 So here's just a quick agenda. We're going to talk a little bit about our program and then we're going to have the actual panel itself maybe around 30 minutes and then we'll get to most of your questions in the live Q&A and then we'll just have a little bit of closeout slides and we'll be good to go. So this is a little bit about our program. We have multiple offerings. You can take our class one year full time. You can do two years part time or you could even do two years in person. Our one-year program is entirely offered in person. Now we wanted to talk a little bit about some of the cohort sizes. The class in general should be between 30 to 40 students, right? Your graduating class. We have foundations classes and these are there's two of them. We call these a multi-layered approach to bioethics and these you'll be in class with 30 or 40 students. Then we also break out into the core classes intro to research ethics, intro to clinical ethics and health law and policy. These might have around 30 students as well. The next set of classes that really make up excuse me the bulk of your program are elective classes and this is your opportunity to partake in classes offered by the wider medical school catalog, the school of public health and the law school and to really close out your curriculum as well of course. We have a capstone experience and your capstone is a hands-on ethics experience that you can tailor to your professional experience, your professional expertise and your interests as well. Just a little bit about our class. We have about right now 120 students 32 of which are full-time and our students come from 27 countries which is pretty incredible. Our students are clinicians, their lawyers, their pastors, their public health and public law professionals. They're working in the pharmaceutical industry or maybe they're taking a gap year in med school and some of our students are also just starting their career while others have been in their fields for 20 plus years and we're going to hear from some of them today. So a little bit about life here at Harvard. You can of course right come study in person that's here in Boston that's on the Longwood campus. You can live in or around Cambridge and then commute in to our Longwood campus right near Fenway or if you're studying in person then you could even live right here on campus at the Vanderbilt Hall and really quick as you've seen here we are going to jump right into our alumni panel because some of the questions that we get asked most are what can I do with the program? How can it influence my career? How could it help me change my career? So that's what we really wanted to share with you today. So I want to get right to it and start our alumni panel. We're very lucky to have our moderator with us today that's Dr. Rebecca Brindel and Dr. Brindel is actually the director of the Master of Bioethics degree program and she's the associate director of the Center for Bioethics. So I'm going to stop sharing the screen and actually open it up to the panelists that we have here to please introduce yourselves and then we'll get rolling to the panel. Thank you. Gaki I'm not sure if you want to go first. Yes happy to introduce myself. Hi everyone and welcome to this information session. My name is Gaki Masunga and I am a recent grad of the MB program. I graduated in 2021 and I was part of the two-year part-time program and I'm currently a postgraduate research fellow at the Harvard Medical School. Great. Just see I can see everyone so I'll take over. Kayla, welcome back. Hi thank you so much for having me. Let's see so I was a full-time student. I graduated in 2020 and I'm currently a clinical ethicist for Providence St. Joseph Health. Sorry and if we can try to get people's cameras on as we move into the panel that would be great. Next Vince, can you introduce yourself? Hey good morning. I'm Chaplain Vince Bain. I'm a chaplain in the United States Army and I'm presently assigned at Walt Reed National Medical Center in the Washington DC area and in my position as the bioethics chaplain for the installation. I'm also the co-chair of the Health Care Ethics Committee and I serve on the IRB and I also advise the DE and I counsel on all their activities and I'm not allowed to start my video. Oh wait now it's there. Great and we're going to ask all our participants. Let's see if we can start videos. There we go. Okay and Ha-jung good morning. It's early for you. Yes it's 6 a.m. here. Good morning everyone. I'm Ha-jung Lee. I'm an assistant professor in religion, spirituality and society and the bioethics program at University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington. Great thank you so much to all of you for joining us and it's really nice to see so many familiar faces first thing in the morning to talk about our program. So we are so excited to hear about your experiences in the program and I know very shortly perspective students in the program are going to start populating the Q&A box to add to our conversation but maybe we could start just with a couple of questions for a couple questions to get us going about each of your unique experiences and what brought you to the program. So maybe we could start with Kayla and talk about how the Master's in Bioethics program prepared you for your current role as a clinical ethicist and how you brought your background in nursing to the MBE program. Yeah absolutely. So I came to the MBE program like Dr. Brandel mentioned with a nursing career background and I had since kind of these different ethical issues at the bedside but I didn't really know how to name them, how to put words to them, how to talk through them. So it was really incredibly helpful to get to join the MBE program and I feel like it was just this year's