Meeting with the Dean

Apparently some students in our class requested a class-wide meeting with the dean. We had the meeting this morning, and people got to air out all their frustrations. It was quite weird actually. Very different from my undergrad institution, probably because people can preface their comments with "I pay too much money to..." which really gives a student some power I guess. It was weird because our dean is new, this is first year on the job. She is supposedly suprised by how some classes are being handled as well, so she was in agreement with much of what was being said. Accept when it came to my comment! LOL I don't know what it is. It will be interesting to see how many changes she is actually able to implement, and ow many things somebody "sets her straight" on since she is new to the school, and maybe new to the type of institutional culture at the school. The insitutional culture definitely has an impact on how things are done, and sometimes I think some things will never change just because it is the way they have been done for, oh, about a century? LOL

The main comments were that Biomed, taught by a scientist, needs a major overhaul. (I agree, its terrible) A guy in our class said "I spent 18+ solid hurs studying for this exam, and i still didn't do well." What he forgot to mentioned was that he has a master's degree in a science field already, which would have lent more credit to his comment about the insaness of the course! BTW, we don't have our scores back yet, so I don't know how I did, other than to say I didn't know the answer to half of the questions! Pharm, taught by a pharmacist, has too many guest lecturers. The idea is that for every given topic a specialist in that field should teach the course. It the university's policy to have students "learn from the best there is." Well, ok. But sometimes we also have gest lecturers who they have selected speifically because they are grads of our program and they think it would be great for us to support these new graduates, and for them to get teaching experience, and to be possible role models for us new students. It sounds good, but the program is so accelerated that we really don't have time to be pratice students for people. I need you to give me what I need to know in as condensed (and complete) a form as possible because I get one lecture and one lecture only to know everything there is to know about AIDS. So while, yes, it is noce to see new grads doing great things, now is not the time! There was also some issue with the fact that whle we sometimes have guest lecturers, our exams are still written by the actual professor, so there is sometimes a huge gap in what we were taught versus what was on the test. We then gave many solutions to the problems we presented to the dean.

My comment, which wasn't received well, had to do with having nursing scholars/researchers/teachers actually teach Pharm and Biomed. The response (which is in no way new) to the question was basically "nurses aren't smart enough to teach the coontent" which I think is a serious problem. Does it say anything about the profession and the school to have these tougher courses taught by non-nurse scholars? What do you mean nurses aren't smart enough to teach the material? Isn't that exactly the kind of image we're trying to dispute in the profession? Our current nurse-lecturers do a better job relating the drug information to our practice than the pharmacists do, and the same goes for the biological processes in the body! Are you, the dean, really standing in front of the room and saying that your PhD educated faculty do not have the knowledge nor means to teach pharmacokinetics? That worries me. It also bothers me that we bring a men in to teach the harder courses, what are you saying, without saying anything?

Anyway, I was disappointed that everyone didn't know about the meeting before it happened. Only a handful of students knew we were having a meeting today. (I was one of the students who didn't know until the moment it was happening) There was a lot of complaining going on, but I think it was necessary, and I'm glad it happened. I can only hope that some good things come out of it. There was also a midwifery issue that had my blood boiling, but I'll tell u about that later!