Andra Oprison wants to go to medical school. She's taking all the right classes, adding extracurricular experiences in the field to her résumé and getting valuable guidance from the College's Health Professions Advising Program. That, she says, has given her a key advantage in preparing for the next phase of her education.
Right from her first semester, Andra knew the path she chose would require a mastery of science and long hours in the library. She also trained and qualified for the on-campus EMS team, shadowed physicians at nearby hospitals, volunteered at a hospital in Haiti and joined AED – a service-oriented society for pre-med students. And almost everything she's done is the result of plans she made with her counselor from the Health Professions Advising Program.
"I've been meeting with her every single semester since I started school," Andra explains. "She's just the best resource. We go over my schedule, we go over activities and we discuss what I should be doing to prepare for the MCATs. She also invites physicians to speak to students, and she arranges service opportunities for us – such as volunteering at a nearby children's hospital. A lot of schools don't offer that kind of personal touch."
That office helped Andra set up a shadowing opportunity with a thyroid surgeon at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC), only blocks from campus. "I ended up doing research with that doctor for a full summer afterward. It was amazing, and it was only available to me because of the contacts that the College has with MUSC. We worked in the operating room, the clinic and the pathology lab. I got to see the full spectrum of that particular work." Given that, and all my experience with the College's EMS team, I think I'll really have an advantage when I started applying to medical schools."