steeped in learning that I referenced back to all the time in my career now. So I started a PhD program that I'm still working on and in the meantime I was really lucky to earn a or land a clinical ethicist position. So what I do now very much relates to the MBE in terms of let's see I carry a pager, I take consults all day, I'm teaching medical residents who are internal medicine residents and ED residents as well, I'm doing like all kinds of education across our system and a lot of the people that I teach or work with are learners and what's so helpful is that I was so recently a medical person learner myself right so when I teach nurses, when I teach residents, I'm very easily able to put myself back in their shoes and I learned, I used so many of the techniques that I was taught while I was at Harvard Center for Bioethics. Just thinking about how a lot of learning bioethics is not only learning the technical pieces, learning the background, learning the current up-to-date content but also learning how to process you know things like moral distress or things like you know really tough issues at the bedside where maybe yes we're talking about withdrawing treatment on a patient but we're also talking about kind of the lived experience of someone who works at the bedside so what I really appreciated about my master's program was that I felt like it included both of those pieces. I found a lot of great mentors through the Master's of Bioethics program who really showed me what doing clinical ethics work is like so I feel like I went in definitely prepared and I used so many little tidbits that everyone taught me along the way so definitely would recommend it. Thanks so much and we're going, I want to sort of go to HaZhong for a minute because you completed the program part-time while you were also completing your PhD and then took a somewhat different path into academia but very much informed by an interest in clinical work so maybe you could tell us a little bit HaZhong about how the program has influenced your career now as a full-time teacher and scholar of bioethics yourself. So I had an educational background in biomedical engineering, law, theology before I enrolled my PhD program in religious studies and I went to one of the ethics conferences and I talked about my background then somebody introduced me about bioethics and I was persuaded to become a bioethicist and it sounded fascinating and I was asking people like how I can study bioethics from now and they recommended me to go to the bioethics conference so I went to the ASBH and then I found the Harvard booth there and they said they may launch the new program so waiting for the school to launch the program so like I was clicked on their web page like almost every day and then I enrolled as an inaugural class and I was probably the first one who took an interview because it's like waiting and like wrote my application overnight when they uploaded the application and I was like very excited and I was already like in the PhD program in Boston area so it worked out very well and I mean without this program I don't think I could become a like bioethicist because when I went to the conference bioethics is interdisciplinary field and there are so many topics and so many things going on and I was really overwhelmed and then realized that how can I get like foundation in bioethics and when I took those classes like it gave me really solid knowledge in bioethics and plus I was able to serve IRB Brigham and Women's Hospital and the hospital ethics committee at MGH and those experiences were like very very valuable and to see like what is going on like in research ethics and clinical ethics so without this program I don't think I can teach and research like now at my current institution so I really really appreciate the program so I strongly recommend that like whoever you are in full time part time I think it's doable and you can get a lot out of that. Great thanks so much and maybe we'll come back and hear a little bit about what you're teaching in your program now. I want to go to Gaki for a minute and hear about your perspective and how your commitment to and research in global health was influenced by participating in the master's program and you still in about an hour you're going to be helping to teach in our global health ethics course too so still still in the middle of the MBE program so tell us a little bit Gaki about your experience. Yes so I came to the MBE program from a public health background I worked for a chronic disease epidemiology lab prior to starting my graduate studies and I actually started my graduate studies with a master's in public health so I was in the middle of that public health program when I applied to the MBE program and I found out about the MBE program actually from a classmate in my biostatistics and epidemiology class and at the time I was designing my thesis where I was doing a comparative analysis between models that were employed by African and Southeast Asian countries to eliminate a neglector tropical disease called leash analysis and as I was designing the study I realized that there are a lot of ethical challenges present in the efforts to prevent and treat neglector tropical diseases and I really wanted to explore this more but I didn't know how to do this so when I met this classmate who was studying biathics it immediately clicked for me and I knew that this is a program that I felt would be really beneficial to to take concurrently with my public health program so I applied to the program and I was admitted to do the program part-time so I could I could also concurrently do the public complete my public health program as well so while I was a student it was a really beautiful match for me because I was able to add on a