Family medicine summer preceptorships reach out to the wider community.
When Izuchukwu Ibe, SOM Class of 2014, arrived in the U.S. from Nigeria nine years ago, he was barely a teenager but he already had decided upon his career path. He wanted to be a physician. But with no idea how he was going to reach his ultimate goal, he now says he wishes he had some mentoring along the way.
So last summer, he worked with a group of high school students through Port Chester’s Open Door Clinic’s Future Healthcare Leaders program, which aims to educate and mentor minority high school students in future career paths while learning about the non-physician elements of the health care field.
His preceptorship at Open Door is a service learning component of the medical school curriculum at New York Medical College. “It’s part of the College’s effort to enhance the pipeline of underrepresented minority students in the health professions,” says Montgomery Douglas, M.D., chairman of the Department of Family and Community Medicine.
Page updated: December 23, 2011