Med School's 'Pipeline' reaches out to Sayre High

The Penn School of Medicine is creating a “Pipeline” to West Philadelphia through a partnership with Sayre High School.

Through the Education Pipeline, faculty, residents and students in the Medical School, as well as Penn undergraduates, teach Sayre students topics relating to neuroscience, cardiology, infectious disease and endocrinology.

For Neuroscience Pipeline, the “oldest and most developed” program, 40 undergraduate students go to Sayre once a week for 12 weeks during the fall semester, teaching 10th-grade Biology classes. They work as teaching assistants, facilitating “hands-on activities, skits, stations with microscopes and brain models,” explained Tyler Holmberg, the program’s high school coordinator and director of Penn’s Partnership with Sayre High School.

Each spring, 25 high school students are then selected to participate in an after-school program at Penn. These students work on case studies written by Penn Medical residents, and present their work in front of the school’s dean as well as their peers and family members.

The program works to recruit more minority students to the medical field, according to Karen Hamilton, the program’s administrative director. It was launched in 1998 when Penn School of Medicine was approached by the Association of Medical Colleges’ Division of Community and Minority Programs, part of the national governing body for medical schools.

Holmberg described the system as a “mutualistic learning tool.”

Pipeline Medical School Coordinator Hugo Javier Aparicio, a 2009 Medical School graduate, agreed. “What’s fantastic about the program is that there are very many different levels of mentoring,” he said. “Everyone at every level is involved in mentoring or education.”

For example, in addition to exposing high school students to advanced topics like neuroscience and allowing undergraduates the opportunity to teach, the program also “gives medical students experience as teachers.” This is fundamental because “as doctors they have patients to teach about their condition and what to do about it,” Hamilton explained.

According to Aparicio, “anecdotal” evidence shows the program’s success.

“High-school students have contacted me asking me about what kind of careers are available in the health-related field, interested in shadowing me,” he said.

Additionally, some high-school students in the program are interning at the Sayre Health Center, located in the high school, Holmberg said.

According to College junior Alaina Pirraglia, who joined the program as a freshman and is now the undergraduate coordinator, the most valuable part of the program is that it gets high school students “personal attention and exposure to different academic areas to get them interested in school and learning.”

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