Fall Semester Recap & Future Events

Now that the Fall semester has ended, I wanted to do a little recap of the events that our pre-health students attended. We had lots of fun and exciting things going on both on and off campus this semester!

Danielle Theis: 2018 WALC Champion

Weekly Events

• We hosted our first ever Weekly Anatomical Language Challenge (WALC) on Wednesdays throughout the semester. Students competed each week for a bag of candy and the glory that comes with being the week's champion. They also worked to climb the leaderboard that we kept posted here on The Atrium for their chance to win a free t-shirt by semester's end. The 2018 WALC Champion was Danielle Theis, who is now immortalized on our WALC of Fame in the Pre-Health Pathways office.

• We had many students attend Rapid City Regional Hospital's Grand Rounds events on Friday mornings throughout the semester. These events offered a free breakfast along with lectures from both local experts and representatives of other institutions. Each topic was different and interesting, giving students exposure to lots of different research relating to an array of specialties in health care.

Off-Campus Events

• Several students attended the day-long Research and Compliance Conference hosted by Regional Health. Here, they learned about research ethics and the compliance protocols set forth by federal mandates for conducting clinical research.

Hunter Roy, Liam Jensen, Samantha Johnson, & Jacey Merkle attend the Research and Compliance Conference.

• A few students attended an Open House for Avera's Center for Pediatric and Community Research. The students got a tour of the facility and learned about internship opportunities for those interested in joining the research team at this local center that is doing so much good for our community.

• Several students attended a pre-shadowing tour of Rapid City Regional Hospital in advance of setting up shadowing opportunities at the facility.

Dr. J takes a pre-shadowing tour selfie with pre-health students,
Kaelyn Kaul, Danielle Theis, Alexia Hodgson, Kaylee Wilson, & Kelcy Bentley.

• Students were also invited to attend several events at the Rapid City USD Sanford School of Medicine campus. These events included:
• Beyond the Borders Poster Session
• A guest lecture by Dr. Morrow about parasites for Halloween
• Ethics Discussion Panel
• A teaching presentation by a candidate applying for a position at the Sanford School of Medicine

Health Professions Week (HPW)

• We hosted several events during Health Professions Week (November 5th-9th) including:
•  Daily information on various health care career options
• Live-streamed lectures & panel discussions
• Beyond Classification – Mr. LeDerick Horne
• Navigating Your Journey on the Academic Sea – Dr. Christine Grant
• Advocacy Panel Discussion
• Various live-chat & virtual fairs via ExploreHealthCareers.org/hpw 
• Sanford Health Virtual Career Fair information
• Informational session with Edward Via College of Osteopathic Medicine
• Meet-&-Greet with Medical Lab Scientist Sandra Lashley
• USD Medical Student Discussion Panel: All About Applying to Medical School

Students learn basic suture techniques on a pig's foot.

Pre-Health Pathways-Hosted Events

• USD Medical Student Discussion Panel: Adventures in Interviewing
• Meet-&-Greet with Donna Vorhees of the Health Effects Institute
• Suture lab & Health Professions Scholarship Program information with the U.S. Army
• Movie screening of the documentary Resistance and post-film discussion about antibiotic stewardship

Moving Forward...
The Spring 2019 semester is sure to see many similar events as well as a few new things for our pre-health student community. We will still be attending Grand Rounds on Friday mornings and plan to have more medical student panels, informational sessions, and pre-shadowing tours. We also plan to be doing a weekly physiology challenge (details to come!).

Here are a few other things in the works for next semester:

• Mock MCAT Exam (Sunday, January, 13th)
• Cell Line Culture Training (March)
• Professional Essay Workshop (March/April)
• Movie Screenings (various times)

Thanks for a great semester and we look forward to seeing more of you this Spring! 

Feel free to contact Dr. J if you are interested in any of our future (or past) events and want to know more about how you can be involved in the pre-health community here at SD Mines! 

Pre-Health Prep Series: Entrance Exams

The GRE, the DAT, the PCAT, the OAT, and who could forget the dreaded MCAT? These acronyms strike fear in the hearts of pre-health students and are the last things most people want to spend a day away from the rigors of pursing a bachelors degree doing. Entrance exams are required by the vast majority of professional and graduate programs that pre-health students apply for around the end of their junior years.

Some of these exams are specifically designed for students pursing graduate work in areas like medicine (MCAT), dentistry (DAT), optometry (OAT), or pharmacy (PCAT). Other exams, like the GRE, are more broadly designed and used by masters/PhD programs and programs in health care professions like physicians assistants, veterinarians, occupational therapy, physical therapy, orthotics/prosthetics, and many others.

Students interested in careers in health care may end up taking more than one of these (or other) entrance exams to fulfill the prerequisites for the schools to which they will apply. For example, students applying to MD-PhD programs will often take both the MCAT and the GRE. Other students my find that the program they are interested doesn't require any entrance exams at all (e.g. some pharmacy schools require the PCAT, while others do not).