biathics component to the project I was already working on for my other program so for my capstone I explored the ethics around the prioritization of global health issues and how global health policies are implemented in relation to the socioeconomic status of affected populations and this is because neglect tropical diseases affect a billion of the world's poorest world's poorest so if I can talk a little bit after after I graduated as as Dr. Brindel mentioned I've stayed on as a research fellow in the department and I've been really able to tap into the world of global health bioethics and discover how to create synergy between public health and biathics so as an example one of the research projects I'm currently working on is as a fellow is to create an African specific big data commons to better understand the determinants of cardiometabolic diseases and mental health outcomes across Sub-Saharan Africa and this is a huge initiative and collaborative among institutions here in Boston and across four African countries and it's we're trying to use smartphone technology to collect and analyze epidemiological data from participants in these African countries and as a PI of the study I am conceptualizing the design of the biathics research arm of the study to analyze important ethical research questions related to the impact of ethical data collection and use in Africa so merging the fields of public health and biathics has has also enabled me to present to my work at conferences that not only focus on public health but biathics as well at the WHO and Oxford as well. Great thank you so much and really also so far all the diverse experiences and the different ways in which our alums bring bioethics into their own practice and in fact day by day every day expanding the scope of the fields and where we can where bioethics can take us and how it can change the world. So I want to go next to Vince and to ask you about your experience in the program and how it's influenced your work and and your career as an Army chaplain. Very good great question I will start this with a long story to get to that point the United States Army has two slots for bioethics chaplains across the entire force and we're talking of force in excess of one million people and there are only two slots in the United States Army for bioethicist and it is a very competitive position and when I was selected for that I immediately dove into let's find a school that's got a fantastic bioethics program realizing I was going to be working at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center it is believed to be the premier medical installation for all Department of Defense personnel and going there I knew I was going to be getting in way over my head unless I was significantly academically prepared for the opportunities and the MBE program gave me a great foundation on which to slide right into this position here at Walter Reed of course I wish I would have taken different electives but if I would have known more broadly what the position was going to entail I would have probably selected the electives a little bit differently although I've been very pleased with how I've been able to integrate within the organization at Walter Reed and I am now serving as the co-chair for the healthcare ethics committee and there's three different subcommittees that fall under this although one of the main programs we're looking at putting back is an annual ethics symposium this went dark during the hype of COVID because they weren't able to conduct this in person so we're bringing that back as a hybrid this coming fall we're also going to be bringing online and kind of a brown bag lunch you know edible ethics or I've got to get a better name than that although a virtual opportunity once a month to bring in a guest speaker give a short presentation and then open it up to everyone who's in the virtual sphere to kind of ask questions about whatever present ethical medical ethical topic that is of interest within Walter Reed and across the Department of Defense and I'm also working on a research project with a number of the residents we're looking at medical ethical situations that occurred in deployment settings because as we have no longer a significant deployed military we're losing that knowledge as those individuals leave the force either transitioning into civilian positions or retiring and we'd like to grab that information and from that make a pre-deployment training protocol that allows our providers that have never deployed to understand some of the ethical challenges that exist in providing medical care in a combat casualty situation we're mirroring a program or not mirroring but kind of building on some work that's been done by the British military and I've had an opportunity to sit in with their ethics committee as they've talked about the program that they have made so we're trying to do something that is similar that's just one of the many projects we've got going on and then I'm also serving on the IRB which is very interesting because as a member of the other people on the IRB have told me I don't have any medical knowledge and I'm sure them that's quite all right because most of what the most of the programs we're looking at are all the proposals are using military service members as their participant pool seen as how I am one of those and as a chaplain I do it I advocate for the care of soldiers I have a very unique perspective in understanding the impact that the participation of service members have especially in a very paternalistic organization with some of the most compliant individuals that exist because we are used to answering yes and positively for all that we're ordered to do so that is certainly something to be concerned about as that pool is looked