Medical Student Affairs

Educational Affairs focuses on providing academic support and learning resources to enhance medical students’ educational experience and help each student achieve their personal and academic goals. SHSU-COM offers a variety of services to our students throughout their four years, which include, but are not limited to, the following: 

• Academic consultation and counseling.
• Workshops on time management, study strategies, and test-taking.
• Learning and study strategy assessment.
• Seminars, resources, and individual preparation sessions for licensing exams (COMLEX Levels 1 & 2).
• Referral to Disability Services at SHSU for additional testing and evaluation when appropriate.
• Learning resources and materials.

The peer tutoring program is designed to assist currently enrolled medical students experiencing academic difficulties in their courses. Students may refer themselves or be referred by others, such as the course director or a faculty advisor. Peer tutors are vetted by course directors and trained by Medical Student Affairs. Students may access tutoring services via Campus Connect. 

Early Alert is a referral system that enables SHSU faculty or staff to assist students who demonstrate a need for additional support through their academic performance or other indicators. Once notified via Campus Connect, the appropriate SHSU-COM personnel member will actively reach out to students to offer appropriate services and referrals in order to assist them. Students are encouraged to be proactive in discussing their needs. 

• Personal Support
• Physical and Mental Health Services
• Illness Exposure Notification Form

Career counseling is a critical part of the medical education process. It focuses on giving students the opportunity to explore multiple areas of interest, determine their options, identify potential residency programs, and prepare to enter the National Resident Matching Program.

The goal of SHSU-COM is to provide students with the experiences and knowledge necessary to choose the specialty and practice that best aligns with their interests, talents, and abilities. This is accomplished by recruiting students from communities in need of physicians, maintaining mentorship with faculty and physicians from the community, and providing clinical training in areas similar to those from which they came.  For research, students may have a faculty mentor in their area of interest.   

In order to ensure Graduate Medical Education (GME) readiness, career counseling is provided by medical school faculty members who review the resources provided by the American Association of Colleges of Osteopathic Medicine (AACOM) for medical student career advising. Students also have access to the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) Careers in Medicine (CiM) program.

The SHSU-COM Medical Student Performance Evaluation (MSPE) Career Specialist is available to assist medical school faculty and enhance the career counseling process for SHSU-COM students through mock interviews, CV critiques, and other career development resources. 

Each student is assigned to a faculty advisor who provides general assistance throughout their undergraduate medical education. In year three, the faculty becomes more involved as students consider their residency options and year four schedules. Students are required to have at least one session with their assigned advisor during the months of February or March.   

Multiple faculty members have experience in advising students. All participate in annual mandatory faculty development sessions led by the Curriculum Administrative Team, where they learn how to gauge students’ competitiveness for various residency specialties and programs, become familiar with our degree plan and schedule requirements for years three and four.

All first-year students are assigned to one of four learning communities. These flexible, student-centered social and academic homes are overseen by faculty and staff sponsors who may act as advisors, teachers, and career development coaches. The learning communities foster relationships between students and faculty and provide community service and team-building opportunities. Programming is student driven and focus on topics like social networking, lifelong learning, peer mentoring, medical professionalism, ethics, and work-life balance.