Mission Statement, Goals, and Objectives
The Master of Science in Media, Medicine, and Health draws on mass media, narratives, and the arts to elevate patient and community voices, create health initiatives and improve health education, and analyze and enhance evidence -based interventions. The program provides rigorous training in both theories and methods of storytelling and social medicine from Harvard Medical School faculty and culminates in a mentored Capstone Project in which students develop a novel health intervention.
The target audience for this program includes physicians, nurses, and health professionals; people in health communications and public relations; health journalists, writers, and editors; bioethicists; patient advocates and health educators; people in health administration; people who work for foundations and NGOs; and others who have a stake in communicating the lived experience of illness to a broad audience.
Program graduates will acquire a wide range of knowledge, analytical, and practical skills (along with career advising) necessary for using media and the principles of storytelling to create successful and measurable health programs for the multitude of health crises facing our nation and the world. Graduates will also learn the importance of grounding their stories and projects in science and drawing on evidence-based, rigorously reviewed programs that have shown success. The program will prepare students for a range of jobs in traditional and social media, journalism, foundations, direct health care, health care policy, and community organizations, and provide valuable networking opportunities with experts in various industries and storytelling modalities.
Harvard Medical School has a history of revolutionizing medical education and improving patient care through storytelling. The New Pathway curriculum, which has influenced medical education throughout the world, departed from the traditional division of biological science and patient care and, instead, placed an innovative emphasis on learning medical science by exploring and understanding the lived experiences and stories of patients. The Master of Science in Media, Medicine, and Health extends the storytelling tradition of Harvard Medical School and uses the expertise of our faculty to improve how we understand the root causes of illness and suffering, why our bestintentioned interventions sometimes fail to heal or comfort, how bias and structural racism perpetuate unequal access to care and increased morbidity and mortality, and how those interventions might yet still help patients achieve the highest attainable health with the benefit of a novel media and narrative approach.
This is the only master’s degree program in the United States to offer evidence-based multidisciplinary storytelling and arts-driven curriculum focusing on health education and interventions to improve health outcomes for the poor and vulnerable. The program will embrace a biosocial approach, as developed in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine (GHSM) by Paul Farmer, Arthur Kleinman, Anne Becker, Jim Yong Kim, and Salmaan Keshavjee. A biosocial approach examines how governments, institutions, and histories intersect to create illness and poor health, especially for those overburdened by poverty and racism. Just as former GHSM Chair Jim Yong Kim transformed the department’s mission from solely conducting research to help others deliver care to a mission that also focuses on the delivery of care itself, this program will guide students in actively highlighting and mitigating inequalities. In this way, the program aligns with the departmental mission.
MMH provides outstanding didactic and mentorship to healthcare professionals to prepare for leadership roles in patient-oriented safety and quality improvement.
The major goal of the program is to provide an innovative comprehensive curriculum that allows participants to pair knowledge and skills with practical experience. The learning model builds upon theoretical knowledge of healthcare quality and safety and expands to include practical applications to assess and improve processes of care. With the opportunity to gain experiential knowledge, students will be well-poised to take on leadership and management initiatives
Learning Objectives
The Master of Science in Media, Medicine, and Health draws on mass media, narratives, and the arts to elevate patient and community voices, improve health education, and analyze and enhance evidence-based interventions. The curriculum provides rigorous training in both theories and methods of storytelling and social medicine from Harvard Medical School faculty. The program culminates in a mentored Capstone Project in which students develop a novel media intervention.
Graduates of this program will acquire a wide range of knowledge, analytical, and practical storytelling and media skills (along with networking opportunities and career advising) necessary to create successful and impactful health programs for the multitude of health crises facing our nation and the world. Guest speakers and lecturers will provide valuable networking opportunities in various industries and storytelling modalities.
This is the only master’s degree program in the United States to offer evidence-based multidisciplinary storytelling and arts-driven curriculum focusing on health education and interventions. The program challenges students to deeply understand and unmask the structural and political roots of disease, shine a light on the gaps in current health education and delivery strategies, and advocate to correct health inequities through storytelling interventions.
