While the campus awaits groundbreaking on a new education center and a second research tower, it already has reasons to celebrate the 2005-06 school year.
Classes start today (Aug. 22) for more than 500 new students, including about 26 new international students from India, Taiwan, Germany, China, Jamaica, Canada, Paraguay, Nepal and Israel. UNMC’s total annual enrollment is approximately 2,900, although final statistics will not be available until mid-to late September.
In addition, approximately 70 new faculty members will be attending this week’s orientation events.
The following are some of the changes that students and faculty are celebrating this school year.
- The School of Allied Health Professions’ radiography and cytotechnology will be offered via distance learning this fall — radiography to Grand Island and cytotechnology to the Carle Clinic in Urbana, Ill.
- SAHP has expanded its clinical laboratory science program, formerly the medical technology program, via distance learning to the University of Missouri at Columbia.
- UNMC’s recent medical school graduates did very well on the United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE) Clinical Skills exam, said Gerald “Jay” Moore, M.D., associate dean of the college of medicine. The nationalized, standardized patient exam tests a student’s ability to do a history and physical and develop a differential diagnosis and initial plan of evaluation/treatment. This was the first year it was required for all graduating seniors.
- The incoming dental class has a 3.80 mean G.P.A. — the highest in college history. The class also is made up of the highest percentage of women in college history at 48 percent.
- After joining the Department of Pharmacy Practice in the College of Pharmacy in December, instructor John Ridgway begins his first full year as the new experiential programs coordinator. Ridgway will coordinate the clerkship experiences for the college’s early and advanced experiential programs, which are the “heart” of the experiential or professional practice portion of the Doctor of Pharmacy (Pharm.D. degree) curriculum.
- Four students from Dillard University — Kimberly Bernard and Renee Jackson, pharmacy; Marcus Harris, medicine; and Davette Johnson, dentistry — are beginning classes at UNMC. They are the first students who are direct results of the UNMC/Dillard University Partnership.
- The UNMC College of Nursing launches its new fast-track admissions option, designed to help nurses with bachelor’s degrees more quickly – in as little as four years — obtain the graduate-level degrees they need to teach and do research in colleges and universities. Typically, students would obtain a master’s degree, and then pursue a doctorate, which together takes at least six years. Heidi Keeler is the program’s first full-time enrollee.
- A new graduate program, cancer research, was announced in September 2004. Currently, 19 students are enrolled in the program.
- The master’s in public health program continues to grow, moving toward the goal of a School of Public Health.
- To keep with the changing nature of the basic sciences, two graduate college programs changed their names. Pharmacology changed its name to pharmacology and experimental neuroscience, and physiology changed its name to cellular and integrative physiology.