Hello, and welcome to this brief conversation about the Bachelor of Science in Health Sciences. I appreciate your attention today. So my name is Dr. Jessica Holzer. I'm an Assistant Professor in the Health Administration and Policy department and I'm the Director of the undergraduate Health Sciences program. There's a little bit of background about me on this slide. So I have my doctoral training in Health Policy and Management from Johns Hopkins. And I also completed a postdoc at Yale in their School of Public Health. I teach a number of courses in the Health Sciences program, including introductory courses such as the Introduction to Health Professions, and Introduction to the US Healthcare System. And then I also teach the Capstone, which is one of the final classes that students take and we'll talk a little bit more about that experiential education.
So our major is, many of the students who have come to classes or to Admitted Students Day before have asked me, "What distinguishes a Health Science major from, for instance, a Biology major or a major in Business, or other majors that you might associate with jobs in the medical field?" And one of the things about Health Sciences that distinguishes it is that we are focused on the experience of being a health professional. And as such, we introduce you not only to the basic sciences that are required for a lot of graduate programs, but also courses that introduce you to the systems of health in the United States-- So the US healthcare system, the public health system, systems of funding and financing, such as insurance and public financing. We also teach you about things like research, bioethics, so that you can think about the social implications of decisions that are being made in physician's offices and in community practice on daily basis. We introduce you to things like laws and regulations that govern health practices in the United States, and are things that really do shape a lot of your experience as a health professional, and then also your experience if you choose not to become a health professional, as a patient, or as a caregiver of a patient.
So all these courses add up to give our students a really complete understanding of the US system around health, and it prepares our students for a number of different careers. We have some specific tracks that you see on here we have Speech and Language Pathology, which is a concentration we're developing now, as well as Occupational Therapy. And that's to ensure that our students get a good background in the foundational concepts that are going to be necessary and desirable to graduate programs. In addition, all of our students are learning how to write in the Health Sciences, and how to read and digest information in the Health Sciences, all of which are going to be very powerful skills within a Health Sciences and health professions context, but also in any context, because all of us will eventually need to understand health content as patients and as caregivers, even if we don't become professionals in the area.
Another question that a lot of admitted students are interested in is what a first year looks like, particularly because I know for myself when I was an undergraduate, my understanding of what I wanted to be when I grew up was developing. You know, when I was in high school, I knew a lot of people who were doctors and nurses and businessmen and engineers, and my mom was a nurse, my dad was an engineer. And other than those four professions, I basically knew about teachers and that was kind of it because those were the people who were part of my life.
And one of the benefits of college is really starting to get a more complete understanding of all the professions that are out there. So our first year in the Health Sciences program introduces you to a lot of core concepts across the university. It introduces you to courses that will be required across any major and it gives our students the opportunity to explore the Health Sciences initially, you're not put off from taking Health Sciences classes until your sophomore or junior year, you start taking Health Science classes that you can see here in your fall semester with Intro to health professions. But in addition, you're taking English and Intro to Communications, and Intro to Psychology because it gives the students an opportunity to explore a lot of different areas of inquiry that the university offers.
You can see also in the spring semester, we continue that trend you take your recommended to take Food, Nutrition and Culture and our university course which is Academic Research or Project Management, as well as history courses and math courses while still again, getting health courses out of the way with our Intro to US Healthcare, these courses are just recommended. So students who are coming in if they have already taken courses like this, if they have APs, those sorts of things, all of that is flexible. These courses are merely recommended. But what I want to highlight is that this first year introduces our students to the types of content that the university provides and gives them an opportunity to while receiving credit and while moving forward in their degree, explore the types of resources that the university has to offer.
It's very important to me as the Director of the program that the students that are Health Science majors feel as though that is the right place for them. They feel supported. They understand the value of that education to their future professional goals. And if there is a student who originally elects Health Sciences, but chooses to elect a different major, or even elected minor, I want to make sure that the students understand how they're moving forward and we don't extend their time at the University unnecessarily. And they're receiving excellent advisement into how they can use the courses that they've already taken to maximize their learning and maximize their happiness while at the University of New Haven.
So in addition to the first year, one of the benefits of the University of New Haven is that we have a study-abroad experience. So this is a video that was put together by one of our faculty members and the students who went to our Prato, Italy campus in the fall of this year. Professor Rachel Platini, who you'll see in this video, leads the class and this type of experiential education is one of the many things that make the University of New Haven exciting and one of the things that the School of Health Sciences is very invested in so let me play for you the video. Maybe?
