Enhance your capacity and potential for becoming an equitable, compassionate, effective healthcare professional.
Whether you are a post-baccalaureate in your gap year or an advanced undergraduate - this Pre-Health Scholars Certificate can bolster your application to professional health programs. Use this opportunity to amplify your knowledge and skills for compassionate and effective healthcare delivery.
Strengthen your application to graduate health programs and build a foundation for success through this rigorous 15 credit hour, Pre-Health Scholars Certificate offered by UNM Health Sciences. Through these five courses, you will explore the interplay among social, cultural, and psychological factors with health behaviors and outcomes. You will develop and practice specific knowledge and skills for effective and inclusive healthcare delivery while interacting with health professionals.
This unique social science focused Pre-Health Scholars Certificate was designed with input from graduate health programs. The curriculum was developed to address many areas of weakness in applications as identified by the programs. Through highly interactive, discussion-based, rigorous curricula the program incorporates thought-provoking engagement and mindful learning. Through demanding discussion, activities, application exercises, and field trips, students will be challenged to think deeply and analyze factors influencing healthcare.
Shadowing, community engagement, and skill development provide a meaningful addition to your application and future healthcare career.
Graduate health programs have rigorous and challenging schedules that leave limited time for focusing on deep reflection, exploration, and skills development. Prior to entering a graduate program is the ideal time to learn about and practice concepts and skills that can help you be a more inclusive and effective health professional. Making a difference in the lives of patients requires more than STEM skills. It requires humanities skills. The Pre-Health Scholars Certificate is designed to give you tools to serve your community with care, respect, honor, and effectiveness.
Students must have Junior Standing (60 credit hours) with a cumulative 3.0 GPA or higher, which must include at least:
Exceptions to prerequisite requirements can occasionally be made by petition to the director for special approval.
In this rigorous course, students will develop a more complex and nuanced understanding of meanings, cultures, and social factors influencing health and illness. The course will explore the role culture and meanings play in the conceptualization, experience, and treatment of health and illness, as well as, healthcare interactions and outcomes. Cultural humility and respect are foundational concepts in this course. Students should expect to receive a health-focused foundational understanding of the complexity of meanings, culture, and society with an eye toward application both personally and professionally in their healthcare career. Additionally, students will expand their understanding, respect, skill, and humility in approaching individuals with different cultural frameworks from their own.
In addition to exploring how behavioral health impacts medical conditions and outcomes, this course also focuses on developing patient communication skills. In particular, students will grapple with difficult patient interaction scenarios, such as, delivering bad news, discussing mental health issues, managing patient and family emotional responses, and handling personal emotions. In addition, students will develop self-wellness plans to assist in managing the stress of professional school and careers.
Critical thinking and problem solving are critical to the successful completion of rigorous professional health programs and effective healthcare delivery. Although critical thinking is universally regarded as a pillar in higher education, applicants to and students within professional health programs often struggle in this area. This demanding course provides explicit training in critical thinking and problem solving, as well as, a focus on meaningful learning, growth mindset, and success types.
This rigorous course is heavily weighted on skill development and engagement with a focus on the development of engaged, respectful, and meaningful communication. Students will deepen their understanding engaged listening, narrative, metaphors, and facework. The praxis of communication will focus on narrative medicine, motivational interviewing, writing, and interview skills. Students will work on personal statements and personal interviewing. In addition, students will have the opportunity to learn and practice deep listening, close reading, and mindfulness in listening to guest speakers’ healthcare experiences from a variety of perspectives.
The two components of this course, shadowing and community engagement, aim to provide students with meaningful experiences in their pre-health preparation.
This course will assist in securing placements for all students. Specific specialties cannot be guaranteed. Health professionals will provide guest lectures. Prompts and direction will be given to students to focus their observations, reflections, and discussions.
Field trips to tribal and rural New Mexico communities and guest speakers provide meaningful learning of health disparities, social determinants of health, and cultural differences, as well as, the assets and challenges faced by the communities - all while immersed in real world contexts in New Mexico. Engagement with a range of communities and community members provides opportunities to overcome current and future overgeneralizations and stereotypes that hinder quality health outcomes.
Strengthen your application and potential for success in health programs through this unique certificate designed to address common areas of weakness in student applications and program success
Seats will be prioritized based on date and time of application.
Classes for the certificate will begin in August, 2022