SEAN KOTZ Special to The Roanoke Times

Sumeet Goel, a fourth-year student in the Virginia College of Osteopathic Medicine, created a Web site specifically for the doctor of osteopathic medicine classes.

| Sean Kotz

Special to The Roanoke Times

BLACKSBURG -- Doctors are trained to look at a problem, analyze the symptoms and come up with a solution.

So perhaps, then, it shouldn't be a surprise that a Virginia College of Osteopathic Medicine's fourth-year student, Sumeet Goel, did just that with a Web site, www.vcomdo.com.

The 25-year-old University of Michigan graduate was elected student vice president in his first year and was looking for ways to improve the experience and education for everyone.

"One of the things we really felt we needed was a podcasting system to make recordings of lectures available to everyone in the class," Goel said.

According to Goel, a handful of students had voice recorders and were constantly being approached for copies.

Access to information often came down to circles of friends, leaving some students without the lectures.

With some help from the school, Goel started working on a way to improve the recording quality and store recordings online.

"The popularity of it was beyond what anyone ever expected, and soon we had about 50 gigs a month being downloaded," he said.

As the use of the service grew to 95 percent of the students and storage space was running short, Goel decided to create a Web site specifically for the doctor of osteopathic medicine classes.

Soon Goel started working with Wordpress sites and realized the potential for expanding the project and making access and interaction as easy as possible.

This, in turn, led to another expansion of the site beyond Goel's initial expectations.

Today, the site offers students a way to share notes, download podcasts, organize study groups and interact socially.

The site is maintained exclusively by students.

There is an executive director and a blog moderator for each class. The blog moderators are responsible for maintaining the integrity of the posts on their class blog.

Second-year medical student Nick Bodenheimer, the current executive director of the SGA communications committee, said one of the most important aspects of the site is the way it promotes community and continuity between classes.

"We archive every post so that when students are taking classes that previous students have already taken, they have access to the previous study guides," Bodenheimer said.

"Personally, as a second-year preparing for third-year rotations, I really appreciate the clinical rotation advice that the current third-year students have passed down via blog posts," he said.

"I use it all the time," said second-year student Stephanie Stratigos, who appreciates the access to information.

"I posted a study guide just the other day, since we are in a test week."

Goel said the site has expanded naturally and he is happy to hand it down to the future classes while he is doing rotations in Rich Creek this year.

As for the future of the site, he expects continued evolution and hopefully expansion beyond VCOM.

"I would like this to become a mainstay not just at medical colleges," Goel said, "but in education in general.

"I feel like this community concept would help make 600-person lectures feel smaller and for freshmen coming into a university, it would help give them a community in the classes and even for social events."