at as research participants so those are a few of the items I'm also involved in and of course I had the opportunity invited to advise the DE&I council on ethical issues as they roll out and expand the DE&I program at Walter Reed so I've had an opportunity to sit in on their discussions also and I would say every one of the classes that I took in the MBE program has applied in some way shape or form to this very diverse job that I have at Walter Reed and I'm thankful for that and as Dr. Brindell can tell you I do reach back quite frequently to get answers to questions to her and Dr. Barry and some of the other instructors because it's the program is like standing in front of a fire hydrant trying to get a drink and it wasn't able to take it all in but the key is I know who to reach back to and ask the questions to so that has been the greatest help since I've been actively engaged in this position here at Walter Reed so pending over thanks thanks so much Vince and thanks for bringing that perspective so we're going to round out our panel with Leanne Homan who I believe is a 2020 graduate of our program and came in as a practicing nurse and now has really shifted her career to be a clinical ethicist and serving as the associate director of clinical ethics at our center so welcome Leanne we're so pleased you're joining us and I'm hoping you could say a little bit about how the master bioethics program influenced your career and your and your own practice as a nurse sure thanks Brenda and I mean Becca and thank you for the introduction it makes my life easier to not have to introduce myself as Becca said I came into the program as a registered nurse I had been a nurse in 2020 for 17 years and you know really the last probably four years of my career was looking for a shift away from the bedside and to be honest it was because of the moral distress that I was experiencing every single day at work and instead of running away from the career of nursing and as I would say I wanted to become a florist I figured instead of running from the feelings that I was experiencing I would learn a little bit more about it and try to figure out how to process it and process these feelings so I started in the program I was part time because I was also working full-time and that was and you know have a family and that was the only way that I thought it would be manageable and you know I'm super grateful for the program I'm confident that I would not be in the role that I am today without the program as Becca said I'm a clinical nurse ethicist here in an academic academic medical center in Boston there's two of us for the entire medical center a requirement is to either have a master's in bioethics or graduate from the fellowship program that is awful also offered at HMS and I kind of fell into this role because this is where I did my capstone project and through the relationships that I made and the networking and the constant contact of the folks in the ethics community I you know kind of got into this this role just happenstance and again I'm super grateful and can confidently say I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for the program so yes thanks great so that brings us into there are so many things so just to highlight about how special the program is really by virtue of the community that we've created between the faculty and the students and the unique perspective experience that each each student in the program brings to the work so this is just the beginning almost the tip of the iceberg but if we had five other alums we would hear even more stories about both how transformative the degree can be as well as backgrounds and interests that came into the program so one of one of the things that we hear in our exit surveys every year from our students is the importance of the capstone experience in helping we've already heard Leanne about how you credit the capstone with your next career move that's not uncommon although not everybody does I'm wondering also about about others capstone experience I think maybe Gaki will go to you and you could tell us a little bit about how your work has developed since the capstone and maybe something about mentorship and research as part of that as well if you'd like yes absolutely so so I the research advisor that I was assigned for my capstone has continued to mentor me in my in my fellowship now and it was very instrumental in a way that he helped me craft my question for the research project that I worked on during my capstone and as a result of that we were able to publish a paper together and then think through how I wanted to continue working not only on the new project that I just talked about on focusing on non-communicable diseases but also continuing another research project with focusing on negative tropical diseases so for the entity for my negative tropical disease project I added a health policy arm so I'm looking at a policy that was implemented about a decade ago to try by congress to try and incentivize drug companies to create drugs vaccines and diagnostics for these diseases that affect a billion people in the world but there's not really a lot of focus on drugs for these diseases so however in 2020 right before the pandemic started the government accountability office did an audit of this policy and found that it hadn't had the intended effect that they had hoped and they provided some reason that they thought could be could be could be the reason for for drug companies not being incentivized and what I'm doing for my in my fellowship is looking at the audit doing a deep dive in the audit and seeing how what specific areas I can focus on to see if we can make if I can propose changes to the to the way the policy was crafted to see if it can have a better impact for