Would you notice frameless art?

The Washington Post published this sweet article Monday, April 9th (which I got via Arts and Letters Daily's RSS, an aggregator of great articles across the Web). It's kind of long, but so deliciously poignant. Also there is a transcript of the online chat between the article's author, Gene Weingarten, and the readers.

Would you stop?

Nuts and Bolts of CCLCM I

They call it Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine of Case Western Reserve University. Mouthful of proper nouns and eponyms. Well, the name doesn't tell you a whole lot what CCLCM is and what it isn't. Of course, there is the web site with the brochure de rigueur, and student blurbs about the program. There are also a lot of the "unpublished." If you dig a bit deeper into the mantle of the Internet (or shall we say, Google), you'd find lots of interesting bits and pieces publicly available. For instance, the first mention of CCLCM I was able to find is here, made by Dr. Fishleder, the executive dean of CCLCM. By the way, CME minutes is by itself a very interesting resource. Even though it is Case's CME, College's Curriculum Steering Committee is reporting to the CME, and thus minutes include discussions relevant to both programs. I sure will be coming back to check what the curriculum committee is thinking, and what dynamics to expect, given they keep posting them.

Then, there is Dr. Fishleder's presentation, which I found on the AAMC website. It gives you a very thorough overview of the program's philosophy, organization, rationale, and financial arrangements. I have to tell you that a lot of questions that prospective students asked faculty during the Second Look weekend would have been answered by this presentation. The penultimate slide of the presentation shows the increasing number of applications (604 in 2004, 728 in 2005, and 1071 in 2006). The most current numbers I found for the 2007 admission cycle were posted in the CME minutes (almost at the end). As of December 13, 2006, the number of applications received by the College Program was 1,239, a 15% increase since 2006. And there are only 32 of us in the class. Pretty competitive, if you follow that sort of rankings. I think it is so competitive that I'm not sure whether I would have gotten in had I applied a year later.

If you seriously considering applying to this school, there is an absolutely must-read blog, which I regard as the spokesblog of the program. It will tell you more than you ever wanted to know and then some.

Revisit of the Revisit

Back from Cleveland where I went for the second look weekend. To second-look what? When was the first? you may ask. The first one was during med school interviews in March of 2006. I was accepted to matriculate in 2006 to Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine (CCLCM), but chose to defer a year. Why and what happened in between is a long story for another post sometime when its retelling would earn me a sizable offer from a major publishing house.

Meanwhile, don't trust anyone saying that Cleveland is the poorest city in America two years in a row. Well, technically they are correct, but between us, they are just naysayers, someone, when invited to visit Cleveland Botanical Gardens, would hear Cleveland rather than Botanical Gardens. And so their tushes freeze in well warmed-up chairs. For those with portable tushes, Cleveland Botanical Gardens are worth seeing. And those with macro lenses and patience, it's an El Dorado of nature photography.

The Cleveland Clinic campus, which is about a mile away from that of Case U. is being actively developed. A new Heart Institute is taking shape, and a big pit is dug for some other building, which looks grand on pictures plastered on the construction vehicles. Unfortunately nobody I asked knew what it was going to be.

Downtown Cleveland is also being developed and growing like crazy mostly because all warehouses are being converted to condos. They are converted so fast that one of the buildings was mostly finished before some genius noticed that it didn't have an elevator for three ground floors. So they ended up attaching one on the outside of the building. How do I know this? From the trusty driver of the Lolly-the-Trolley that the school has arranged for us to tour Cleveland. The driver, a woman in her early sixties animated with dark energy (what would be a good GRE word for it?), praised parking lots as life-savers ("There are way too many cars on the roads, we need places to park them.") I expected her to be pro-public transportation since she's a bus driver. At another interactive occasion she asked if anyone was from Canada. As it turned out, there were none on board, but two people admitted to visiting the septentrional neighbor. But it didn't matter whether you were a native or a tourist, she had a line, "See those Canada geese? Take them back home _with you_, they don't have Green Cards." So now you know, dear Canadians, come prepared with Green Cards. If geese become subjects for the immigration debate, so will you.

In fact this line made me a tad defensive on the inside. As any foreigner will tell you, if you don't start thinking about getting a Green Card from day one, you need a sanity check. And to get one isn't easy. Before you get one, you're pretty much a nobody with no rights whatsoever. We foreigners have to prove to INS (now DHS) people sitting literally in caves (there are a number of caves under St. Louis, MO left over from old-time breweries now used by the National Record Center for storage and sorting of all immigrational paperwork) that we are worthy people. Not easy even when you have a Ph.D. and several publications to your name.

I've been in this country only six years before I decided to apply to med school. I took MCAT twice because the first time I missed the bubble in Bio/Orgo answer sheet. So if I managed to get into med school (and I got into several), you can too. Good luck.

Next time more about the Cleveland Clinic College of Medicine.