Kirsten Peterson is no stranger to Allegheny College. She graduated twice — in 1978 with her bachelor’s and again in 1987 with a master’s in education — and has taught as a lab instructor for organic chemistry. Today, she works from room 261 in the Maytum Center for Student Success as the college’s senior assistant dean of student success for health professions advising.
Peterson’s work focuses on advising pre-health students, which she said extends far beyond students looking to be neurosurgeons.
“That includes medical school, but it also includes all of the other health professions: dentistry, veterinary medicine, PT/OT, athletic training, it just goes on,” Peterson said. “Nursing’s actually a big one right now, physician’s assistant.”
This advice typically focuses on what individual students need to graduate — both classroom requirements and extracurricular work that might be required by students’ individual fields.
“It’s no big secret what courses you need to take,” Peterson said. “But getting experience, how much — and you know, you’ve got people like a pre-physician assistant, folks who, depending on where they apply, need up to 2,000 hours of clinical experience. And on the other end, you’ve got pre-med students — if they have 2,000 hours, that’s great, but they don’t need that. You need a somewhat different cluster of experiences.”
For first-years, sophomores and juniors, Peterson said her advice is mostly focused on planning out classes, internships and other experiences. Seniors, on the other hand, are more focused on job and graduate school applications, so her work with them includes planning how many schools to reach out to and reviewing personal statements for applications.
“I really like that part of it,” Peterson said of personal statements. “It’s fun; you get to help somebody identify themselves.”
For students not already on the pre-health track but interested in the field, Peterson said that there were many different ways to complete their studies, even beyond college.
“There are actually post-baccalaureate programs that are specifically for people who set out to do something completely different and have now decided medicine is the route they want to take,” Peterson said.
In general, Peterson encouraged students to engage with books and pointed out that around a quarter of the Medical College Admission Test — or MCAT, used in medical school admissions — tests verbal reasoning and reading comprehension.
“Communication — even if you don’t think you’re good at it or you don’t like doing it — it’s a skill that you just have to have,” Peterson said. “You really need to be able to communicate no matter what you’re going into, including math, and engineering and physics and economics, and all that kind of stuff.”
Peterson also encouraged students to move beyond the classroom and look at internships and jobs.
“Get experience in whatever it is you think you want to do, because you might discover that it is really very different than what you thought it was,” Peterson said. “If you do enjoy it, it helps you keep going when the going gets tough.”
At the end of the day, Peterson said she enjoys working with Allegheny’s pre-health students.
“My colleagues at other schools either have parents that are over involved, have students who are super competitive and just not always that nice to work with,” Peterson said. “I kind of like the student body that we have, which is collaborative and generally has a good sense of humor.”