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 There are also a lot of the "unpublished."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.