Degree Offered
This program offers a Master of Science in Media, Medicine, and Health (SM-MMH) degree.
Prerequisites for Admission
To apply to the Master of Science in Media, Medicine, and Health an applicant must:
• Have a bachelor’s degree
• For applicants for whom English was not the medium of instruction for their undergraduate or graduate degree. The master’s programs accept TOEFL iBT, TOEFL Essentials, IELTS Academic, or the Duolingo English Test. To be considered for admission, applicants must meet the following minimum test score requirements:
TOEFL iBT: 103
TOEFL Essentials: 11
IELTS Academic: 7.5
Duolingo English Test: 130
Instructions to submit official test scores:
TOEFL iBT and TOEFL Essentials: Code 3151: Harvard Medical School Graduate Education Master’s Programs
IELTS Academic:
Contact the test center where you took the IELTS test to request that your scores be sent via e-Delivery to: Account Name: Harvard Medical School Graduate Education Master's Programs Address: Graduate Education Master's Programs 25 Shattuck Street
Boston, MA 02115
United States
Duolingo English Test: Search for “Harvard Medical School” and select the appropriate program.
Academic Residence Requirements
The Master of Science in Media, Medicine, and Health is a residential program. Students complete their coursework at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts.
Course of Study
Curriculum by term: full-time
(September–December)
(February–May)
The US. State Department requires that students on an F-1 or J-1 visa complete degree programs full-time.
(September–December)
Required Courses by course number with credits, grading, description, instructor(s)
Core Courses
MMH 701: Social Medicine Proseminar: Methods and Practice
Primary Faculty: Marty Zeve, PhD; Joia Mukherjee, MD, MPH
This course will introduce students to the foundational concepts, analytical frameworks, and methodologies of social medicine and global health. Social medicine is a field of study and practice that uses insights from the interpretive social sciences to improve medical theory, the delivery of health care, and health equity; global health practitioners draw on social medicine approaches to eradicate the drivers of health inequities, to deliver high quality care to poor and vulnerable communities, and to advocate for health as a human right. Students in the course will learn to analyze the intertwined social and biological forces, or “biosocial interactions,” that distribute risk, illness and disease, treatment access, and poor outcomes inequitably across places and communities. They will do so by exploring the historic, socioeconomic, and political forces patterning the burden of disease, conventional biomedical and public health models of risk and poor health, and programmatic responses to health challenges. By the end of the semester, they will have mastered the concepts and critical thinking skills required to produce independent scholarly analyses of the biosocial roots of contemporary health challenges.
This course is required of all first-year students enrolled in the Global Health Delivery and Media, Medicine, and Health masters programs at Harvard Medical School.
Primary Learning Goals:
1. Understand the history of social medicine and the continuities and discontinuities of inquiry from historical and current leaders in the field.
2. Appreciate how a historical understanding of the field of global health and social medicine and its diverse traditions can inform practitioners’ choice of methodological and practical approaches to contemporary health equity challenges.
3. Evaluate the role of global and local social forces in determining the burden of risk, morbidity, and mortality, across time and place, especially among the poor and marginalized.
4. Apply critical analytic and methodological approaches in combination with a deep historical understanding of the field, to original analyses of urgent and emergent social medicine problems.
Prerequisites: There are no formal prerequisites.
Credits: 4
Grading: Ordinal
MMH 702: Social Medicine Proseminar: Advanced Topics and Applications
Primary Faculty: Marty Zeve, PhD; Joia Mukherjee, MD, MPH
The Proseminar in Social Medicine is a two-semester course required of all students in the Master of Science in Media, Medicine, and Health program. Social medicine uses insights from the social sciences to improve medical theory and healthcare delivery. The second semester of the course will build on methodological and critical analytic foundations established in the first by exploring the field’s diverse historical roots in 19th-and 20th-century Europe, Latin America, Asia, Africa, and North America. It will enable students to situate different practical approaches to social medicine in the local contexts in which they developed and help students to understand how history and social exigency shape both continuities and discontinuities across them. Finally, it will examine contemporary case studies of social medicine, allowing students to apply the critical analytic and methodological skills learned in the first semester of the course to urgent and emergent health equity challenges.
