ETSU’s Veterans Administration campus houses the James H. Quillen College of Medicine, the Bill Gatton College of Pharmacy and ETSU’s Department of Physical Therapy. Students and faculty from each program have had to adapt to a new online curriculum with ETSU’s switch to all online classes for the remainder of the 2020 spring and summer semesters. This is the second of a three-part series on the VA campus programs. Part one may be found here.
First-year medical student Fulton Robinson, an avid class-goer, enjoyed the interactive aspect of class because if he was confused about the material or needed to ask a question, he could get immediate clarity.
Now that classes are online for the rest of the semester as part of ETSU’s COVID-19 response, that clarity takes longer for Robinson to get.
“Now you know obviously our professors are still very open to questions,” Robinson said. “They’re open to helping us, but you have to send them an email. They tell you, ‘We check our emails between this and this time of the day,’ so it’s like you can’t always get that immediate clarity that you want. It is a little frustrating, especially when you’re going through a topic and you’re struggling, and you’re caught on something and you know it’s hard to move on while you are still worried about that thing you had trouble understanding.”
With campus closed, Robinson also lost access to on-campus study spaces, which he utilized daily. He said he does not study well at home because he gets distracted easily, and he lives with three other medical students who have “drastically different study schedules.” To minimize distractions, he has started waking up early before his roommates so he can watch lectures non-interrupted.
“I definitely feel like I’ve gotten better about staying focused when there’s distractions present around me, which last semester I had a really hard time with that,” Robinson said. “If there were distractions around me, I would lose my train of focus. I wouldn’t be able to study. So, it’s definitely been a new skill that I’ve picked up, and there’s nothing wrong with picking up a new skill”
Robinson has had to adapt his study skills, and according to Dr. Kenneth Olive, professor and Quillen College of Medicine executive associate dean for academic and faculty affairs, students’ ability to deal with ambiguity and be adaptable is one of the learning objectives for the medical education program.
“We certainly wouldn’t have picked this as a way to teach that, but that’s certainly something students are having to deal with,” Olive said. “Because, you know, none of us know when we’re going to be able to get back. And that’s a pretty big degree of uncertainty, but I think everybody understands that you know, this is no one’s doing. It’s an unexpected circumstance that hopefully will be a once in a lifetime circumstance. We’re doing our best, and our students are doing their best to try and get through this.”
Second year students finished around the middle of March, but first years who finish in May have transitioned to online classes with Zoom meetings, online videos and learning modules and online testing. For both first- and second-year students in clinicals, most of their experience happened before they were pulled from clinical settings.
“So, the first-year students had a clinical preceptorship, which is where they go spend a half-day with a doctor in practice a number of times throughout the year,” Olive said. “[They were] cut short by about two sessions per student, and we feel like they had enough exposure that they were still able to accomplish the learning objectives for that activity.”
Being pulled from clinicals has been one of Robinson’s bigger frustrations. He is interested in surgery and radiology, and in addition to his clinicals for class, he was also spending time with a surgeon he has known since high school.
“So, I was getting really like that hands-on exposure that’s pretty much priceless,” Robinson said. “So, this kind of time has affected that a little bit because obviously I’m losing hours of experience.”
Olive said third and fourth years being pulled from their clinical settings has been a significant challenge. Though fourth year students were close enough to finishing the year that they were able to get them all through, the third-year students have a clerkship course left to finish. He said they are working on alternative strategies including two weeks of online didactic content for students to complete until they can return to their clinical settings.
According to Olive, the program is also offering new online elective courses, including one specifically on COVID-19. The first group started on April 6, and he said the class will continue to be offered once the virus settles down if there is sustained interest.
“It includes online patient cases, information about the epidemiology of the disease,” Olive said. “That means, you know, which populations it affects and how is it transmitted—that sort of thing—and about public health measures that are being applied to try and address this. So, hopefully our students will be better prepared to deal with things that they see.”
Robinson said COVID-19 is “definitely scary”, but despite the panic surrounding it, seeing healthcare workers on the frontline is inspiring to him as someone preparing to enter the medical profession.
“They’ve really just stepped up,” Robinson said. “They’ve said, ‘This is what we’re here to do. This is what we picked,’ and they jump out into the call of duty, and I think that that’s awesome. It definitely makes me very proud to be going into this field, and I hope that if I’ll ever be in the same scenario, I would act the same way. I would have the feeling of this is what I wanted, this is what I’m here for, this is what I’m trained for and jump right in no questions asked.”
