UC Riverside alumna Gabriella Moussa has a sterling piece of advice about the Pre-Professional Advising Center (PPAC) and the services it provides.
“To any student looking to use the office’s resources, but who may be hesitant for whatever reason: Let yourself let THEM help you!” says Gabriella, who graduated from UC Riverside in 2022 with a degree in Cell, Molecular and Developmental Biology, is just days away from becoming a second-year medical student at the Arizona College of Osteopathic Medicine at Midwestern University.
“Take the leap and schedule that first meeting with your advisor, go to that initial workshop, chat with one of the ambassadors...make that first step to lifelong mentorship and guidance,” she continues. “Everyone in that office wants you to succeed just as much as you do. You will not regret it!”
Formerly the Health Professions Advising Center, the PPAC was renamed last quarter when the Center merged its pre-health focus with the additional core competency of pre-law advising.
“Many colleges and universities around the country utilize this type of advising model encompassing health and law,” explains Charlie Scruggs, who's served as director of PPAC since August 2014. “It’s full-service advising. Prior to winter quarter, pre-law advising was exclusive through the College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (CHASS), and with this new partnership between the Division of Undergraduate Education and CHASS, we’ll now have support for pre-law students in all colleges/schools. The marrying of the two is pretty easy for us.”
According to Charlie, it’s essential for pre-health students in particular to seek advising as soon as they become interested in pursuing a career in a health-related field. “This doesn’t mean they should seek out our advising only when they’re certain about entering a specific profession,” he clarifies. “We have students who come in and know they want to be dentists, and we have others who are interested in healthcare in general, but they aren’t sure which area.”
A key aspect of how PPAC operates so successfully is due to the Center’s Student Ambassadors, who act as hands-on mentors for interested students.
“We have 10 Ambassadors this year,” Charlie says. “Students who are interested in connecting with an ambassador may do so via the ambassador's in-person or virtual drop-in hours. There is no application or matching process...it’s up to a student to connect with the ambassadors based on their interest or availability.”
For 2023 UC Riverside graduate Yuma Miyake, currently a medical assistant at an ophthalmology clinic and a clinical research assistant for a Stanford University liver transplantation lab, his two-year stint as a Student Ambassador at PPAC was transformative.
“That experience alone gave me a good grasp of what and how I needed to prepare for medical school applications,” he says. “With the need to be simultaneously involved in academics, research, and many extra-curriculars in order to be a competitive applicant, having a supportive office like PPAC made my four years at UC Riverside much easier to navigate.”
Verena Awadallah is a 2021 UC Riverside graduate with a degree in Biology is currently finishing her second year at California Health Sciences University School of Osteopathic Medicine. She worked with PPAC as a Student Staff Assistant and also served as a Student Ambassador during her third and fourth years at UC Riverside.
“I was involved with the Center almost every day, whether in person or virtually,” she says. “As a first-generation student with immigrant parents, I didn’t have much guidance on how to get to medical school. The PPAC became a place where I not only felt supported, but also gained the tools and confidence I needed to succeed. I honestly don’t know where I’d be without them.”
The National Association of Advisors for the Health Professions (NAAHP) cites more than 120 careers related to health professions. “This is where we as an academic and career advising center can help,” Charlie says. “Ideally, we’d like to see students soon after they arrive on campus.”
Typically, Charlie says, first-year students are connected with one of PPAC’s ambassadors, who help them understand the pre-health pathway journey while also advising them on how to be successful in courses and explore clinical, research and service opportunities. In the second-year onward, students are encouraged to meet directly with an advisor to identify their specific interests and develop an academic and curricular plan.
According to Charlie, it benefits students to seek out the PPAC for assistance at their earliest opportunity. “It can be quite daunting to plan both undergraduate and graduate/professional studies simultaneously,” Charlie says. “In this process, it’s important to have support from a pre-health advisor, and often the major advisor and faculty, to discuss interests, goals, and nuances, and then form a timeline in pursuit of a health professions graduate/doctoral program.
“It’s beneficial for students to connect with apre-professional advisor to help identify their area of interest and understand necessary academic and clinical pre-requisites," he continued. "It’s also important for the advisor and advisee to discuss where to get accurate and up-to-date information on admissions, test prep, application, letter of recommendation, and interview support.”
“The Center was very important to me while I was a student at UC Riverside and also as an alumna,” says Gabriella. “Being the first person in my family to pursue a career in medicine was difficult in many ways, but especially in the lack of innate knowledge and advice that some of my peers benefitted from by having family members who already worked in healthcare.
"Having entered UC Riverside with a desire to one day pursue medicine but no knowledge on how to do it led me to look for opportunities for guidance and mentorship, which in turn led me to the PPAC,” she continues. “It truly felt like a privilege to have access to all of this knowledge and mentorship through events, advisors, and ambassadors.”
Charlie shared that roughly "75 percent of the students that avail themselves of the resources offered at the PPAC come to the Center via the UCR College of Natural & Agricultural Sciences (CNAS). But he emphasizes that the PPAC serves students from all of the colleges/schools at UC Riverside.
“That’s kind of a big deal,” he says. “If you’re an English major, for example you have a support center to help prepare you to go to dental school or optometry school.”
One significant benefit of utilizing PPAC is that the information the Center gives is vetted, as all of the Center’s staff are members of the NAAHP. “That membership gives us agency,” Charlie says. “We help students understand where to get accurate and valid information specific to health professions preparation. With so many things online, what’s true and valid can be confusing."
Charlie says that in this wired world, it’s easy for students to access Reddit and other online sites for information that can sometimes be suspect. “We assist them in determining what may be correct or incorrect about information from those sites,” Charlie says. “And our advice really comes via unimpeachable data. That’s why I tell students to come in and see us, because in addition to the data, we have an ongoing conversations with medical, dental schools, etc. We talk daily about how to work with students to aid them building a portfolio to be a competitive applicant … from letters of recommendation to why a certain class isn’t more diverse, or why students might not be doing better on a certain part of the MCAT...anything you can think of, we talk about.”
As 2020 UC Riverside alumna Megan Burns attests, although students are urged to frequent PPAC early and often, there is really no cut-off date for the services the Center provides. Burnes, who lives in Santa Barbara, works as a medical assistant in a cardiology office during the week, and as a Certified Nursing Assistant at a nursing home on the weekends. In July, she’ll move to Omaha to start medical school at Creighton University.
“PPAC is fantastic for ‘late bloomers’ like me,” she says. “I will be 28 years old when I go back to school in July, with five years elapsing since my last college class. I took a long and winding untraditional path into medical school, and I’m not sure I would have gotten there without the five years worth of PPAC’s advisors and resources.”
PPAC, with its health professions advising component, is one of only two such centers that exist in the UC system. Furthermore, says Charlie, the Center has everything covered.
“Students have a resource to come and talk about careers, how to prepare for embarking on them, the job market...everything,” he says. “PPAC is very niche in this field. This is what we do for all of our students interested in health, and now law careers, no matter their major.
Charlie continues, "We’re an overarching one-stop shop for all UC Riverside students!”
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