Prerequisites: There are no formal prerequisites.
Credits: 4
Grading: Ordinal
MMH 705: Storytelling Methods to Promote Health and Well-Being
Primary Faculty: Neal Baer, MD, Suzanne Koven, MD, MFA
There is a growing and influential body of literature showing that promoting positive health-related behavior and change can be influenced by drawing on mass media, storytelling, and the arts. Traditional public health approaches have included outreach campaigns, but newer and more innovative programs draw on both nonfictional and dramatized depictions of public health issues to create and encourage pro-health-related behaviors. This seminar explores a plethora of storytelling methods that can be used to promote health and well-being, ranging from blogs, op-eds, and podcasts to theater, graphic novels, and poetry. We will draw on research to strengthen health communication and will survey the different methods of messaging, emphasizing which of these methods is most appropriate for a given audience.
Primary Learning Goals:
1. Discuss different storytelling modalities available for health outreach and determine which are most effective for behavioral change goals.
2. Describe the benefits of different forms of entertainment and storytelling modalities as a means of creating prohealth behavior with attention paid to cross-cultural approaches.
3. Analyze and cite examples of current initiatives using mass media and technology to promote pre-health change.
4. Consider which storytelling modality to use for their Capstone project and discuss why that modality is being selected.
Prerequisites: There are no formal prerequisites.
Credits: 4
Grading: Ordinal
MMH 721: Illness Narratives
Primary Faculty: Suzanne Koven, MD, MFA
“The kingdom of the sick,” as Susan Sontag called it, is no single place. The experience of each ill person and each caregiver is unique, shaped by psychological, social, biological, political, economic, and other forces beyond a specific diagnosis. Narratives in the form of essays, memoirs, poetry, fiction, pathography, and other genres help us make meaning and even beauty out of the complex and often bewildering experience of illness. In this course, we will read several such narratives as well as write our own, addressing topics including disability, addiction, mental illness, the role of the family in illness, the role reversal that occurs when clinicians become ill, and the end of life. We will also explore the history of medical narratives, the ethical considerations involved in telling the stories of illness, and the power of such stories to promote healing in individuals and society.
Primary Learning Goals:
1. Describe the history and impact of many forms of illness narratives.
2. Analyze written texts of narratives in terms of structure, content, and rhetorical effectiveness.
3. Identify moral questions that arise in illness narratives.
4. Craft personal essays that respond to multiple moral questions about illness.
Prerequisites: There are no formal prerequisites.
Credits: 2
Grading: Ordinal
MMH 725: Opinion Writing for Science and Medicine
Primary Faculty: Jason Silverstein, PhD
“We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology,” said Carl Sagan, “in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.” And so, the task before the opinion writer on science and medicine is a tall one: to tell the stories not only of incremental developments and dazzling discoveries, but also of health and society, all while trying to persuade an audience of ordinary humans with little time, limited knowledge, and varying allegiances. This course teaches the craft of opinion writing on science and medicine with a focus on writing for publication. To do so, we read and dissect a selection of powerful, award-winning editorial and commentary pieces. Some expose harms in mental hospitals, jails, and the child welfare system, while others debunk conspiracy theories about vaccines and speak truth to power about abortion access. By the end, students will understand how these pieces are pitched, sold, and written, and will have a packet of revised op-eds polished for publication.
Prerequisites: There are no formal prerequisites.
Credits: 2
Grading: Ordinal
MMH 717: People Power & Health
Primary Faculty: Marshall Ganz, Pedja Stojicic
People Power & Health will create a space in which students creatively engage in collective action around health topics. Grounding them in the foundations of community organizing frameworks and public narrative, we will enable students to explore how using art as a continuous practice, rather than a final product, can build collective efforts and impact in health spaces.
