In New Undergraduate Program, a Healthy Synchronicity

In the University of Minnesota at Rochester’s new undergraduate program in health sciences, every student will take the same sequence of courses during the first four semesters, discussing specific medical concepts simultaneously but from different disciplinary perspectives. Here are some examples from the early weeks of the first semester.

• The sociology class and the humanities class discussed emotions and professionalism in medicine.
• In the writing seminar, students wrote haiku about one of the chemical elements they studied in the chemistry course.
• The statistics class discussed measurement error in parallel with a chemistry exercise in calibrating lab equipment.
• The humanities class covered ways we perceive the world and studied a chemistry lesson on the atomic model of matter.
• The statistics class and the sociology class taught regression analysis, as students prepared to analyze health-survey data.
• The humanities class and the writing seminar held parallel discussions of essays and fiction on the ethics of organ transplants.
• In the writing seminar, students discussed drafts of an assignment from their statistics class. The assignment asked them to describe epidemiological data about cancer.