SELECT students are committed to positively changing medicine and to a cause, and organization or an idea of their choice— one that will shape their lives and careers. We wish to develop self-aware students who see themselves as leaders working alongside other leaders, not as competitors, but as colleagues on a crusade to make a difference and to create healthier communities. SELECT students become connected to a network of professional colleagues as mentors for life. Our students know that independently they can create and impact, but collectively they can transform health care. We stretch our students to reach their full educational and personal potential in the SELECT graduate certificate program. The SELECT curriculum accomplishes this by implementing the following features.

Professional Development Curriculum

SELECT students participate in a mandatory progressive professional development course throughout all four years of medical school that results in a formal graduate certificate. The curriculum incorporates collaborative seminars to deepen students’ knowledge of leadership, health systems, and values-based patient-centered care. This work includes baseline personal and leadership assessments, structured assignments and presentations, and interactions with leaders in various fields to enrich student development.

Physician Faculty Coaching

One of the key features of the SELECT program involves longitudinal coaching for our students throughout all four years of medical school. The coaching program consists of “coaching groups” that pair one faculty coach from the USF Lehigh Valley campus and one faculty coach from the USF Tampa campus with eight students. The two coaches remain with the same group of students for all four years. Our program is proud to have senior faculty, including Department Chairs, as well as physicians who have excelled clinically, as our coaches. Our physician faculty coaches have a passion for education and personal learning. They work with the students to help them create a personal development plan with clear benchmarks and timelines. Through these activities, physician faculty coaches help students synthesize and apply the unique content in the SELECT curriculum.

Peer Coaching

The SELECT program believes the competencies used in coaching can be an important component of a physician’s toolkit. Therefore, all students serve as a longitudinal peer coach to a fellow student throughout the four years as well. Skills of effective coaching are acquired through practicum and specific exercise as a part of the professional development curriculum. Peer coaching enables students to gain experience in giving feedback and investing in the development of others. As with the physician faculty coaching, students remain with their peer coach throughout all four years and this serves as an added support for every student in the program.

Immersion Field Experience

To apply theory to practice, our students partake in intensive field experience with leaders in medicine, academics, industry or government through the required Summer Immersion course and a Community-based Clinical Mentoring experience. The Community-Based Clinical Mentoring (CCM) Program represents the student’s first exposure to a clinical setting during his/her medical education at USF and is designed to provide a student dyad with an opportunity to observe interdisciplinary collaboration and patient-centered care. Students observe clinical preceptors as they see patients, but also interact with/shadow interdisciplinary team member at their assigned site. Students will occasionally follow a patient beyond the clinic setting in order to gain the patient’s perspective of how health/wellness impact one’s home life and community experience. In the first year, students complete an action research project at their CCM site.

The Summer Immersion Course allows students to create an individualized learning experience that focuses on an area of the student’s interest and builds upon the basic principles of safety and quality, patient-centered care, and leadership. In addition to the individualized experience, students participate in on-line learning modules and continued communication with their coaching groups. The Summer Immersion occurs between the first and second year, and can take place on the Tampa or Lehigh Valley Campus, other places in the country, or internationally. The experience results in a scholarly product that is shared with peers and faculty upon return to campus.

Scholarly Focus on SELECT Domains

During the fourth year of medical school, our students are required to complete a Capstone project focused on a SELECT domain of their choice. This is a system improvement project integrating leadership, values and healthcare analysis.