P21
September 2013
At many large university pre-med programs, a common complaint of students
is that labs are taught almost exclusively by teaching assistants. Many of the
new Arts and Sciences faculty will teach labs exclusively, emphasizing the
one-on-one interaction.
“They’re qualified to teach the lecture classes, but their passion is teaching
labs,” Wireman said. “It’s more hands-on. In the lab they can interact with
students, unlike lecture classes.”
The pre-med program, Wireman said, will have the largest undergraduate campus
enrollment for the College of Arts and Sciences this fall, with more than 700
students. Despite the growth over the past few years, he said Arts and Sciences
faculty continue to make time for students and treat them “like their kids, like family.”
This fall, Arts and Sciences also will introduce a new science coordinator
who will be focused exclusively on guiding top students into internships and
underperforming students into study programs to help them get back on
track to graduate. Additionally, plans are in place to develop a more refined
program dedicated to helping students prepare for the Medical College
Admission Test – known as the often-dreaded “MCATs.”
GCU also offers students the rare opportunity to dissect an entire human
cadaver on campus, mostly through the dissection course taught for years by
Haley Peebles
, who recently took a new role at the Center for Connected
Care (story on Page 11).
Learning from a cadaver provides an experience that other students might
only approximate with cartoonish textbook pictures or a plastic dummy.
“That’s not realistic,” Peebles said. “(GCU students) use that as a tool to give
them a bearing of where things should be, but they need to investigate a
lot more – see the unseen, and see where certain things are leading to and
coming from.”
From cancer survivor to doctor
After surviving brain cancer,
Dan Hannon
knew he wanted to be a doctor.
The Midwestern University osteopathic medicine student earned his pre-
med degree from GCU in 2011 and felt prepared to take the next step toward
becoming an oncologist.
Hannon, 27, transferred to GCU for a final year in college after attending
Paradise Valley Community College over about five years as he fought cancer.
In just one year at GCU, he had the opportunity to work as a teaching assistant
for Peebles, to intern at the Phoenix-based Translational Genomics Research
Institute, and to serve in a volunteer research role at the Barrow Brain Tumor
Research Center at St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix.
“I walked those halls as a patient, and I’d love to go back to help people with
brain tumors and that type of cancer,” Hannon said about his dream job of
working at Barrow.
At TGen, Hannon participated with a research team responsible for
investigating how cancer spreads so aggressively from the lungs to the brain.
“It wants to burst out of the lungs and travel to the rest of the body,” Hannon
told a group on the GCU campus in 2012, adding that 1 percent of patients
whose cancer spreads from their lungs to the brain survive. However, patients
face a 50 percent shot at survival if their cancer is contained to their lungs.
Hannon said that Peebles advised him on how to write his personal statement
for medical school applications, helping him find a personal touch that
strengthened his case.
That type of mentorship and personal interaction, he said, helped him know
exactly what to expect with the intense preparations for medical school.
■
Although Dan Hannon spent just one year in GCU’s pre-med program, he earned
internships and student-teaching opportunities that helped him prepare for
Midwestern University’s osteopathic medicine program. Photo by Darryl Webb
“
The lecture isn’t entirely passive (at GCU). You don’t sit there and zone out. It’s broken
up where you see the information, and then have to apply it – which really makes it stick.
”
– Ryan Miller
