Jessica Ostrow Michel

This course traverses multiple topics that complement core genetic counseling knowledge and skills to enhance and deepen students’ personal approach to practice. Students engage in interactive workshops on narrative medicine, variant curation, cultural humility, education outreach, and professional development. Students have opportunities to compare and contrast viewpoints and experiment with applying insights from other disciplines to their work in genetic counseling.

The Research Methods course serves as an introduction to the research process, with multiple connections to the development of their thesis projects. Students are encouraged to become better consumers of the scientific literature, including the use of search engines, a reference program and critical reading skills in the construction of a literature review as a first step toward study design and publication. The course includes a review of qualitative and quantitative research models, development of surveys, focus groups and questionnaires, and the basics of data analysis and working in SPSS.

As a genetic counselor, you will likely encounter multiple occasions for which you will need to serve as a leader. Some of these occasions may include standing up for others (patient or advocacy groups, disadvantaged or disenfranchised populations) and pushing issues that you support into the timeline (gene patents, congressional issues). You may have interest in taking an active role in professional societies, joining an advisory board, or launching your own company. Integrations between health care and technology will likely pose further opportunities for genetic counselors to take active roles in the development of genetic/genomic products. To prepare you for taking on these important roles, this class will feature guest speakers who have assumed leadership roles within their genetic-counseling careers and who will share insights on navigating the different stages of their career trajectories.