Hundreds of Colorado high school and undergraduate students attended CU Pre-Health Day at the CU Anschutz Medical Campus.
More than 200 Colorado high school and undergraduate students and pre-health advisers attended CU Pre-Health Day at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus on Sept. 26.
“We were hoping for close to 100 people to register for our event and to have over 200 show up, including walk-ups on Saturday morning, the turnout simply exceeded our expectations,” says Cammie Kennedy, chair of the Anschutz Marketing and Recruiting Committee (AMRC), the committee that hosted the event.
The event is a great way to introduce students to the excellent education they can receive without leaving the state. Pre-health programs are among the most popular undergraduate programs on the CU Denver campus.
The AMRC consists of faculty and staff representing each of the programs, schools and colleges on the CU Anschutz Medical Campus. The grassroots group formed in 2014 as a result of challenges associated with the multitude of pipeline and recruiting programs that are based on the campus.
CU Pre-Health Day 2015 was modeled after a similar event held at the University of California-Davis, where upwards of 8,500 students attend annually.
Erik Wallace, MD, FACP, delivers the keynote talk to a large audience of students at CU Pre-Health Day.
The CU Anschutz event consisted of eight different sessions targeted primarily to undergraduate students exploring the health professions as well as their pre-health advisers. Topics covered included, but were not limited to: the transition from undergraduate- to graduate-level programs (student panel), careers in the health care field (alumni panel), navigating the application (admissions panel), financial aid information and preparing for standardized exams.
Attendees were also given the opportunity to attend two 40-minute program-specific presentations. The event closed with an interprofessional mixer at which attendees had another opportunity to communicate with students and AMRC representatives.
During a lunch lecture, keynote speaker Erik Wallace, MD, FACP, associate dean for the Colorado Springs Branch of the University of Colorado School of Medicine, discussed interprofessional education focusing on emotional intelligence. Although attendees raved about all of the sessions during the day, they especially enjoyed Wallace’s inspiring presentation.
“For an inaugural event this was very successful,” Kennedy says. “It gives us a lot of momentum to build on going into next year.”
Kennedy adds that the enthusiasm, motivation and dedication of AMRC is impressive. “These CU Anschutz faculty and staff members came together voluntarily, identified needs and are enthusiastic about working together to address them,” she says.
Guest contributor: Cammie Kennedy, administrator, Human Medical Genetics & Genomics and Genetic Counseling.