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' S C O P E S M A G A Z I N E O C T O B E R 2 0 13 A Cornell Veterinary Education Over the past several decades, three general trends in medical education have been pursued by thoughtful faculties seeking to improve student engagement and enhance educational goals such as the production of clinician scientists or, particularly in the case of veterinary medicine, clinical preparedness. The first involves the effort to integrate clinical information within the pre-clinical disciplines in a manner that uses students' hunger for patient contacts to motivate the acquisition of biomedical fundamentals. The second is the incorporation of self-directed learning exercises that focus on problem solving rather than strictly on data delivery and retention. Finally, exposing students to meaningful research imparts the awareness of the continuing advancement of medical knowledge and the vital connections between discovery and current medical procedures. These trends have been aggressively incorporated into Cornell's DVM training program and constitute one of our major competitive advantages; but more importantly, the integration of broad clinical experiences, self-directed learning in a clinical context, and meaningful research experiences within our curriculum add significant value to our students' degrees. I am often surprised by the assumption, even by other academics, that medical curricula and educational strategies are relatively fixed and immutable, that faculty invariably resists change, and that national reports or calls for uniform pedagogical approaches are the only effective strategies to motivate curricular "reform." Moreover, there is a perception in our profession that achieving a standardized and uniform curriculum is a desirable goal. These views seem at odds with those aspects of medical training that have led to the most distinguished and desirable education in the world. The curriculum at Cornell is a case in point: one of the most innovative in the world, it has undergone substantial change since the top-to-bottom revision associated with implementation of problem-based learning in the 1990s. That curriculum revision changed the DVM program from one organized around traditional disciplines to integrated "Blocks" that incorporate pre-clinical and clinical information within the context of student-directed learning. Thus, for example, Block 4 com- |1