creating drugs for these diseases so that's one way that I've continued what I started in the capstone and now in my fellowship as well. Great thanks so much and another piece of the capstone that we hear is so important is the mentorship that comes along with it and we've heard that from you Kaila I was hoping maybe you could tell us about your mentor and you know we have some a question in the chat box too about what it's like being a nurse in the program and whether that background and experiences is valued and what mentorship might look like so I thought you might be able to tell us a little bit about your experience. Absolutely I found myself very lucky to have two mentors one of them was Dr. Jennifer McGraw and the other one was Dr. Amy Millican and Jennifer was a neonatologist physician and Amy Millican is a nurse ethicist I still text Amy probably once a week um whether we're talking about you know just sending photos of very cute young son or if we're talking about you know needing help on a consultation that I'm facing and I think I found that you know whether or not the person that you are matched up with as a mentor is still working with the center or if they've moved clear across the world they will stay in touch with you at least that's been my experience and they're incredibly helpful in terms of gosh I mean letters of rec advice along the way I really do feel like that was one of the most beneficial pieces um and really that relationship is fostered through the capstone so my capstone project was looking at shared decision making in the labor and delivery birth setting looking at how we can include pregnant people more in conversations around what's going to happen next in their birth process which is really handy because when I'm at work I get ethics consults from obstetricians saying hey you know we need ethics help this patient let's say doesn't want an IV doesn't want a C-section but we think it's an urgent right like what do we do next how do we think about consent in these contexts I mean just so many questions around really any piece of medicine you could focus your capstone on if you are interested in in the clinical or bedside aspect of things and so working on that project I got to really get to know both of my mentors ask them questions about what their career looks like every day really develop that relationship and I totally echo Leanne even though I'm clear across the country I'm on the west coast in Portland Oregon I could not have imagined even coming close to earning or being in this role that I'm in now without their mentorship on what this work looks like how to apply how to do it I mean I did practice interview questions with my mentors as well so incredibly incredibly helpful and then in terms of what it's like to be a nurse at the program I definitely went in nervous because not uncommon you hear in a nurse's experience that maybe you don't feel like medical school is a place that you would just like you know fit right in super casually and it really blew me away I actually remember I cried happy tears embarrassing to admit but I'll tell you I cried happy tears to one of those two mentors after the second week of classes because I told her I just felt so included and so welcomed and there's so many awkward moments in class where professors will say you know we're talking about x y and z at the bedside and then they'll pan to whoever's in the class that has that lived experience and say hey Le you've seen a page you know I used to be a pediatric hospice you've held a patient's hand as they're dying you know talk us through that piece what were the ethical issues you faced so I never felt like being a nurse was I never felt out of place out of medical school which I think said a lot about Harvard's culture especially this program's culture I'm not sure that that's the case how or if I would feel that way at every medical school across the country to be sure but no I felt like it was nothing but a good thing to bring and I also still have a lot of close relationships with people who were also nurses in the program and we've kind of stuck together so definitely would recommend it from the nursing angle great thanks and Hajeong you came in as sort of at a pretty formative time in your career looking at how to bring together your academic background in religion your interest in culture and and immigrant health as well as this growing growing desire to study bioethics and so you know how what was your mentorship experience like and how do you see where it's gotten you to today and maybe tell us a little bit about now now that you've been in your position for a long time how will you bring that to your own students in fostering a love of bioethics um after I came to this institution actually our bioethics program was growing because I started to offer like more classes like pandemic ethics and law like public health ethics reproductive ethics global bioethics so I tried to bring more global perspectives and as on as a first generation immigrant I tried to bring like immigrants undocumented issues and all that and during my MBE program I think it's going to be changed as like science in bioethics I just read I was conducting a research on undocumented immigrants like you know health issues and I was conducting some like survey of quantitative research and I faced some challenges to finish that research and Becca met me like after her work hour like she was looking for like a mentor for me and she tried to connect me to people that who can be really helpful and she was like totally on the student side and I still like I'm still so grateful for that to you know think of that kind of like mentorship so when I teach my students and when my students conduct some independent research or summer research