Student Life at UMMS-Baystate

You will spend time at the UMMS-Baystate campus in Springfield from your very first week—becoming familiar with our faculty, teaching facilities, patients, and communities where you'll do your clinical training in your third and fourth years.

Your home base is Brightwood House—the learning community for PURCH students. You will learn and work together with these students and faculty mentors over the four years of medical school.

Get an idea of a typical day for a first-year and second-year PURCH student at the Baystate campus.

The First Day

Breakfast with Faculty and Staff

Welcome from Dean Andy Artenstein

Team Building Ice Breaker

The First Month

First DCS Class

PURCH students compare and contrast clinical reasoning with everyday reasoning by listening to a master auto mechanic diagnose car problems.

History-taking Interviews

Half of the class practices their interview skills by taking family and social histories with clients at the homeless shelter.

The other half interviews inmates at the jail. They also discussed the healthcare systems at the shelter or jail and identified barriers to care.

Interprofessional Poverty Simulation

PURCH students join students from nursing schools and pharmacy schools in an exercise simulating the experiences of living in poverty. Executives, attendings and residents have participated in similar poverty simulations.

White Coat Ceremony

Our PURCH students and their classmates receive their white coats at a ceremony at the main campus in Worcester.