Personal Journeys to PBL: Retrospect from Unit-2 Medical Students at McMaster University

This is the fifth of a series of papers jointly written by a tutor and his Unit-1 and Unit-2 medical students from different tutorial groups in a genuine PBL educational program at McMaster University. The first two papers deal with students' views on the philosophy and process of problem-based learning (PBL) as they experienced during the first year. The third paper is concerned with students' views on the early clinical exposure in the PBL curriculum and the fourth article describes the sources of stress in their learning under the intense self-directed PBL environment. In this communication, all six students in Dr. Kwan's tutorial group recapitulated, in their own words, the thoughts and preparative events that have led them to follow the roadmap to PBL at McMaster Health Sciences Center. What made them chose PBL and what made them choose McMaster? At the time of writing, these students had gone through Unit-1 (12 weeks) and 8 weeks into Unit-2 (16 weeks); that is, they had been given an initial taste of PBL under McMaster philosophy. Did the PBL experience at McMaster meet their expectation? We also had a visitor, Dr. Song, joining us as an observer. Dr. Song is a faculty from a dental school in China, who is on an academic mission to acquire the first-hand PBL experience at McMaster and to introduce it in dental education in his home institute in China, which at present remains as an immense infertile land for PBL in higher education. We also invite Dr. Song's input based on his observations of this tutorial group.