and I tried to support them and like emotionally and with like network and everything and I thought that was like really good model like role model as a mentor and I was working with Piju and he was a great mentor as well and so like one of the lessons that I learned was like like don't you know give up your research when you like face challenges because it's not easy to conduct research for the marginalized communities like silenced communities so I mean he addressed that issue like with sincerity so not only like knowledge and what I've learned from the research but also like that kind of mentorship and kind of sincere heart for care for human beings really touched me actually and and I've also learned a lot from other faculty members and who actually have the experiences in bioethics the hospital floor or at the labs so when I read bioethical materials like a lot of them are just philosophical theological and abstract kind of concepts and I appreciate that but I felt like I needed more I need to learn like you know what is going on on the hospital floor and what are their lived experiences were like and a lot of faculty members always brought their experiences and not only faculty members but our cohorts like who had lots of experiences in nursing medicine like clinicians and like they brought their expertise so we have learned from each other a lot as well so that's something that I really appreciate about the program. Thank you that's really helpful to hear and I'm it was not a plant of a question to talk about anybody in particular and their mentorship but you know I do there's a question about the culture of our program and about what it's like to be a student and you know does the group does the group come together and what about students from different backgrounds so that begins to touch on it and we'll come back we'll come back to that as well when I think about that Vince I have to go to you I kind of would like you to tell people about foundations of bioethics bingo to give people a sense that we take our work very seriously but we also we also have good fun and have community but um but maybe there's a way of tying that I really really love to hear now that you're at least ankle deep in your position how you're learning in your capstone and what you looked at you're integrating into your work your work as about well thank you very much that my capstone mentor was dr lisa moses fantastic individual and just so knowledgeable the capstone project that I focused on was looking at the inclusion of chaplains on health health care ethics committees and consultation committees oddly enough exactly what I was going to be doing so I would say the capstone project that I worked on directly applied and with dr moses's help and also the other individuals in our capstone seminar we crafted a I crafted a pilot study they helped tighten the questions a little bit and then being able to access the individuals that are part of the Harvard hospital groups that we were able to survey the ethics committee members in those facilities to get their feedback on their impressions of chaplains on health care ethics committees so taking that pilot study dr moses is still encouraging me to take this to a full blown study and publish the results because we thought they were very interesting and they are it's just I really don't have as much time to focus on this as I did about a year ago so it's while it's one of those backplate burner ideas we're not making a whole lot of forward progress at this point but hopefully we'll be able to do that and speaking of community with our capstone seminar the five of us that were mentied by dr moses we're still getting together about once every two months through the wonders of zoom as we are all over the world because I'm out in Washington DC me oak is back I believe in Singapore and menias in Switzerland and I think her shawley I don't know exactly where she is in the world but none of us are connected you know geographically anymore but we still have this opportunity to get together dr moses has still been instrumental in setting that up and finding times that work for all of us so it has it has been fantastic and as dr brendel did mention a bioethics bingo buzzword bingo she had never heard of this and neither had dr berry so there was one of the last classroom presentations that they led in foundations too and it was a it was a very aggressive match of buzzword bingo waiting for the instructors to say key words that they had said throughout the entire term and it was very competitive amongst us in the classroom that was listening to this so if you've never seen this it was quite the scene but it was it was a fantastic experience over thanks thanks vince and so um uh we have so many questions now coming in um into the the panel so lianna i'm going to give you a chance to jump in on on the culture question because you um uh you had the experiences of student and now you've come back on uh in a leadership role in clinical ethics in the center and maybe you could give us the perspective um on on both sides of that of what the center is like and what it's like to be part of the bioethics community at harvard medical school sure um i think this has been touched on a bit by most of the panelists but overall the culture at the medical school and the program in general has just been really welcoming um like kayla said you know well i will say coming in as a nurse i was a little worried a little little um nerve wrecked i guess because you know i felt out of place i i definitely had imposter syndrome that was all just my issue had nothing to do with hms or the program it was just something that i struggled with and i i believe the only reason why i got over that was because of the culture and the the welcoming