Our successful Body & Soul program has evolved into the new Center for Pre-Health Professions, continuing to serve as a guiding light for a greater future. We prepare students for success in healthcare careers through intentional mentoring and excellent coursework. If you envision yourself serving others in a medical setting, you will find experiences to prepare you for your career. Engage with medical professionals through shadowing and conduct difference-making research alongside your professors. Ignite your passion at ACU.
Our successful Body & Soul program has evolved into the new Center for Pre-Health Professions, continuing to serve as a guiding light for a greater future. We prepare students for success in healthcare careers through intentional mentoring and excellent coursework. If you envision yourself serving others in a medical setting, you will find experiences to prepare you for your career. Engage with medical professionals through shadowing and conduct difference-making research alongside your professors. Ignite your passion at ACU.
“The Center for Pre-Health Professions is preparing me for medical school. They do an awesome job of connecting all of us to resources and providing flexibility to fulfill our requirements while gaining experience. There’s really something to be said for having the second advisor through CPHP to look over my shoulder and assist in any way they can.”
There are few fields that bring you closer to understanding the intricacies of God’s handiwork and the building blocks to life than those that take you through microscopes into the greater worlds beyond and back to serve others through knowledge and care.
CPHP helps you build a strong portfolio toward applying to professional schools. We provide shadowing, surgery observation, medical missions, professional school visits, mock interviews and entrance exam prep so you can reach your goals. For the past 10 years, 80% of our graduating professional school applicants have been accepted into their programs of choice.
Our faculty mentors lead a medical missions seminar about ethical travel and best practices in international service and relief. We then put it into practice through multiple medical mission trips.
Students work alongside health professionals with partner ministries in Guatemala, Peru or Denver to support medical outreach.
Summer-long medical mission internships are also available to learn first-hand about full-time medical mission work and develop future partnerships as they complete their professional training.
Participate in CPHP’s summer Global Healthcare Study Abroad program to Leipzig, Germany. You’ll study healthcare systems and the impact of culture, politics and poverty while observing in German clinics and hospitals. The history of the Reformation, the Holocaust and the fall of the Iron Curtain that divided East and West Germany provide a rich backdrop for examining your own cultural assumptions.
ACU grad Leslie (Pickett ’04) Hutchins, MD, didn’t know she wanted to be a surgeon until her second year of medical school, when she followed a patient through emergency neurosurgery. Now she offers that same opportunity to students through ACU’s CPHP. By shadowing her, future doctors experience a day in the life of a neurosurgeon and are exposed to a field of medicine they may never have considered.
“They remind me of myself at that time,” she says. “I’m appreciative of the people who invested in me when I was younger, and I’m reminded of why I entered into medicine.”
Formerly the chief resident of neurosurgery at Virginia Commonwealth University, Hutchins now works in her hometown of Abilene. She’s satisfied in a career where she does “a little bit of everything” from cranial and spinal operations to peripheral nerve surgeries. “When you can perform an intervention that can change an outcome for an individual or a family, that is what I love the most about my job,” she says.
From the undergraduate classrooms to clinics, research facilities, graduate programs and hospitals, 80% of our graduating students enter into their chosen healthcare profession across the United States. We have students that are currently finishing their post-graduate degrees in a wide array of disciplines.
DENTISTRY
MEDICINE
OCCUPATIONAL THERAPY
OPTOMETRY
PHARMACY
PHYSICIAN ASSISTANT
PHYSICAL THERAPY
VETERINARY MEDICINE
Visit Abilene, tour campus and see for yourself what our Center of Pre-Health Professions can offer you.