REACH
High School Youth Mentoring Program
Metro-Atlanta Public School Students Enter Healthcare Pathway
The ROEO Youth Medical Mentoring Program (YMMP) is being relaunched under a new name, The MSM Surgery Reach Program. The program will continue to provide youth mentoring, health care professional role-modeling and medical/clinical exposure to bright, to highly motivated primarily high school senior and junior students with demonstrated academic aptitude/potential. The program was derived from the idea that there are highly intelligent and capable high school students who may be potentially interested and suite for careers in the healthcare industry/field, but lacked the proper exposure/experience and professional role models to propagate their career pursuits
Dr. Danner spearheaded the project, ten years ago, with the support of Grady’s Emma Harrington and Felicia Mobley along with Emory School of Medicine’s Adetolu Oyewo, M.D., when 17 Atlanta Public Schools (APS) and DeKalb County Schools students successfully completed and graduated from the ROEO program. To date, several of those graduates are pre-med students attending Columbus State University, Georgia Piedmont Technical College, Georgia Perimeter, Georgia Southern University, Gordon State College, Atlanta Technical College, Atlanta Metropolitan College, The University of Alabama at Birmingham, Tuskegee University, and Xavier University of Louisiana, to name a few.
Under new leadership, the Reach program will be supported by the MSM Surgery Department with Dr. Henry as the Program Director for the project. It is the program’s goal to maintain its mission of introducing and exposing interested high school students from underrepresented backgrounds to medical careers in various specialties during an intensive hybrid 8-week course.
“I wish this type program were available to me during my early years,” said Omar Danner, M.D., FACS, trauma surgeon and surgical critical care specialist at Grady Memorial Hospital, associate professor of surgery at MSM, and former program director of ROEO. “Part of MSM’s mission is to prepare interested minority students for health care professions and transition them into the pathway to increase diversity within the medical and scientific fields.” The MSM Surgery Reach aligns well with our rich institutional history of accomplishing this objective.
The Reach Program includes an overview of the path to medical school; comprehensive exposure to the field of healthcare; young healthcare profession panels; a financial literacy seminar compliments of Fifth Third Bank; a tour of Morehouse School of Medicine, Morehouse Healthcare and Grady Hospital; skills lab with hands-on simulation, knot tying, and casting; and clinical shadowing experiences at our Morehouse Healthcare facility.
The Reach Program is a hybrid curriculum that will begin with weekly virtual sessions for the 1st half and concludes with in-person sessions with medical professionals. In the final week, we will culminate with a graduation ceremony in June 2023. We will be sending out a follow up letter along with the application package and a Program Agenda with an outline of the anticipated schedule of events, to selected students, when it becomes available.
Selection Criterion:
- Submitted completed application with Guardian/Parents' Permission prior to deadline.
- Write a one-half to a full-page essay to you about why student would like to become a doctor or healthcare professional and/or participate in the program.
- Submitted Recommendation form from counselor/mentor/coach at current school.
- Approved vaccination(s) requirements
For more information about MSM Surgery Reach Program, contact Selena Phipps, Outreach Program Manager – sphipps@msm.edu and/or complete the Outreach Program Interest form for detailed information.