Year in School: M3
Hometown: Green Ridge, Mo.
Undergrad: University of Missouri
Major: Biological sciences
Email: ctbqnf@health.missouri.edu
Med Specialty: Pediatrics/sports medicine/undecided
Why I Chose MU
Hey y’all, I’m Cole Bredehoeft. I grew up in a small farming town in central Missouri near Sedalia (home of the Missouri State Fair, which I recommend you attend if you come to Mizzou!). The majority of my family didn’t attend college and worked in our family construction business. However, because my mother is an LPN, I got a lot of exposure to medicine at a young age as I practically grew up running around the family medicine clinic where she worked. I was lucky to get to see Mizzou Med education in the works as all five doctors in this practice were graduates of the medical school at Mizzou. Therefore, I was set on attending Mizzou for undergrad and medical school.
That being said, when I graduated from Green Ridge High School, I decided I didn’t want to go to school that long. I ended up attending the University of Central Missouri, where I majored in marketing. About a month into my freshman year, I knew it wasn’t a good fit and decided to transfer to Mizzou. After a year at UCM, I ended up at Mizzou majoring in biological sciences as I originally planned. I then began working in a research lab and a part-time job at Bass Pro Shops as I worked through the pre-med coursework. When I graduated in May 2014, I took a year off. During this year, I continued to work in the research lab that I had during undergrad and began working as a clinical laboratory assistant at the Women’s and Children’s Hospital in Columbia. I then started medical school at Mizzou in July 2015.
As I said, Mizzou was always at the top of my list for medical schools since I had experienced care from and shadowed doctors who were graduates of Mizzou’s Patient-Based Learning curriculum. I knew that was the type of doctor I wanted to be, so I set my sights on making Mizzou my home for medical school. The best part about Mizzou’s PBL curriculum is that we don’t get stuck in lecture all day long! After experiencing the PBL curriculum, I cannot imagine learning any other way. PBL encourages collaboration, since we work in small groups, each block working through different cases each week to learn about medicine. We teach each other about topics we didn’t understand that were presented in the case after each day and then put what we learned into practice in later cases. This collaboration rids the medical school of competition as we all want to learn the same material and help our classmates learn. If there is something you’re struggling with, there is always either someone to explain it to you in person or someone who has made an awesome study guide that is shared with the class. The best part of all of this is that we get to start applying what we learned to real patients in our PBL cases, while at other schools, you try to memorize everything presented in lecture and hope to remember it to apply to patients in the future. Although it’s not completely obvious what you’re going to be tested on with the PBL curriculum, which can be frustrating at times, I believe we learn more information about each topic and learn it more effectively as we teach each other about the topics. With this, everything we learn is integrated together, which prepares us to become patient-centered physicians. Mizzou really does make us more prepared for our futures than other medical schools. Along with this, we start seeing patients in our simulation center (which is crazy awesome!) the very first week of class. That is quite a bit sooner than most medical schools.
If you have any questions, feel free to send me an e-mail at ctbqnf@health.missouri.edu. Besides the school, if you have any questions about Columbia, let me know, as I’ve called it home for five years now. Good luck with the application and interview process! I hope to see some of you during the interview season and next year at Mizzou!
