This NIH-SEPA (Science Education Partnership Award) project has an intentional program design to improve students’ social capital to enable student success in medical and health education. We hypothesize that increasing high school students’ social capital will reduce the barriers to health careers. We propose two specific methods for increasing student social capital within the context of a research-based pathway program: increase student access to information and engagement with support and resources about health careers and the educational trajectory and create a multilevel mentorship network composed of high school students, pre-med undergraduates, and medical students. This project is a partnership between the STEM Center and Southern Illinois University Medical School.
This is an ongoing project which started on July 2025.