William Carey University College of Osteopathic Medicine

About WCU College of Osteopathic Medicine:

In October 2007, the Board of Trustees at WCU voted to select a dean for the College of Osteopathic Medicine. They decided to open COM because there was a shortage of physicians in the Mississippi region as well as the nearby states. The authorities wanted to address this shortcoming and improve the healthcare of the Mississippi community. The College of Osteopathic Medicine was developed in March 2008. In September 2009, William Carey College of Osteopathic Medicine gained its provisional accreditation by the American Osteopathic Association’s Commission. WCUCOM welcomes its first class of 110 students in August 2010.

William Carey University College of Osteopathic Medicine is the first school in the region and the second in the state to focus on osteopathic medicine. The first class of William Carey University Medical School graduated in 2014.

Contact Details:

• Address: 498 Tuscan Ave, Hattiesburg, MS 39401, United States
• Email: com@wmcarey.edu
• Phone: (601) 318 – 6235

Core Competencies:

The curriculum of WCU College of Osteopathic Medicine is based upon a few core competencies with a primary objective to educate physicians that can pursue their careers in the healthcare field. Some of these core competencies are:

• Osteopathic Principles and Practice.
• Medical Knowledge.
• Patient Care.
• Interpersonal and Communication Skills.
• Practice-based Learning and Improvement.
• System-based Practice.

Strategic Goals:

The five primary strategic goals of WCU College of Osteopathic Medicine are:

1. The College will attain excellence in the UG osteopathic medical education.
2. The College will attain excellence in the PG osteopathic medical education which will be considered as an example of the high-quality osteopathic primary care residency program.
3. The College will be recognized as an educational institute that promotes institutional effectiveness & collaboration.
4. The College will promote excellence through education, scholarly activities, and research.
5. The College will be recognized both locally and globally as an institute that addresses the healthcare needs of the Mississippi community and the nearby regions.

william carey university college of osteopathic medicine Mission & Vision:

Mission:

The primary mission of the WCU College of Osteopathic Medicine is to prepare individuals to become osteopathic physicians through a focus on research, lifelong learning, scholarly activities, primary care, and service, including graduate medical education and osteopathic clinical service.  The College of Osteopathic Medicine will use a community-based training model through which it will train and educate graduates who will be committed to addressing the healthcare needs of everyone, with special emphasis directed to the underrepresented population of the region, state, and the region.

Vision:

WCU College of Osteopathic Medicine envisions to become the foundational pillar for excellence in osteopathic medicine both locally and globally.

william carey university college of osteopathic medicine Academics:

WCU College of Osteopathic Medicine offers degree programs in the following areas:

• Doctoral Program: Osteopathic Medicine
• Master’s Program: Biomedical Science

Educational Requirements:

1. Osteopathic Medicine:

Admission Requirements:

• Biological Sciences (12 Semester Hours)
• Physics (8 Semester Hours)
• The applicant is required to take the MCAT test and submit his/her official scores to AACOMAS. Only MCAT scores that are not more than 3 years old will be considered.
• Pre-requisite coursework: The applicant is required to pass these courses from an accredited college/university.
  1. General Chemistry (8 Semester Hours)
  2. English Composition and Literature (6 Semester Hours)
• Organic Chemistry (8 Semester Hours)
• The applicant is required to submit all the official transcripts from all the colleges and schools attended.
• The applicant should have at least 75% of the credits needed for a baccalaureate degree from an accredited university/college.
• It is recommended that the applicant must have a good working knowledge of computer use & applications.

General Process of Application:

WCU College of Osteopathic Medicine uses a comprehensive approach while evaluating individuals. The College will only send the secondary application to the qualified applicants who have met the admission requirements. The College will only review the files if they’re complete and include all of the following materials:

• Complete and verified AACOMAS application along with the MCAT scores.
• Complete Secondary Application.
• Letters of Recommendation from a physician (preferably a DO) or two letters from science professors.

Important Dates:

• The deadline to submit the complete and verified AACOMAS application: 15^th
• The deadline for receipt of the william carey university college of osteopathic medicine Secondary Application: 15^th

Personal Interview:

Those applicants who will submit the completed application file will be considered for an interview. Then after the review, the qualified applicants will be invited for an interview. This interview is of great importance for both the Admission Committee as well as the applicant. The applicant is provided with an opportunity to see WCU College of Osteopathic Medicine and interact with faculty and current students. Whereas, the Admissions Committee is allowed to evaluate and review the applicant on important attributes to a potential osteopathic physician that can’t be evaluated by standard tests.

