ORLANDO, April 15, 2010 — UCF College of Medicine now has official student transcripts, a development that M.D. Program Registrar Teresa Lyons-Oten calls “another piece of history that puts us on the map.”
M.D. students will need official transcripts during their fourth year of medical school to compete for graduate medical education positions in their specialty through the National Residency Match Program and Teresa said most programs want a M.D. transcript only that shows how a student performed during his or her medical school training. Now, thanks to help from Monica Rodriguez, from the College of Medicine’s IT team, Ron Mathews, of UCF’s Computer Services and Telecommunications Department and the university Registrar’s Office, the college has medical career-specific transcripts.
The project was a year in the making as the team designed a transcript that was consistent with UCF’s but also provides a detailed record of the academic history for each M.D. student. Students can request transcripts in person or on-line and can choose whether to include records from their undergraduate and graduate education. The documents are created and printed on secured transcript paper that contains an identifying “fingerprint” and the UCF College of Medicine seal.
Teresa and Monica recently printed out the college’s first transcripts amid much fanfare. “I actually got up and started dancing,” Teresa said. “With transcripts, the student’s achievement is official. The validation is there.”
Members of the UCF College of Medicine Charter Class of 2013 will not be charged a transcript fee. First-year medical student Briana Gapsis already has ordered her first official transcript. Briana is applying for a summer research opportunity in ophthalmology at the Johns Hopkins University and needed a transcript for her application. “This is great for our school,” she said of the new transcripts. “In the future it’s going to be very important for all of us to be able to get this kind of accurate record quickly.”