UNF's post bac:
http://www.unf.edu/dept/premed/
This is a formal program for career changers or people who didn't major in science. It gives students the opportunities to take their prereqs and also to take some more advanced, and even graduate classes at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville. The program does provide a committee letter which is also nice. My main reason for trying to get in is that members get very high priority on classes they're trying to take.
If you click on the link to UNF courses on
http://www.unf.edu/dept/premed/, you can see how the classes are setup and when they usually are. The only negatives I see in the program is that it's not super well known school outside FL and the classes aren't offered in the evening/weekends. Fortunately for me, my employer in Jacksonville where I plan on workikng is very supportive on continuing education.
The UNF Post-Bacc website is outdated. Unfortunately, the Post-Bacc program does not have shadowing contacts in place with practicing physicians and access to Mayo graduate courses has not been available for at least a year.
The structure of the program itself is pretty loose. It basically involves your general prerequisites and then you can elect to take any additional science course that interest you. Some courses are offered during the evenings, and usually some lab sections as well. Upon completion of 30 hours, you're given a certificate of completion/committee letter; although people often wait until the very end to receive the cert if they want the raise their BCPM a little more. I'm currently at 45 hours of post-bacc coursework and won't submit for my cert until the very end because I want it to reflect the highest GPA possible.
I'm a post-bacc at UNF and of all of the other post-baccs I know, none are officially enrolled in the certificate program and all are just doing it informally. One student in my Organic lecture submitted his application for the program and never heard back, even after talking to the professor in charge several times.
The problem the program faces now is a lack of involvement from the top down. Dr. Bowman, the professor who instituted the formal program stepped down as the coordinator and sponsor for it because the university didn't want him to have the responsibility of the post-bacc program and the new Environmental Chemistry center to deal with. The new sponsor seems to have too many other things going on, so nothing really gets done.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that the only real benefit to the post-bacc program is priority registration.
THAT WILL CHANGE, however. I'm currently getting the paperwork in order for creating the University of North Florida Post-Baccalaureate Pre-Medical Society. Here is a quick list of some of the objectives that the society will be focusing on.
- Working with area hospitals and physicians to provide shadowing experience and research opportunities to students in the program; although we will most likely extend this to undergraduate premeds as well.
- Advising services. Post-baccs have a severe lack of counseling resources as it stands now. The pre-med society officers are all undergrads, so none of them are really familiar with the needs of post-bacc students.
- We'd really like to work on re-establishing those contacts with Mayo for graduate course access. Fortunately, I know some of the people in the graduate school admissions office at Mayo, and have been working on getting information on how the program worked before. I'm hoping that by sometime next semester, Dr. Lentz (the current post-bacc program supervisor) and I can get a proposal together and start talking to the graduate school at Mayo.
- Fix the administration bottleneck. The undergrad pre-meds don't touch the post-bacc stuff, so it all falls onto Dr. Lentz's lap. Society officers will be required to hold office hours during which administrative details can be processed. This will improve the application process for the program and with the other objectives, hopefully encourage people to apply to the program. Of course, the more people involved in the program, the better, since it gives us more leverage when proposing further improvements.
I'm very happy here at UNF. The chemistry, physics, and biology departments are excellent. The Chem/Phys building is only 2 or 3 years old and has very good labs. All of the professors I've had have been excellent, the best that I've had during my college career. President Delaney has been making a lot of improvements to the school and they're currently constructing a new wing of the Health Sciences building and breaking ground on the new student union.
If you've got any specific questions about UNF, send me a PM or reply and I'll get you an answer.
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