Through fieldwork, students obtain exposure to a variety of clinical specialties, including prenatal, pediatric, cancer, fertility, neurogenetics, and multidisciplinary specialty clinics.
Students must complete 18 credits of clinical training:
- First year fieldwork: Introductory Fieldwork Practicum (1 credit)
- Summer Intensive Internship (5 credits)
- Second-year fieldwork: four blocks - Fall 1, Fall 2, Spring 1, Spring 2 (12 credits)
Students begin applying their fundamental genetic counseling skills to simulated patient sessions in the fall semester of their first year. Summer placements are typically full-time at five days per week for eight weeks or four days per week for ten weeks. Throughout the second year, two days per week are dedicated to fieldwork.
Most fieldwork placements conducted during the academic year are based in the greater New York area. For the Summer Intensive Internship, students have the option to remain in the New York area for their fieldwork placement or to seek out sites in which they would like to learn and work.
Each student’s clinical fieldwork path is designed to ensure experience working with diverse patient populations within a wide variety of practice settings, clinical indications, counseling and supervision styles, and service delivery models.
Sarah Lawrence is situated in one of the world’s most diverse regions, with access to leading medical institutions and communities from every background. Our clinical fieldwork partners include most of the major academic medical centers and top research institutions in the region, including:
- Albert Einstein College of Medicine/Montefiore Medical Center
- New York Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center
- NYU Langone Medical Center
- Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center
- New York City Health + Hospitals
- New York Medical College/Westchester Medical Center
- Northwell Health
- New Jersey Perinatal Associates
- Lescale Maternal Fetal Medicine
- NYC Office of the Chief Medical Examiner
As the genetic counseling workforce evolves, there is an increasing range of roles genetic counselors take on, expanding beyond clinical settings and into industry, research, and advocacy-based positions. Each student’s non-clinical fieldwork path is designed to provide opportunities to work with genetic counselors in a wide variety of non-clinical roles.
Our non-clinical fieldwork partners include:
- Myriad Genetics
- Natera
- Quest Diagnostics
- DNAToday
- GC Connexons
- SLC Institute for Genomics Education, Workforce & Leadership
Additional non-clinical fieldwork opportunities include an education and leadership rotation with our program leadership. The education and leadership rotation is ideal for students who are interested in genetic counselor education and wish to gain a deeper understanding of program accreditation standards and practice-based competencies. Students actively explore their leadership style, create an educational program, and complete a project tailored to their specific interests.