OSR Central Region Update

June 2008

The central region is fresh off a fantastic combined regional meeting with the southern region in sunny Florida. Some of the hot sessions at this year's meeting included:

• panel of recently matched 4th years talking about the Match and the Scramble
• financial aid services, a comprehensive approach
• central vs. southern "Challenge" on the beach...need you even ask who won? (Great job central region!)

The hot topics discussed in business meetings included:

• regional campus issues
• career advising
• recruitment of under-represented minorities

Also, of great interest to the CGEA Steering Committee was the discussion on roles and responsibilities of OSR reps at different schools. An end-of-the-meeting survey very clearly illustrated the variety of roles that OSR reps play at their respective institutions, with many of them sitting on Student Government, others acting as informal contacts for a myriad of issues pertinent to Medical Education, and most having very ill-defined responsibilities. Several good ideas were discussed and proposed in a Southern-Central combined business meeting and will be available on the Online Community soon. Also, as was announced in an email in April, we've elected a great bunch of delegates for the upcoming year, with a mix of senior and new reps. Congratulations to each of them and thank you to all who ran.

Finally, a group of very motivated central region reps have initiated a project that is intended to better educate OSR reps about the issues at their school and better orient new OSR reps. This project has a couple of parts. The first part is a questionnaire of both preclinical and clinical issues that are often discussed amongst the OSR reps; the hope is that new reps (and even experienced ones) can take this questionnaire back to their institution and work on completing it so they have more thorough knowledge of their institution's policies and so they can more actively participate in OSR business meeting discussions. The second part of this project is a series of "leader" questions that can be used to initiate productive discussion between the OSR reps and their institution's administration. The reps are putting together the questions and a sample may be available for the June Ad Board meeting...stay tuned.

I'm looking forward to a very productive year with this group of OSR reps; they've already demonstrated their immense enthusiasm and initiative and I can't wait to see what they'll do next... Cheers from the Central Region!

Roxanne Richards
OSR Central Regional Chair
Ohio State University COM
d.roxanne.richards@osumc.edu

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