Technical Standards:

Some of the technical standards of the WCU College of Osteopathic Medicine include:

• Participation: The applicant must be able to attend & participate in every laboratory and class assignments.
• Observation: The applicant must be able to acquire the information provided in the classroom carefully.
• Communication: The applicant must be able to communicate efficiently with the patients, their families, and the members of the healthcare team.
• Sensory: The applicant must have exceptional sensory skills so that they can evaluate the individuals thoroughly.
• Intellectual, Conceptual, Integrative, and Quantitative Abilities: The applicant must be able to calculate, measure, analyze, synthesize, and reason timely.
• Behavioral and Social Attributes: The applicants must utilize their emotional health as well as their intellectual abilities to attend and diagnose patient care.
• Transportability: The applicant is required to complete several clinical rotations at off-campus sites during their tenure at WCU College of Osteopathic Medicine.
• Immunization: The applicant must be able to comply with the minimum requirements for immunization of all the hospitals.

Tuition & Fees:

The tuition fee is tentative and it is changed annually. However, the details for the year 2020-2021 are mentioned below:

• Annual tuition (2020-2021): $42,000
• Fall tuition: $21,000
• Spring tuition: $21,000

2. Biomedical Science:

Admission Requirements:

• A baccalaureate degree from an accredited college/university.
• Pre-requisite coursework:
  1. Physics (8 credit hours)
  2. General/Inorganic Chemistry (8 credit hours)
  3. Organic Chemistry (8 credit hours)
  4. Biology (12 credit hours)
• The minimum score for MCAT is 495, whereas the preferred one is 500. For GRE, the minimum score is 290, whereas the preferred one is 300. For DAT, the minimum score is 15, whereas the preferred one is 17.
• One page personal statement.
• Letters of Recommendation from physicians, professors, or anyone who can speak for the applicant’s potential.
• The applicant must complete an online application for graduate medical education.
• The applicant is required to pay a non-refundable application fee of $40.
• The applicant is required to have a complete baccalaureate degree from an accredited college/university.
• Official transcripts from all the colleges or schools attended.

Application Process:

• Review the requirements, pay the non-refundable application fee, and complete the graduate admissions application.
• The applicant needs to submit his/her application. To do this, the applicant will be required to provide an education history, contact information, physical address, and email addresses for references. The applicant will also require a payment method to submit the application fee.
• The applicant is required to submit all the necessary documents. Once the application is submitted, william carey university college of osteopathic medicine will send an email informing them of the documents and any other additional information they need to submit to william carey university college of osteopathic medicine.
• The successful applicant will be required to deposit a non-refundable fee of $750 to secure their admission to the WCU College of Osteopathic Medicine.

Cost of Attendance:

The duration of the MBS Program is 1 year and the cost for 1 year is $20,000. It is divided into trimesters of the academic year.

Student Life at William Carey University College of Osteopathic Medicine:

Campus Dining:

WCU College of Osteopathic Medicine provides a remarkable dining experience to its students, faculty, and staff with an objective to provide a wholesome meal in a clean environment that will also promote fellowship. It is located in Wilkes Dining Hall on the Hattiesburg Campus. All the residents are required to have a meal plan and the details for the meal plans are:

• 5 meals (per week): $400 per trimester (Penton Apartments only)
• 12 meals (per week): $945 per trimester
• 14 meals (per week): $965 per trimester
• 20 meals (per week): $1050 per trimester

Timings for the campus dining are:

Breakfast

• Saturday: 9:00 am – 10:00 am (self-serve)
• Monday to Friday: 7:30 am – 9:30 am

Lunch

• Saturday and Sunday: 12:00 pm – 1:30 pm
• Monday to Friday: 11:00 am – 1:30 pm

Dinner

• Saturday and Sunday: 4:30 pm – 6:30 pm
• Monday to Friday: 4:30 pm – 7:00 pm

Campus Housing:

WCU College of Osteopathic Medicine provides an on-campus housing facility to its students because it believes that students living on-campus are more likely to get better grades, overall better college experience, and persist to graduation than those students who do not.

How to stay focused in a Medical School?

Getting into a medical school is difficult but what’s more difficult is to survive in a medical school. The main reason for this is that students easily get distracted by the distractions around them and are unable to make their way back to their studies. Keeping up with your schoolwork will be hard if you’re among those students. The key to this is to eliminate the distractions around you and set up an ideal studying environment for yourself.

