Students with an undergraduate pre-medicine degree might be on a direct path to a job, but Ohio University’s medical school is offering some high school students who are considering the major an alternative.
OU’s Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine signed an agreement with Ohio Dominican University, granting high school seniors planning to attend medical school early admission to OU-HCOM — the first of several similar agreements between OU and other state universities.
The agreement, signed Aug. 20, will allow up to 10 students from Dominican University to enroll directly into OU-HCOM after graduating with a pre-medicine bachelor’s degree.
High school seniors must be admitted to Ohio Dominican by Nov. 15 in order to qualify for the program, which offers students either a seven or eight-year track to complete both a pre-medicine and medical degree, said Nicole Evans, Ohio Dominican’s director of admissions.
Students are required to have at least a 3.5 high school GPA and a cumulative ACT score of at least a 28, but Evans said the reviewers and interviewers from Ohio Dominican and OU-HCOM will focus on the personal statement and what students have done outside of classes.
OU-HCOM plans to put a similar program in place at Otterbein University and other universities in the Columbus and Cleveland areas, where OU-HCOM’s branches will be open in July 2014 and July 2015 respectively, said John Schriner, OU-HCOM assistant dean of admissions.
“Everything really looks great, and we’re not too far away from signing (additional) agreements as well,” Schriner said.
“We certainly anticipate that there will be a large number of students (applying),” Evans said.
Ohio Dominican’s program is not likely to expand, said Ohio Dominican President Peter Cimbolic, but he said he hopes to collaborate with OU in the future.
“That’s something that we’re beginning conversations about, but nothing has been explored deeply,” Cimbolic said. “I certainly would be open to that, but we haven’t had the necessary conversations.”
Cimbolic said he was motivated to approach OU-HCOM because of its Dublin campus expansion, but the new program will also address the decline in primary care physicians in Ohio in the last few years.
“There’s a critical shortage of primary care physicians in Ohio, and because a significant portion of our students are from here, they tend to stay here,” Cimbolic said. “We anticipate that we’ll have a large percentage of students finish school and stay here in Ohio (from this program).”
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