Traditional health communications campaigns seek to leverage “silver bullet” messaging a single, simple ask that will transfer to individual behavior change. Without creating meaningful relationships with and among people, these interventions risk falling short of their potential impact. If communications teams continue to view target populations as passive audiences, rather than active constituencies, their efforts will continue to miss the mark. This course will allow students to practice how to build such constituencies by switching the focus of communications practices’ final products from that of a campaign messaging strategy to the collective power of the individuals who participate in the campaign.
Primary
Learning Goals:
1. Learn and apply principles of Community Organizing to developing teams and engage in collective action
2 Learn and apply the Public Narrative framework, such that students understand how storytelling can be used as a leadership practice.
3 Demonstrate an understanding of the relationship between health communications interventions and collective action, and how collective action could enable health and well-being.
Prerequisites: There are no formal prerequisites.
Credits: 2
Grading: Ordinal
MMH 729: Designing Change: Empathy and Storytelling in Health
Primary Faculty: Emilie Wagner, Paola Abello, Sandra de Buffington Castro
Designing Change: Empathy and Storytelling in Health is a half-semester course in the MS program in Media, Medicine, and Health. This course will be broken into two distinct chapters: 1) Design Thinking, Empathy Research and 2) Storytelling for Health, Empathy and Well Being.
In Design Thinking and Empathy Research students will gain a foundational understanding of the design thinking process, spending four weeks exploring empathy research, the first phase in the design thinking process. Four empathy research methods will be covered: interviewing, observation, immersion, and intercepts. Students will jump between experiential classroom activities and fieldwork to learn best practices, frameworks, and mindsets specific to each
research method taught.
In Storytelling for Health, Empathy and Well Being, students will gain an understanding of communication and narrative change theory, spending three weeks exploring four elements of narrative change: the power of storytelling to change health knowledge, attitudes and behavior; case studies of TV health storylines and their impact on audiences; research methodologies to evaluate the impact of storytelling on audiences; and a practicum in developing new narratives of health, empathy and well-being.
Primary Learning Goals:
1. Gain a foundational understanding of design thinking, including the end-to-end process and value of deploying a human-centered approach to problem solving.
2. Develop empathy research skills and best practices, specifically around 4 key empathy research methods: in-depth interviews, observation, immersion, and intercepts.
3. Gain a foundational understanding of communication theory, including theoretical frameworks and audience impact research results.
Primary learning goal
4. Develop storytelling for health skills, including review of case studies of TV storylines portraying empathy and the resulting impact on audience knowledge, attitudes and behavior; and practice crafting narratives that draw audiences into a compelling story vs. pushing a message out.
Prerequisites: There are no formal prerequisites.
Credits: 2
Grading: Ordinal
MMH 730: Readings in Media, Medicine, and Health
Primary Faculty: Jason Silverstein, PhD
This course is focused on preparing students to make an original contribution to knowledge in the field of media and medicine in their capstone projects. Through practical exercises and curated readings related to each student’s chosen topic, students will learn the process of turning their research project into a publishable work. While the course readings are highly tailored to each student’s interests, sessions will familiarize students with key approaches and concerns of scholarly practice. By the end of the class, students will demonstrate a command of the historical foundations and current debates about their topic, how to situate their work within the scholarly debates, and how to craft an intellectually rigorous and boldly original argument.
Primary Learning Goals:
1. Build a literature review that situates the student’s capstone project in the history of the scholarship on their topic.
2. Understand the current state and debates among scholars and practitioners about their capstone topic.
3. Examine the political, economic, and social world in which their topic is situated.
4. Produce a properly formatted bibliography that is acceptable for capstone submission and publication.
Prerequisites: There are no formal prerequisites.
Credits: 2
Grading: Ordinal
MMH 732: Fundaments of Visual Narratives
Primary Faculty: Paola Abello, Brooke DiGiovanni, Joel Katz, Gaël McGill, Emilie Wagner
This course, divided into three distinct parts, focuses on the fundamentals of effective visual narrative messaging for improving health-related behavior. We start with the lens of design thinking to learn about communication and
interactive challenges in healthcare and what tools can be used to address these challenges. In the second part of the course, students will explore how the visual arts can contribute to positive engagement in healthcare. Finally, the students will be introduced to the opportunities and challenges of crafting accurate and engaging scientific visualization narratives.