Stay Focused & Set Realistic Goals:

From the first day, you need to be very focused on your goals. Nowadays, when you have tons of distractions in your life, it is difficult to stay focused, especially, while studying. You need to remind yourself every day that how hard you’ve worked all your life to get here and to stay away from all the distractions which are bothering you. Focus is the key here. Once, you know your goals and you’re focused on how to achieve those goals, a lot of things will become easy for you automatically.

Now, when we say set REALISTIC goals for yourself, what does it mean? Don’t pressurize or overburden yourself by setting up goals that aren’t possible for you to achieve because it’ll lead to demotivation in the future when they won’t be accomplished. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t set any high goals for yourself but in fact, you should start from the ground, build them from scratch and then move forward. Once, you’ve set some goals for yourself, you’ll have a direction to move into which will help you stay focused.

Create a Suitable Study Plan:

We talked about how the focus is key while studying. Now, when it comes to staying focus while studying, you need to take care of a few other things too. First of all, develop a habit of PRE-STUDY. Don’t leave stuff for the last moment because it is going to harm you in the long-run when your brain wouldn’t accept a lot of information at once. Yes, it happens with not only you but with everyone. Most of the students keep on skipping things which they don’t understand due to which they can’t understand another thing but now, they don’t understand anything. Confusing, right?

To avoid being in this type of situation, make a study plan which is suitable for you. You know what is suitable for you and how you can cover all your subjects, so you can do it! Make that plan from the very start and ask for help from your teachers or classmates if you don’t understand anything instead of skipping it to avoid stressful cramming the night before. Sticking to this study plan will help you survive these 5 years of medical college easily as compared to those people who never created a study plan.

Choose your study environment wisely:

Unless and until you have good study partners, try to study alone. If you find your home environment to be distracting, grab your study materials, and find a comfortable study spot for yourself. However, if you’re studying at home, you must choose a quiet place with the least amount of distractions. If there’s some distracting noise around you, try to eliminate it by headphones and turn on a study playlist, whatever is suitable for you. It is recommended that you should create the best possible environment for yourself before you start studying so that you don’t have to pause again and again in the mid-session to change things.

Relax:

Amidst all the difficulties of a medical student, the self-care factor can’t be ignored. Your health has a huge impact on your studies and productivity. Be a part of several clubs and societies that are present in your school and engage yourself in the activities to give yourself a break from studies. Studies have shown that participating in these extra-curricular activities not only benefits your body but also your brain and results in increased productivity.

Reward yourself if you achieve something, which means incentivizing hard work. This further grows seeds of more hard work and you’re inclined to do better each time in hope of reward from yourself. Give yourself a break now and then, rather than pilling up all the notes into your brain until it can’t take anymore. It can mean that pick a day or two in a week and spend time with your friends and family and do stuff that makes you feel happy and relax because your idea of self-care is entirely different depending upon your personality.

Dr. Najeeb Lectures:

There are a lot of times in a medical school that it becomes really hard for the students to stay focused in the class because they might miss a class or they don’t understand something and boom! They’re behind everyone now. But what if you could replay all the lectures and understand everything taught in the class in a better way? Yes, it is possible now with Dr. Najeeb Lectures. Now, with these lectures, you can learn on your schedule. Rather than leaving your home early or skipping family gatherings to rush to campus, you’re logging in when it is convenient for you; at a time that doesn’t interfere with your other commitments. This flexibility will allow you to manage your school, family, and social life more easily.

In addition to this, most of the students don’t feel comfortable asking professors to repeat something they said in the last lecture or dive into deeper detail in a specific topic. But with Dr. Najeeb Lectures, you can revisit the past study material or pause the lecture to perform additional research or maintain your notes. You can work through the lesson plan at your own pace to ensure you’re mastering the material before moving on to the next section. These topics cover a wide canvas encompassing Neuro-anatomy, Embryology, Histology, Physiology, Biochemistry, Genetics, Pharmacology, Microbiology, Immunology, and Pathology. These lectures cover almost all the topics currently in the medical curriculum of almost all the medical institutes. Furthermore, our application makes you accessible to the lectures irrespective of where and when, with no time constraints. Thus, with so many strong aspects of these lectures, these lectures should be your go-to, making your life easy without any constraints and barriers therein.

In the end, we would like to assure you that there are always ups and downs in life. Don’t lose hope, keep our tips in mind, and Good luck!

For more information, please visit their official website.