Ms. Settles is the coordinator of the Gross Anatomy class. While she "only" has an MS, she is a knowledgeable anatomist and an excellent instructor. (As the class was team taught, myself and others in the class found her to be the most comprehension-focused of the instructors--if people had concerns to understanding how to learn, she was able to take a different track to get us there.) Gross Anatomy in medicine programs is considered to be one of the big "weed-out" classes. If you cannot do well in Gross, your stay in the program will be short or extremely painful. As lead instructor and class coordinator, her input is vital to graduating educated physicians.

Answer: You might be very true in your assessment of Ms. Settles abilities as an anatomist. However, a major red flag goes up when an individual who did not go through the rigors of graduate or medical school or who in some cases has lesser academic credentials than some of the applicants sits in judgment of applicants. Our point is that she is just not qualified to sit on this committee.

Clearly, the USD faculty have limited her position on the faculty roster and have capped her tenure as an Instructor.

It would seem to me that an admissions committee member should have the essential qualifications as the applicants. I have opened this blog to the USD Admissions Committee members to post the dates that they completed the MCAT, their respective GPAs, etc for public scrutiny. These are essential positions determining the vital public health of the Citizens of South Dakota, and we should know who is making these decisions.

In earlier posts, I brought about the issues that none of the USD School of Medicine faculty have any formal training in Public Health (at least no one publishes an MPH or MS in Public Health, Epidemiology, etc) … does this not alarm you?

Issue 7: Another concern I have with your discussion on this topic is your focus on those who were excluded. Did you sit in on their interviews? Interviews are important, and while an interview may not show how they might interact with you in a personal or work environment, it may show how a person deals with stressful situations (necessary for the practice of medicine).

Answer: I’ll be brief on this answer … I could address multiple points but it would turn out to be a thesis.

I did not sit-in on the student’s personal interviews.

I am not certain I agree with you on the importance of an interview. In most cases, the interviewer has 30 minutes to 1 hour to Q/A the applicant. I am positive that most experts in the field of interrogation would agree with me that this is not ample time to find-out that someone is. In short, I am not a big fan of or believer in the personal interview.

Letters of recommendation are much more important evaluators of the fitness of an applicant. What bothers me is that a majority of applicants are just out of their undergraduate studies and most have a letter written by their Organic Chemistry professor or Biology professor. These individuals write dozens (sometime hundreds) of letters. Most of these letter go like this: “Suzy Q was in my course XXXX-101, she earned a grade of “A.” I was able to interact with Suzy Q during the semester. I think she will perform acceptably during her studies at your medical school. Suzy has a GPA or 0.00 and scored 10s on the MCAT.” I ask you, what good is a letter like this? Each of the individuals who contacted me about the practices of the USD SOM have stellar letters of recommendation and incredible work experiences post-undergraduate studies.

Based on your argument, if interviews are so capable of weeding-out applicants, why are there so many “arrogant” individuals in your current SOM class (at least according to your classmate Michael’s earlier post)?

What types of stressful situations were you exposed to in your personal interview that would lead your interviewers to believe that you would be able to handle a stressful medical procedure or situation? Would a PhD or a MS interviewer have those same insights as an MD interviewer?

Let me throw this one out to you. One applicant to the USD SOM is a decorated officer in the US Military. He served two involuntary tours in Iraq – Fallujah to be exact. He has command experience in a battlefield situation, yet he was rejected by Admissions Committee. Do you feel that you or any of your fellow students are more qualified than this individual? Did you put your life on the line to defend the principles of this Nation?

Maybe, your argument on the importance of the interview holds less water than you originally thought … but this is just my opinion.

Issue 8: I have sat through graduate school interviews that I thought I did very well in, to get a rejection letter saying I needed to work on my interview skills. I have personally conducted interviews for a Residency program in my life prior to entering a graduate program. Would some of those [MBBS] and MDs resent my only having had a bachelor's degree having a say in their admission to a residency program with hundreds of applicants and only 7 spots. Absolutely. However, does that mean that my ability to understand someone who had 4 weeks of class and 6 weeks of experience in a field I had 8 years of experience working in, having worked with practitioners of various backgrounds and education levels and seeing who succeeded and failed was not a valid perspective? I think not, and neither did the residency program who selected me as an interviewer.

Answer: As I have stated in previous posts, I am a huge fan and supporter of community members at large sitting on admissions committee’s. Membership on such a committee is a major responsibility and we must be humble on our opinions. I hope before you passed judgment on the applicant that you reflected on your own experiences and made a decision based on your heart and conscience.

Issue 9: As for the comment about the admissions program being comprised of people from the Vermillion and Sioux Falls areas, as the committee is made up of people who work at the SSOM, why wouldn't they live near to where they work?

Answer: I have no problem that members of the admissions committee are from the Sioux Falls/Vermillion areas. My central argument is that the admissions committee is ONLY composed from people living in these areas. A MAJORITY of South Dakotans (>80%) do not live in these areas. With this in mind, shouldn’t the admissions committee of the ONLY Medical School (that is charged with safeguarding SD medical education program) in South Dakota be comprised of member of the greater community? Shouldn’t the admission committee contain members from SDSU or Augustana? In fact, many of the faculty members at these two institutions have higher academic credentials than the faculty members of the USD SOM. Shouldn’t there be members from western South Dakota. Shouldn’t there be a member representing the 9% of the SD population that is associated with one of American Indian Tribes (a population that is 100% medically underserved)?

Our state legislators travel from throughout the state to the Capitol, why can’t we have other members travel to the USD for a few days of interviews. I guarantee you that a majority of individuals, if asked, would gladly serve on this important committee.

Issue 10: Mr. Gilbertson, while I understand the point you are trying to make, I disagree with your concerns.

Answer: You are welcome to disagree, but I caution you in disagreeing with these important concerns over the health and well-being of South Dakotans. We, as a nation (but more as a State) are in an ABSOLUTE health care crisis. South Dakota is a medically underserved State and we have serious public health issues (type II diabetes is just one of many examples). We need primary care physicians and we need a Medical School and an Admissions Committee that understands these important and fundamental issues.