In an attempt to add diversity to Dartmouth Medical School's graduate population, roughly five students from the City College of New York will join Dartmouth's third-year medical students beginning in 2007.
Graduates of CCNY's Sophie Davis School of Biomedical Education will compress their undergraduate education into three years and study at DMS for two years before applying to complete a medical course of study.
Sophie Davis students will travel to six medical school campuses this fall to interview for the open spots. The medical schools and students will then rank each other in order of preference. Students will gain admittance to the highest-ranked school that expresses a preference for them.
According to David Nierenberg, DMS's senior associate dean for medical education, the new students will help Dartmouth's medical students prepare for the more diverse environments they may encounter in the future.
"I think our admissions office does a wonderful job of recruiting a first-year class that is diverse in many ways," Nierenberg said. "But I would also say that diversity is a really important thing in medicine because our graduates are going to practice medicine in a lot of places, and I don't think diversity is ever something you can get enough of."
Stanford Roman '64, the dean of the Sophie Davis School, believes that the diversity of his students will significantly contribute to the DMS student population.
"I think [Sophie Davis students] do have a very rich experience in working with different cultures and maybe different languages. They understand the effects of this on health services," Roman said. "Many DMS students are going to be doing their residencies in urban areas, and those populations tend to be more like the environments Sophie Davis students have been exposed to rather than Hanover."
Roman defended the academic prowess of his students, noting that six percent of Sophie Davis graduates finish in the medical honors societies of their respective schools. He predicted that they would thrive in Dartmouth's academically challenging environment.
"Because we select students from high school, many of the students have turned down Dartmouth and Harvard to come to Sophie Davis. They have very strong SAT scores. It's a different way of doing it," Roman said.
Roman was the associate dean of DMS during the 1980s.
Rather than complete four years of undergraduate education as pre-med students, Sophie Davis students complete their undergraduate education and their first two years of medical school.
"Students should be fairly sure that they want to go into med school at some point," Roman said. "I wouldn't recommend it to someone who's considering two or three fields and medicine might be one. And we tell those people, 'you're wonderful but this might not be the place for you academically.'"
Other medical school partners of Sophie Davis are Albany Medical College, New York Medical College, New York University School of Medicine, the State University of New York Health Science Center at Brooklyn and SUNY at Stony Brook School of Medicine. Typically, all 50 Sophie Davis graduates are admitted to medical schools, with the largest chunk attending SUNY Health Center at Brooklyn, Roman said.