Primary Learning Goals:
1. Describe components of effective as accessible visual narratives and storytelling.
2. Articulate real-life applications of visual narrative interventions in healthcare.
3. Understand how to disseminate visual content to a given audience.
4. Recognize the process and coordination of visual production projects, showing the iterative nature of creative projects (phases, skill sets, tools, and budget).
Prerequisites: There are no formal prerequisites.
Credits: 2
Grading: Ordinal
MMH 750: Capstone
Primary Faculty: Jason Silverstein, PhD
The Capstone Course in Media, Medicine, and Health is the culmination of the Master of Science in Media, Medicine, and Health program. It is the student’s opportunity to use a storytelling method of their choice to craft a novel health intervention. In consultation with program leadership and their mentor, students will decide on both a storytelling medium and message. Students will be expected to draw on the work they completed in the fall and are completing in parallel to produce a written paper that applies to the biosocial analysis of a health problem and a media project. At the end of the semester, students will present their capstone project in a public forum.
Prerequisites: There are no formal prerequisites.
Credits: 4
Grading: Ordinal
Elective Courses
Students will have an opportunity to take fourteen (14) credits of electives for example in bioethics, social medicine, or methods (such as courses offered by the Departments of English; Art, Film, and Visual Studies; and Theater, Dance, and Media in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences). Students may also take electives from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, including “Health Communication in the 21st Century.” Other potential electives include an internship or an independent study with an advisor to develop or reinforce their Capstone Project. For example, a student working on a capstone that involves creating a podcast might complete an independent study or an internship with the instructor who taught that modality in the first semester on podcasts.
MMH 760: Internship in Media, Medicine, and Health
Primary Faculty: Jason Silverstein, PhD
An individual internship course in which a student of the Media, Medicine, and Health master’s program works with health researchers for one semester as a participant-observer; research assistant; photographer, documentarian, or journalist. To enroll, a student must obtain permission from a research supervisor and the MMH program leadership. Specific criteria will be developed in a committee of student, supervisor, and Course Director, and will include a weekly work schedule, a clear goal for written or artistic work, a midterm committee conference, and a final public presentation of their internship work.
Primary Learning Goals:
1. To gain experience in the craft of health communications not covered by regular courses of instruction, such as photography, documentary filmmaking, or narrative science journalism.
2. To develop research skills for identifying and moving towards actionable advocacy goals.
3. To gain an understanding of the professional work of researchers, observe their form of expertise, and learn about the process of becoming an expert.
Prerequisites: There are no formal prerequisites.
Credits: 0–4
Grading: Ordinal
MMH 709: Special Topics in Media, Medicine, and Health
Primary Faculty: Jason Silverstein, PhD
Special study of selected topics in Media, Medicine, and Health. Given on an annual basis, the lecture course is designed by the MMH artist-in-residence for the year to cover topics not covered by regular courses of instruction. A detailed narrative of the year’s course will be made available on Canvas. To enroll, a student must be an MMH master’s student or petition the instructor.
Primary Learning Goals:
1. To develop an understanding of media and storytelling techniques not covered by regular courses of instruction.
2. To use the arts to explore the connection between firsthand experiences and social and political life.
3. To examine a specific storytelling modality’s ability to effect social change.
This is the 2024 Fall description for the course with 2024-2025 artist-in-residence Saeed Jones Who Do You Think You Are: A Creative Nonfiction Workshop
Saeed Jones
Enrollment: Limited to 12 students
People don’t just happen. In this workshop-based class, students will explore the capacity of memoir and cultural criticism to illuminate their understanding of memory, connection, and self-making. This course is as invested in the craft of writing as it is in interrogating how storytelling functions within systems of power. Students will be asked to consider what the work is doing to us, and what we are using our own work to do to others. In particular, this course will investigate the role social determinants of health play in self-making. Classes will alternate between workshop discussions, in-class writing exercises and close readings of nonfiction by Lucille Clifton, Eula Biss, Carmen Maria Machado, Toni Morrison, Vivian Gornick, Hanif Abdurraqib, and Kiese Laymon among others.
