Photo by Karen Kirchhoff
Sharmi Elamin
More Than Science Classes
Medical schools want applicants to have a rich portfolio of experiences — shadowing physicians, volunteering in clinics and hospitals — so we built that in for our P4 students, too.
Sharmi Elamin hadn’t heard of podiatry — a branch of medicine that deals with the foot, ankle and leg structures — before representatives from the Temple School of Podiatric Medicine came and talked to her P4 class one day. “I didn’t even know podiatry existed — that you had a separate position just for feet,” she says. But as a result of that classroom experience, Elamin applied for an internship with the Temple podiatry group. She shadowed multiple clinics and watched everything from surgeries to routine diabetic foot care. Now Elamin, a criminal justice major in college, has enrolled at Cooper Medical School of Rowan University. She says the Art and Science of Healthcare class, where she first met those podiatry school reps, was one of her favorite P4 courses. Grunwald says it’s also a class that makes Jefferson’s postbac unique. The Art and Science of Healthcare fills in the background and context that the basic science courses don’t teach. Experienced physicians stop by to talk about their work and life experiences. Admissions officers from health-science professional schools reveal what they’re looking for in applicants. The P4 students read research papers, give reports on medically related topics and brush up on their interview skills. “Medical schools want applicants to have a rich portfolio of experiences — shadowing physicians, volunteering in clinics and hospitals — so we built that in for our P4 students, too,” Grunwald says. As a P4 student, Elamin volunteered at JeffHOPE, the free clinic that Jefferson medical students run in homeless shelters throughout Philadelphia. She worked shoulder-to-shoulder with Sidney Kimmel Medical College students there, gathering patient histories and asking about symptoms. “I was able to collect all of the patient information, analyze it, come up with a possible diagnosis and present all that to the attending physician, just like the medical students and residents do,” she says. “That was by far the best healthcare experience I’d had, because it wasn’t just shadowing.”
The Next Step After Invisalign braces boosted her confidence in college, Alia Khan knew she wanted to become a dentist, not a doctor — but she still needed to take all the same science prerequisites. She started the Jefferson program just two weeks after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania with a bachelor’s degree in health and societies, and now she’s a student at Columbia University’s College of Dental Medicine. 16
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