In this guest Q&A, Katherine Sukalski, Ph.D., talks about the Millenial Generation—born between 1982 and 2000—and medical education. Sukalski is associate professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and director of biochemistry education. She also is principal investigator of the North Dakota Bridges to the Baccalaureate grant with North Dakota tribal colleges, and does faculty development.

Q. What do you teach and how has that informed your interest in addressing the needs of the Millenial Generation of medical students?
A. I teach intermediary metabolism and nutrition to medical students and metabolism to both undergraduate and graduate students. I often ask how we should train faculty to do the many different things they must do now that they didn’t earlier in terms of delivering course content to medical students.
     I belong to the International Association of Medical Science Educators, which recently organized a Webinar we participated in with Susan Pollart, M.D., associate dean for faculty development at the University of Virginia School of Medicine. She talked about preparing faculty for the “next generation” of medical students.

Q. What  major recent changes in medical education have you seen?
A. Our patient-centered learning has revolutionized medical education. In terms of most medical schools in the U.S., we’re well ahead of the curve. That’s why so many other schools send people here to find out how we do it. It’s based on problem-based learning, which started at McMaster University in Ontario. We were one of the early adopters. Dean Wilson sent a team to the University of Missouri Medical School to get a firsthand look at this model and bring it to North Dakota. Then we developed it and made it our own.
      Medical education is changing because our students are changing. The Millennials coming to medical school have different worldviews and they’ve got new notions about education. They’ve been shaped in a world that’s vastly different than the world we were trained in.

Q. Tell us more about these changes.
A. We engage students much more pro-actively in getting them on their way to master the material. They don’t like the old lecture-based system, and they don’t use libraries and textbooks like we used to. The Millenials use Google
and Wikipedia. They never had to learn how to use a
computer. It was there when they were born. As soon as they could sit up they were on the computer. They had computer game machines, e-mail in elementary school, cell phones, iPods, and a host of other interactive electronic devices. You and I had to learn how to use computers as adults. That’s a major difference.
      On the more human side, let’s note another difference: when our parents sent us off to college, maybe we called when we got engaged to be married. Now parents and kids are connected via cell phones. Parents today will talk to kids in college (and here at the med school) daily if not more often.
      That’s because there are fewer children per parent today, and parents are investing much more time and energy in their kids.

Q. So what does this all add up to for the future of the medical school curriculum?
A. We launched our revised curriculum in 1998. That’s when we put students into small groups. At that time we still urged them to use their texts and journal articles. Now, you look at their resource lists and almost everything on them says “www.”
      This all points to a different paradigm for acquiring and processing information and that continues to evolve. Fifteen years ago, students relied on four or five textbooks, which, even with all their failings, had a certain level of authority. Students knew that at article in Time was not as authoritative, say, as Devlin’s Biochemistry.
      Now it’s so easy to get something off the Web. It may not be as authoritative, but it’s increasingly a part of how medical education will continue to change.  We teach medical students what is an authoritative resource.
      A bigger change is that we know our students in small groups learn how to ask better questions, and how to research the answers quickly.