So that video shows you just some of the experiences that students in Prato had and one of the values that we hold very dear as a school and as a university is experiential learning. So we encourage students to get out into the community as often as possible study abroad is just one of the ways. We also require each of our students to take an internship. They'll do 150 hours worth of internship at a local institution. Some of the partnerships we have include a lot of healthcare providers, so Bridgeport Hospital, Hartford Health, ProHealth physicians. We have students who are interning at hospitals and private clinics, we also have in interns who are out in the community working at for instance, Women, Infants, and Children Center working with Clifford Beers and others, to try to gain a really deep understanding of how the theory that they're learning in class is actually practically applied. And that's something that's very important for all of our students to understand.
In addition to experiential education in terms of internships, we also offer the capstone class that I mentioned earlier, and that capstone class is an opportunity for students to start to provide a service to the community. So for instance, right now, in spring '20, I am teaching an internship or excuse me, a capstone course, in which the students are working with a local volunteer organization that does literacy training for adult language learners and adult learners. And they are working on-- my students are working on a health literacy module packet. So what they're doing is they're-- We're identifying evidence-based practice, through searches of the literature and communication with other experts in the field of adult health literacy. And we're developing education modules that these volunteers who work with adults with low literacy can use to teach them basic things like how to read an insurance form to fill out, for instance, for Medicaid eligibility or an employer insurance form, how to fill out the necessary paperwork, to get insurance and how to read the bottle of medication or the packet that the pharmacist sends home to give you instructions about what are adverse consequences of your medication and those sorts of things.
This is giving our students an opportunity to really interact with a community partner who is not normally in an educational setting is not normally oriented towards students and making sure student understanding is maximized. And so they're getting a real experience for how to leave in the professional world. And it adds a level of seriousness to the work that makes the students really respect the effort that they're putting in. And already the students have done an amazing job going from knowing very little about health literacy to identifying through a long and storied process many resources that can be utilized, it can be modified to provide a very practical tool for this community partner. And that opportunity is taking all the lessons that the students have learned about research and conducting literature searches, and reading and evaluating what they're reading. It's using all of those skills in a very applied way.
And our goal at the end of the semester is to be able to hand over a resource. And hopefully, in the future, subsequent Capstone groups -- capstone classes -- might be able to actually evaluate whether or not that resource is improving the health literacy of the population, really take a very holistic view of it, and really serve as a research resource for the community partnering question. So experiential education is something we take very seriously. And I personally, as the Director of the program, encourage all of our students to think early and think often about experiential education. And part of that is because the careers in Health Sciences are many and varied. This is just a picture of a few of them, right?
We have health education, public health, clinical medicine, which a lot of our students are interested in, but also health administration and the allied health professions such as Speech, Language Pathology, Occupational Therapy, Physical Therapy, and other types of allied professions. All of those career opportunities are going to be enhanced, and the students' readiness for them is going to be enhanced by experiential learning. So we make sure that our students from the very beginning are getting as many in class exercises as possible and then as they become more senior, and as they get into their junior and senior year, are getting community experience through internships and through the capstone project, so that by the time they are ready to leave the university, they are over prepared for the opportunities that will be available to them out in the community and in grad school. And all of that is with the goal of creating educated professionals who understand how to work intra-professionally, how to collaborate with one another, but also how to serve the community and how to maximize the benefit that they bring to a community.
In addition to our career opportunities that are available to all of our students, we have some specific dual-degree programs for students who know relatively early on that they're interested in graduate programs at the school. So currently, we offer a Master's in Health Administration and a Master's in Public Health dual-degree program, which means that students who meet the qualifying criteria, the GPA criteria, are able to do an accelerated degree. It takes off roughly two years of the total training necessary to receive a Bachelor's degree and a Master's degree in each of these fields. And that prevents that provides our students the opportunity to identify early on that they want to begin taking graduate classes and those students who qualify can begin taking graduate classes in their senior year, and walk away with both a Bachelor's and a Master's degree in four years rather than the traditional five to six that it might take between a Bachelor's and a Master's in a more traditional non-dual-degree program. So those are two resources that we offer our students and we have a number of students who are taking, taking part in those dual-degree programs and are generally very excited about the opportunities.
With that, I want to welcome all of you to Charger Nation. You've come a long way already in terms of be applying and being accepted, and we are so excited at the opportunity to work with you in the future and we're excited to bring you on campus so I look forward to answering your questions at the future Admitted Students Day, live conversations. I welcome any thoughts you have and you can always email me. You can find my contact information on the school's website. Be well to all of you. This is a challenging time with Coronavirus knocking on our doors but I hope that you are as excited as I am about the future. This holds for you and your students. If your parents and I look forward to seeing you all in the fall. Take care!