Applications for this workshop should include a 2-3 page (double-spaced if prose, single-spaced if poetry) writing sample of any genre (nonfiction, fiction, poetry) or combination of genres. Additionally, I ask that students submit a 250-word reflection on their aspirations for creative nonfiction and why this course appeals to them. This class is open to students of all writing levels and experience.
Prerequisites: There are no formal prerequisites.
Credits: 4
Grading: Ordinal
MMH 715: Rx: Arts and Global Mental Health
Primary Faculty: Doris Sommer, PhD, MA
The arts are available resources for supporting mental health. The reasons why and exemplary cases are explored in this course. Clinical interventions alone seldom address the escalating challenge to prevent and treat mental illness. Fear or humiliation may interfere with diagnosis and available treatments. But today, the even greater obstacle is an insufficient ratio of clinicians to potential patients. Professional treatment at the necessary scale has become impractical and
medication has become a default and dangerous stop-gap response to the crisis. Therefore, innovative health providers have learned to rely on creative interventions through the arts and, by extension, through creative education. Our course considers the dynamic between health conditions and conditions for health to highlight non-clinical responses to the mental health crisis. Resources for responding are everywhere when the arts come into focus. The genres of art will include traditional and contemporary arts; each environment can identify available materials and mentors.
The interconnectedness of conditions and the far-reaching effects of creative responses are explored through cases of art intervention in health care and through theories of why art works. What is therapeutic about making art and about thinking through the process? Readings and discussion engage a tradition of aesthetic philosophy that begins in the European Enlightenment to promote broad-based artmaking as a response to conflict (Schiller) and to stimulate freedom of thought by starting with beauty (Kant). Surprising expectations and inviting us to think about the effects, “Rx: Arts for Mental Health” offers basic training in the enlightened tradition of aesthetic judgment while it tracks some cases of arts that support global health. In seminar discussions, the course considers how change and growth in global health can benefit from an aesthetic approach to technical and social challenges. Theoretical readings (Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Arendt, Schiller, Dewey, Freire, Gramsci, Rancière, Mockus, Boal, Nussbaum, inter alia) accompany concrete cases of depression, anxiety, and suicide. The final project will be a “case study,” of a health challenge, including a proposal for a creative intervention.
Prerequisites: There are no formal prerequisites.
Credits: 2
Grading: Ordinal
INDP 300: Writing and Communication for Biomedical Sciences
Primary Faculty: Naomi Hein, PhD, Jason Silverstein, PhD
This course prepares students for the demands of writing and communicating in the medical sciences. The class has two linked agendas: students will learn how to turn raw research into polished academic arguments, and students will practice specific lessons through exercises that allow them to think about their developing scholarship. The course is divided into three units. In the first unit, we examine the main components of academic argument (structure, evidence, and analysis). In this section, students will learn how to write with sources. In the second unit, we focus on framing insights, entering the scholarly conversation, and crafting and responding to sophisticated critiques. In this section, students will learn how to frame both the human health and scholarly significance of their work. In the final unit, students will learn how to communicate their work in various forms, including writing an abstract, grant, or blog, before turning to presentation skills, such as crafting an elevator pitch and how to present at a conference or thesis defense. Students will have frequent opportunities for feedback on issues of grammar and syntax. By the end of the course, students will have learned how to communicate their research in a variety of ways to academic and professional audiences.
Prerequisites: There are no formal prerequisites.
Credits: 0–4
Grading: Ordinal
Expectations for Students
• Students are expected to participate fully in the required components of the program, including the longitudinal seminar, capstone, and courses.
• Students will be formally evaluated in each course through participation, online quizzes, homework assignments, team projects, and written work. Attendance is required for all course meetings and students must pass all courses to receive credits.
• Students will complete a mentored capstone. Students will submit a written report that includes the required elements of the capstone to the program leader.
• Students are expected to maintain regular meetings with their assigned Program Director at least twice during each semester. Students will also meet with their project mentor as established at the start of the project, at least monthly, and more frequently as the project progresses.
