For high school students interested in exploring health care, this summer’s Health and Medicine course will be more timely than ever, with a specific focus on COVID-19.
The Health and Medicine course offers high school students access to public health experts, global health, genomics, general medicine, and nursing who have been on the front lines of the worldwide pandemic. The course is available through the four-week, fully online UVM Summer Academy program.
“It gives students an opportunity to interact with our colleagues who are doing some incredibly interesting and up-to-date work and research in this area that’s putting us in some pretty surreal times, to be quite honest,” says UVM Larner College of Medicine Professor Paula Tracy, who co-teaches the course with Associate Professor Stephen Everse. “You can get a real feel for what is exactly going on.”
Exploring Modern Medicine in UVM Summer Academy
Students in the Health and Medicine course will explore modern medicine and bioscience through the lens of COVID-19 in online labs, lectures, demonstrations, and virtual visits. In the lab component, students will gather data, interpret data, and reflect upon it under faculty or a teaching assistant’s guidance.
“The most exceptional thing about this program is that as a freshman, you don’t always get to take classes you want or enjoy. And here is a class you’ve chosen to be a part of,” says Dr. Everse. “Also, it will be a great insight into COVID-19 and things going on that you may not have realized.”
The program helps students discover their interests, learn about the latest advances in bioscience and molecular medicine, and develop an understanding of diverse medical and health science career paths that might be right for them.
For high school senior Hannah Sher, who completed the UVM course last summer, the all-encompassing nature of the material gave her new insight into the world of health care.
“I want to study pre-med in college and focus on science. For me, the UVM Health and Medicine course helped me realize that medicine isn’t just about anatomy. It also encompasses public health, epidemiology, and hematology,” she says. “The course allowed me to explore other aspects of science that we don’t really get to learn in a traditional high school classroom.”
Dr. Tracy says access to experts is a valuable experience for any student interested in the medical field.
“For me, I think one of the nicest aspects of this course is the diversity of the individuals involved in medicine that you will have a chance to interact with, to ask questions of, to find out what’s important to them, and what they do on a daily basis,” she says. “What kind of educational training did they need? What led them to the field they are in? It’s just a great opportunity to learn a lot about health careers.”
UVM Summer Academy is offered every July, with the application deadline in mid-June.
Learn more about UVM Summer Academy
