Facilitating the initiation of the physician’s professional identity: Cornell’s urban semester program

A. Programme goal: To enable advanced college students to engage medical culture and clinical professional formation

 1. Integrative learning

  i. Connect formal knowledge and problem-based reasoning skills to relevant clinical experience and skills

  ii. Appreciate situated or in-context knowledge production located in sites of practice

  iii. Develop insights into the skill levels necessary at different stages of educational development

  iv. Experience organization culture of a hospital in relationship to the culture of medicine

  v. Carry out immersion in communities of practice

 2. Lifelong learning

  i. Use inquiry and discovery to improve medical practice and professional formation

  ii. Recognize that learning is progressive, developmental, dynamic, social, participatory, and distributed

  iii. Recognize that learning is relentlessly reshaped, recombined, expanded and elaborated to improve the implementation of patient care

  iv. Exercise self-directed learning through reflective practice

  v. Use reflexivity to create self-awareness about assets and deficits to guide learning and self-improvement

 3. Global learning

  i. Use of an ethnographic/anthropological framework for generating knowledge

  ii. Teamwork and the nature of collaboration across specialities and medical domains

  iii. Improve the ability to communicate across inequalities and differences

  iv. Deepen understanding of sociocultural and economic inequalities and their relationship to medical and health disparities

  v. View patients as active participants in health improvement

  vi. Comprehend the relationship of treating individuals but understanding population-based health issues

B. Structure: Weekly student seminars with physicians, researchers, and other health care professionals

 Seminar #1: Physicians focus on issues related to:

  i. Personal history of professional formation

  ii. Decision-making process at different stages of professional formation

  iii. Organization of medicine, from medical school admissions to health insurance coverage

  iv. Advice about how to prepare for medical school

  v. Disparities in health care and medical practice

 Seminar #2: Ethnographic and experiential learning methods—readings and discussion

 Seminar #3: Social medicine—readings and discussion

 Seminar #4: Experiential learning reflections

 Hospital rotations: NY-Presbyterian, Woodhull, Lincoln, NY-Methodist

 Relationship of students with clinicians & researchers

 Students are embedded into the normal routines of day-to-day activities, shadowing attendings, 3rd and 4th year medical students, physician assistants, and residents