By: Alessandra Santiago
As future healthcare professionals, we recommend that pre-med students put a premium on gaining experiences that confer a lens into the patient perspective (of which there are many).
At CU Denver, we seek students who have applied what they’ve learned in the classroom to outside experiences, especially those that expose them to the challenges and attributes of working with different cultures or socioeconomic groups.
In this article, we will review what “gaining a patient perspective” actually means in terms of your trajectory as a future healthcare provider and how to convey it in your application materials. According to Senior Admissions Professional Karina Goodwin, a wide variety of patient perspective experiences can tell us whether an applicant would be a good fit for our commitment to diversity and teamwork.
“We’re looking for what experiences you have done that can tell us who you are. How have they shaped who you are? Since we’re such an interpersonal campus, we want to see if you place nice in the sandbox. So what experiences have you had that show us that?”, said Goodwin.
Our Admissions Officers encourage applicants to demonstrate a level of introspection in their primary essays that they may not be able to convey in the list of extracurriculars. Beyond what research or shadowing experiences applicants have done, we look for how applicants exemplify the attributes of service, diversity, and teamwork through their patient perspective experiences.