Special Programs and Community:
Office of Public Medical Education

Through the Office of Public Medical Education, a division within the Office of Special Programs, New Jersey Medical School offers two programs that reach out to the community. The Pre-Medical honors program is designed to attract promising high school students to medicine and the health sciences and is offered during the fall. Mini-Med School is a similar program offered to adults. Both nine-week courses take place Wednesdays 5:45 p.m.-9:15 p.m. Each program includes 195 minutes of lectures and seminars. The programs address recent findings in medical research and healthcare, raise consciousness about the routes to medical care, and enhance one of the principle missions of New Jersey Medical School — to train socially conscious and humane physicians.

While formal lectures are delivered by medical school faculty, more informal seminars are conducted by medical students, known as medical student preceptors. In addition to the evening sessions, there are three electives courses offered on select weekends including training in basic life support, a lecture on cardiopulmonary physiology and a tutorial in medical librarianship. Mini-Med school operates a screening clinic, for all program participants. Both programs have a 5:1 student to medical student preceptor ratio and student tutors who provide extra help.

Students in both programs are provided with opportunities to interact with medical students about their decisions to entering the field of medicine, the medical school application procedure and the process involved in pursuing the doctor of medicine degree. This is accomplished during formal small group sessions as well as at dinner seminars. The programs are designed to enable students to gain an understanding of the intellectual, emotional and physical demands incumbent upon medical students. Every student is given an opportunity to simulate a portion of medical education by sitting in the very seats of medical students, and listening to the same professors who lecture to these future physicians. To date, nearly 2,300 students have participated in these programs.

Special consideration is given to disadvantaged populations. Fifty places are set aside for applicants proposed by administrators from the New Jersey Medical School sponsored Hispanic Center of Excellence and from Science Park, a Newark consortium which includes 12 inner-city high schools.