• Students are expected to abide by the policies, including attendance and academic integrity, of each school in which courses are taken.
Capstone Experience
Successful completion of the Capstone will require submission of a written and media component and a presentation. The media component will include the materials developed toward a health intervention, which may be, for example, a film, a series of op-eds, or a graphic novel. No matter what medium is chosen, students will be required to submit a framing essay that contextualizes their capstone and argues for its importance both for scholarly literature and human health.
Assessment
Students receive a final grade for each didactic course they take. This may be a letter grade or a satisfactory/unsatisfactory rating. In addition, students are evaluated throughout each course through regular homework assignments, online quizzes, class participation, and team-based projects that are presented orally and/or in written form. A student must have the equivalent of a satisfactory grade for all courses to maintain satisfactory academic progress.
Students are achieving satisfactory academic progress through the attainment of a B average (numeric value of 80%) or above in all required courses, an “SAT” for electives, tutorials, and seminar courses, with maintaining an overall grade of B average (numeric value of 80%) and by demonstrating ongoing progress with the capstone project.
Students must be evaluated twice a year by their project mentor and submit progress reports mid-year to the Program Director. This report will match elements of the capstone requirements.
Full-time MMH students are expected to complete the degree program in one academic year (September–May). Part-time students are expected to complete the program over the course of two academic years, or four semesters.
Length of Time to Degree
The minimum time to degree for a full-time student is one academic year. (September–May). A part-time alternative is possible for eligible students with a student expected to complete the degree over the course of two academic years, or four semesters. The maximum time to degree is three years. Enrollment beyond one year requires a formal petition and approval of the program leadership and the Office for Graduate Education. (See Section 2.06 for definitions of full-and part-time and Section 2.07 for the policy on the length of time to degree.)
Requirements for Graduation
To graduate, students must complete the 36-credit curriculum, including a Capstone project with a written report. Students must meet all academic, professional, and financial obligations required by the HMS Master’s programs and outlined in the HMS Master’s student handbook. A degree will not be granted to a student who is
not in good standing or against whom a disciplinary charge is pending. In addition, a student’s term bill must be paid in full before the student is awarded the degree.
Advising
Each student is assigned an individual Capstone mentor/tutor from Harvard Medical School. Students may also be paired with a secondary mentor if they wish to focus on a specific storytelling modality. Students will therefore receive highly personal attention and guidance particularly on their Capstone Project in addition to, the iterative experience of courses and seminars.
Mentors will be available to meet with students for one hour twice each month, and more if deemed necessary by the student and/or mentor. Students will benefit from meeting with both the mentors and Program Director to discuss their academic work, developing their Capstone Project, and discussing professional development.
The Program Co-Directors will be available every week to meet with students about any concerns. The Program Co-Directors will be in contact with mentors to ensure ongoing and consistent support across the student body.
In the event of a student-advisor conflict, the student should report the problem to the program leadership. Depending on the nature of the problem, the program leadership will offer the student the opportunity for a mediated discussion with the advisor. In all cases, the program leadership will aim to minimize the impact on the student’s work and offer to replace the advisor. If the issue is sexual harassment, discrimination, or abuse, faculty will follow the Harvard University Title IX policy and the faculty member will report any sexual harassment, discrimination, or abuse to the Title IX coordinator, who will act per the stated policy
Financial Aid
Students should consult the HMS Masters Financial Aid website at https://hms.harvard.edu/educationadmissions/masters-degree-programs/financial-aid and are encouraged to apply for external grants and fellowships.
Students who are enrolled at least half-time may be eligible for other federal or private aid. See Section 5.08 for additional financial aid information.
Capstone Considerations
Successful completion of the Capstone will require submission of a written and media component and a presentation. The media component will include the materials developed toward a health intervention, which may be, for example, a film, series of op-eds, or graphic novels. No matter what medium is chosen, students will be required to submit a framing essay that contextualizes their capstone and argues for its importance both for scholarly literature and human health.
Internship Information
Internships are allowed in the Fall or Spring semesters through the MMH 760 internship course only.