MOULTRIE, Ga. — PCOM South Georgia held its first open house since opening its doors in August. The event brought in more than 100 prospective students.

The open house, held 5:30-8 p.m. Nov. 14, is a mile marker for the medical school on Tallokas Road.

In the year prior to its construction, students didn’t get an opportunity to see the school they’d attend or meet the people who’d teach them the ways of osteopathic medicine.

It’s an awesome opportunity to finally flip that script, Assistant Director of Admissions Dana Brooks said.

“We were dirt when they applied, so it’s great to see potential applicants and have them on our campus to see such an amazing facility,” she said.

And it’s meeting the people you’ll be taking under your tutelage that provides the real kicker, she said, as you take strides in challenging their norms.

“It feels good to be a part of something so much bigger than just enrolling students in school or to become doctors,” Brooks said. “You know you’re actually shaping and changing the way people think about health care, and making an impact, hopefully, on the shortage of physicians here in our area.”

Challenging and changing the norm is a part of PCOM (Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine) South Georgia’s mission.

As it states on its website, PCOM “is dedicated to the education of students in medicine, health and behavioral sciences. The College fosters the growth of the osteopathic profession by training physicians through programs of study guided by osteopathic medical tradition, concept and practice.”

A Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine (DO), according to the American Osteopathic Association, emphasizes “a whole-person approach to treatment and care”; the doctors “are trained to listen and partner with their patients to help them get healthy and stay well,” and they “receive special training in the musculoskeletal system, your body’s interconnected system of nerves, muscles and bones.”

They strive to help their patient “be truly healthy in mind, body and spirit — not just free of symptoms,” the site says. Students even got a demonstration of this from two current PCOM students, third year Setu Patel and first year JonHenry Allen.

But PCOM South Georgia has another mission: helping their students understand why they’re needed in rural areas. Chief Academic Officer and DO Michael Sampson said it best during his presentation to the prospective students.

“We’re going to train students to know their community because a medical school can’t live in a bottle,” he said. “It has to be out in the community. You have to know the nuances of rural medicine.”

Though Sampson didn’t want to emphasize that the young doctors had to stay in rural areas. He said he wanted them to understand the need and the disease states of rural areas versus that of urban ones.

“Some people are going to go to big cities — that’s cool. We’re going to train the best physicians, but all of our students are going to have a rural medicine spin [to their classes] so they’ll know the nuances of rural medicine,” he said.

Dorothy Anne Galang Cabantan, a prospective student from Seattle, Washington, is currently an emergency department medical scribe and graduated from the University of Washington in 2018.

She has her own experience with rural medicine and wants to make a difference in the area. That and a sense of community is what brought her to apply to PCOM South Georgia.

“Growing up in the Philippines, I used to go to my grandfather’s farm over in a province there and I totally remember how peaceful the situation was, how incredible the sense of community was, and, ultimately too, how sparse the healthcare was in that situation,” she said.

She was a child at the time, so there was nothing she could do. Her seeing the announcement of PCOM South Georgia’s construction reinvigorated a mission to make a difference in rural areas.

“South Georgia’s mission to build a new medical school and really revamp the entire health situation here and give healthcare access to a pretty underrepresented and underserved population really hit close to home,” she said. “And so I said I had to apply here — I had to fly all the way down here and see how it really is.”

And so, she did, which led her to getting an interview with the school on Nov. 15 to she if she’d be accepted.

PCOM South Georgia will be hosting a DO program, which has about 55 students in its inaugural class and will accept about 55 more for next year, and a new Master of Science in Biomedical Sciences program, which will accept about 15 students. Both new classes will start in August 2020.