Regardless of which exam(s) you take as a pre-health student, you will mostly likely need to spend time and money preparing for and eventually taking these tests. There are many resources out there to help you prepare (e.g. prep books, prep courses, flashcards, mock exams, etc.); however, the effectiveness of these resources (and their costs) are highly variable. Students can easily spend hundreds of dollars on resources.

At SD Mines, we try to help our students get as many resources as possible without breaking the bank. We have various prep books available via our on-campus library and within the Pre-Health Pathways Office that students can borrow for free to help them prepare. We are also planning to administer our first Mock MCAT Exam this January to interested students for only $25.00. Doing a mock entrance exam can help students in many ways:

• Identify areas of strengths & weaknesses
• Helps guide subsequent study plans to better prepare for the real exam
• Gain familiarity with digital interfaces & features of the exam
• Will allow for more time to focus on content, rather than logistics, during a real exam
• Gauge the impact of external factors on test-taking
• Hunger, thirst, sleep habits, and clothing choices can all steal time during an exam
• Recognize how much food/drink you need to bring with you
• Recognize any clothing choices that distract you due to discomfort over time

If you are interested in taking the upcoming Mock MCAT Exam, please contact Dr. J for details.

There are several other great entrance exam resources out there to help you rock your entrance exams. Many of these can be found by looking through the Entrance Exams page on our Pre-Health Pathways webpage: https://www.sdsmt.edu/Academics/Pre-Health/Current-Students/Entrance-Exams/

You can also look at getting free practice questions, like the MCAT Practice Question of the Day or the GRE Practice Question of the Day. Subscribe to newsletters for pre-health students in your area of interest to get information about free mini-lectures, information sessions, practice exams, and more!

If you can't get the resources that you need for free and you struggle to find the funds to cover a set of prep materials on your own, consider asking other pre-health students to go in on a set with you and share as you prepare. (You can even form your own study/support group!) You can also ask your Pre-Health Pathways Advisor to help you find ways to gain access to specific materials. Remember that you can never get the help that you don't ask for!

Resistance Screening Set for Friday Morning

Last week's Grand Rounds at Rapid City Regional Hospital featured Dr. James M. Keegan in his presentation A Paradigm Shift in the Approach and Treatment of Infections-Antibiotic Stewardship and the Human Biome. During his talk, he discussed the consequences of over-prescribing antibiotics...particularly those that destroy helpful anaerobes in your gut. We naturally have opportunistically pathogenic microbes as part of our gut flora. Such microbes are kept at a controllable level thanks to other microbes that coexist with them in the depths of the bowels. When we disrupt the bacterial composition of this microbiome, we leave the body vulnerable to the proliferation of those opportunistically pathogenic microbes, giving them the opportunities to cause us harm.

Take for example the bacterium Clostridium difficile a.k.a. C. diff. This bacterium can be found in small amounts as part of the healthy gut flora in about 2-5% of the adult population. When prescribed antibiotics that kill off C. diff's competitors without killing C. diff, this microbe is able to take advantage of the newly available space and food resource and will begin to multiply. As it does so, C. diff will start to produce toxins, which can cause severe, even life-threatening, inflammation of the colon. We see most cases of C. diff infection in hospitals among patients who are on broad-spectrum antibiotics.

Dr. Keegan talked about how being more careful with which antibiotics are prescribed in different situations can make a big difference in protecting patients from the effects of a disrupted microbiome. He talked about the work he and his colleagues have done to bring awareness to the issues of antibiotic preservation and stewardship of the gut flora. By helping physicians to understand the broader impacts of antibiotic preservation, his team has seen remarkable improvements in hospitals. We are talking significant reductions in cases of MRSA and C. diff with very little effort once physicians are aware of how to more appropriately prescribe antibiotics that are less disruptive to the gut flora.

During his talk, he mentioned a documentary about antibiotic stewardship. The documentary is called Resistance and it explores the history of antibiotics and the rise of superbugs due to improper usage of various antibiotics. You can catch the trailer by going here: http://www.resistancethefilm.com/ 

To continue the conversation about antibiotic and gut flora stewardship, SDSM&T will be doing a screening of the film on Friday, December 14th at 9:30AM in the McKeel Conference Room in the Surbeck Center. There will also be a brief discussion of the topic following the film for those who would like to stick around to talk a little bit more about the subject.

We hope you can join us!

Finals Week Fun

It's that time of the semester...students are stressed, faculty are frantic, and everyone is ready to call it a year so that they can fully enjoy a well-earned break. To help everyone cope with the beast that is finals, the Student Success Center will have lots of food and fun freely available this week!

Swing by to grab some snacks and de-stress!