hires. As the program director, Lewis brings continuity with the day-to-day management of IMS, ensuring that student advising, enrollment, mapping, data management and experiential learning processes are performed at a high standard.
“ Those really have to be based upon what the students ' interests are because when they apply to medical or PA schools, or whatever it is, the first thing that their interviewers are going to ask them is why did you choose the things that you chose?” Speights said.“ We don ' t want it to be that we are prescriptive in what they should do.”
On average, Speights said, IMS students are averaging roughly 600 experiential learning hours over the course of four years with some, like first-year FSU medical student Emelia LaCognata( see accompanying story) amassing 1,800 prior to her December 2024 graduation.
It’ s worth noting that LaCognata selected FSU as her undergraduate destination largely on the strength of IMS’ preparation and success in matriculating its graduates into the College of Medicine’ s M. D. program.
There has been no change to the IMS core curriculum since the program was developed, according to Associate Dean Elizabeth Foster, Ph. D. Students are required to take a prescribed number of core credit hours, which include courses in psychology, algebra, pre-calculus, trigonometry, chemistry, biochemistry, organic chemistry and physics, to name a few. In addition, they must complete upper division elective hours offered by IMS partner colleges from both science and non-science offerings.
This is one area where the explorative component of the program is prominent.
“ What we like the advisors to do is listen to a student, and based on what the student is interested in, they can identify a set of electives for the students to choose from,” Foster said.
“ If you really like people and culture, here ' s a set of electives in anthropology that are on our approved list that might be of interest to you. If they like working with children and are very much into thinking about young people ' s development, we’ ll look at the elective list with family and child sciences, psychology and social work electives.”
Beyond the classroom requirements, Foster said the required seminars and capstone offerings are where the IMS curriculum has“ evolved and strengthened.”
They“ bring together their interests and their scholarship … hopefully having them bring in prior knowledge from courses to apply how they ' re understanding an issue that they see in the community.”
Speights outlined some of the seminar topics over the course of the four years, where students begin by looking at the patient experience, what it’ s like to be underserved or be a mission-based patient. From there, they dive into the various roles of health care professionals. By the third and fourth years, he said, the students begin focusing on research, often reaching back to study those areas they’ ve explored in earlier years.
“ They’ re not getting a lot of that from the core science classes,” Speights said.“ Where we expose those things is in the seminar curriculum that Helen and Liz [ Foster ] built.”
Foster shared an example for illustration.
“ The wait times for patients to see a physician are long.‘ How does that factor into something they ' re seeing in a public policy elective that they took?’ It might be picking up pieces from a course that they took in the College of Social Sciences and Public Policy and applying it to what they ' re interested in.”
In short, the program has matured and evolved over nearly a decade of existence.
“ We know our students better now after 10 years and what they ' re capable of,” Foster said.“ So, we ask a lot of them. Our expectation was that they could be exposed to research and have that autonomy of selecting their own topic. Now they ' re immersed in research and really looking at publicly available data.
“ We expect them to do a lot more and they rise to the occasion. It ' s just great.”
Looking to the future
By the time the 10th class of IMS students enrolls in the fall of 2026, the program will have expanded.
“ We’ re going to be the first pre-health major at FSU-Panama City,” said Speights, who is excited about taking the program to a larger rural area.“ We ' re starting that with Clinical Professions. It really is taking the program to where it ' s needed because there are a lot of students from that area who don ' t necessarily want to leave home, or are students from those rural areas who don ' t necessarily want to come all the way to Tallahassee to do a prehealth major when they can do it closer to home. I think that makes sense. From there, the sky’ s the limit.”
Speights said there have already been discussions with the College of Arts and Sciences and Tallahassee Memorial HealthCare about phlebotomy and other lab certificates. The potential for an IMS MBA pathway through the College of Business is also on“ good footing.”
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