Chancellor Michael Drake on Medical School Excellence - Uc Irvine 2011

>> My name is Karla Lozano, I'm a first-year medical student. Chancellor, is there any chance that the UCI School of Medicine will rise to be in the top 20 medical schools in the nation over the next decade, and what do you think it will take to get us there? >> So, I will say a couple of things about the School of Medicine, first it's nice to see you again and I know as a medical student we can't take too much time out of your schedule as I see you fidgeting. So, a couple of things about our medical school, one is the improvement in ranking over the last four or five years has been dramatic. It's moved up about 15 places in the standings. So, out of all of our schools there has been the greatest increase there, and it continues to move forward. The hospital is ranked in the top 1% of all hospitals in the country, so we're doing very, very well. So we're really pleased with the direction that things are going in our medical school. We have things like the iPad initiative, which was the first in the world and that's been copied at many places. You know that this school was the first to start the PRIME programs. They're a systemwide program and we were the first out of the block. And so we're doing things to change medical education and change the quality of the medical school. And that by changing the quality of the hospital we're improving the quality of care that people in our community and region get. So we do all those things to improve our quality and as you do those things step by step, you continue to move up in the rankings. The rankings are not as important as the "who you are" and "what you do," so we're really focused on the "who you are" and "what we're doing" and we'll let those other things come to follow; and we're very, very impressed with the direction that we're taking.