“Did you know that so-and-so is PLME?” This is a question many Brown students may have heard. And unless the target of the question is enrolled in the Program in Liberal Medical Education themselves, there is a good chance the answer might be no.
The Program in Liberal Medical Education is an eight-year combined baccalaureate-MD program and the only one of its kind in the Ivy League. Attractive for giving pre-medical students the flexibility to explore a liberal arts education, PLME is also highly competitive, with an acceptance rate of around 3.5% in 2019 and only around 50 enrolled students per class year.
Past the program’s competitiveness are benefits that PLME student Deeya Prakash ’26 described as “amazing.” For instance, PLMEs can take Organic Chemistry, a notoriously challenging pre-med requirement, with a Satisfactory/No Credit grade option and are not required to take the high-pressure Medical College Admission Test, or MCAT.
Both of these perks allow students to partake in more academic and extracurricular ventures — but can also lead to “frustration” within the non-PLME pre-med community at Brown, Prakash added.
“I cannot sit here and say that that frustration’s an illogical thing to feel,” Prakash said. “But because of that, a lot of us feel like (being PLME) is not necessarily the first thing we want to tell people, because there’s going to be some opinions or preconceived notions or treatment that we might get.”
“I have a lot of respect for the pre-meds on this campus, and a lot of the times I have sat through classes that I have the opportunity to take pass/fail, and have been very grateful for that,” she added.
But Prakash stressed that PLME students are “never just idling” due to their guaranteed seat in med school. Prakash, for example, currently works three research jobs in addition to taking advanced English classes.
“The way that we got here is that we were grinding our little tails off in high school to a point where you can’t take that out of a person,” she said. “That work ethic and that ability and passion is within almost all the students here at Brown, but it’s in us too.”
For Rafael Davis ’25, another PLME student, the “stigmatization” faced by PLMEs is “not really that big of a deal,” but “definitely something that will make people kind of hesitant to mention that they are PLME.”
Davis and Prakash are co-presidents of the PLME Undergraduate Senate, the representative body for PLME students. One of the biggest “hidden benefits” of the program, Davis says, is the tight-knit cohort.
“You’re gonna be with those people for the next eight years,” Davis said. “So I think it’s very good to build relationships now and start a good foundation.”
Beyond the inter- and intra- class year camaraderie, Prakash noted that PLME students also have a strong built-in network with professors at the Warren Alpert Medical School and Rhode Island Hospital doctors, since their advising deans are all working physicians.
“If you’re ever in a situation in which you want to be connected with somebody … (the deans) know somebody and they can get you something,” Prakash said.
According to PLME Associate Dean Judy Jang ’03 MD’07, an assistant professor of medicine, the benefit of having working physicians as advisors is invaluable in PLME. She added that being a former PLME student herself enables her to have an “understanding” of her current mentees, especially since she advises the same students for all four years of their undergraduate education.
“The course for all of our students is pretty individualized, and that falls under every realm of the program, so the advising is also personalized,” Jang said.
PLME also supports students through the group PLME First-Generation and Underrepresented in Medicine, or FURM, which connects students identifying as first-generation or underrepresented minorities. Davis, who is the PLME Senate Liaison to FURM, said that a group like this is beneficial in “rehumanizing the path.”
Many other pre-medical opportunities are only open to PLME students — such as the PLME Summer Research Assistantship, PLME-specific study abroad opportunities and the Whole Patient and Whole Physician programs, which allow students to talk with doctors. According to Davis, the Research Assistantship saves PLME students from the competitiveness of other Brown research opportunities like the Undergraduate Teaching and Research Awards, or UTRAs.
There are also PLME-specific classes, such as PLME1000, a seminar giving students “a taste of med school” through rotations with different physicians at Warren Alpert, Prakash said. Others include preclinical electives at Warren Alpert that are “tangential to medicine,” such as Planetary Health, Medical Malpractice and Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, according to Davis.
Although PLME offers a wealth of pre-medical opportunities — and a guaranteed seat in medical school, the “number one most attractive” quality of the program — Prakash, who concentrates in English, said that the value of being able to explore the liberal arts cannot be overstated.
“Since I’ve been here, I can absolutely confirm that no part of that is clickbait,” Prakash said. “I think there’s a huge benefit of being a humanistic physician … caring about all aspects of education makes you a better doctor, makes you a better person.”
“It’s so much better than it looks on paper,” she added.