nature and the inclusivity of everybody in the program um you know i also felt like what i brought to the table and and the value that i added to to my class was very um was really appreciated and they they just really valued my hands-on um life and work experience since many of them you know they they have never worked in healthcare they've never taken care of patients they are half my age you know so they don't don't have that lived experience um but i i really feel and even coming back in as a as faculty member still very inclusive it's like a bunch of friends truly we just chat and where we throw ideas out there and we bounce ideas off of each other and the the dialogue that we have is is really wonderful and um just enlightening and i feel like just having these relationship with everybody has it it makes me think more and it makes me just value um this community tremendously so thanks so far thanks so much so we we just have a um a few minutes to answer some more questions from the chat we've actually covered aspects of many of them one of the things we haven't really talked about is electives and how how people picked elective courses and what their favorite course was so maybe we could do a little bit of a lightning round um what was either you know some question about how you picked an elective what you thought was most valuable the thing you were most surprised by um and and um and or any class you uh wish you had taken that you perhaps didn't consider um any one of those questions but maybe we could get a i'll go in the order of my screen but maybe we could um get some insight for applicants about all the opportunities in electives so let me go ahead and we'll go backwards now Leanne we'll start with you so as you can imagine i heavily um leaned towards the clinical ethics related classes and tried to stay away from the the non-clinical ethics classes because i was scared you know i'll just be honest it was it it was all foreign to me and i was i was worried i wanted to kind of take the easiest route first but i will say the one non-clinical ethics course that i took that i thought was incredible and surprised me that i thought this was incredible was health law and policy um i thought i was going to take the course and learn have to learn all about um taste law and things that i knew nothing about and i learned a ton but it was so interesting and the way that it was taught um was really um applicable and great so recommend that great um vince your take on electives there were a lot to choose from that my favorite one that i enjoyed was narrative ethics uh that was fantastic because i enjoy stories and that was wonderful and it certainly opened up a greater understanding of of individuals ethical issues but i wish i would take more on clinical ethics they were there but you know schedules just didn't allow that because of all the other classes that were required it didn't line up as well as i would have liked and because i'm extremely shallow and it was harvard i took an elective over at the divinity school because um i've always wanted to go there so i took one that looked at it had to do more with environmental ethics and catastrophe and the marginalization of vulnerable populations in parts of the world that are destroyed by catastrophic events over all right um cocky your favorite elective or the thing you or your fomo elective the one you you were uh upset you missed out on uh yes so i as you can imagine i lean towards the public health um elective so i took global health by ethics and i really really enjoyed that and um one course that i do wish i had taken was newer ethics um and um and another thing too i want to highlight is that i also cross-registered um so one thing about being in the um mv program is that you can cross register across any school at harvard and i think even mit and tufts and so i took a class at the business school actually that was surprising and very interesting and um it also gave me the opportunity to meet other students across across campus and um just build relationships so i would highly recommend looking at courses in other schools as well but the program has really a really nice selection of elective of electives in different disciplines that i think are really valuable to look into great um hajan your experience with electives i think my favorite elective was writing course uh with dr montello and i think it was several of us taking classes was like tiny class and sometimes we met at a student's house or other times like we met on zoom and we are working on like um like on the topic of our interest and giving some feedback and it was like really nice group like great mentor so i think that was the the probably best experience in elective and i wish i could take the class about like religion culture i think there was a class but i had a time conflict so i was not able to take it but i'm like teaching those materials now great um and uh kala do you want to ram this out yeah absolutely my two favorites were definitely ethics and reproductive medicine and also health and human rights i do wish i had taken narrative ethics because i find that i do a lot of sitting with patients and families at the bed side and i think the skills of knowing how to sort of understand how someone's life story their own narrative affects everything that they're facing in the hospital would be really helpful so definitely if i could go back i would take narrative ethics as well great um so we are coming towards the end of our time together believe it or not i feel like we're just getting started and i'm even learning new things about each of you and about about the program as much time as we've spent together so i really want to thank you for uh being here sharing your experience and passing it forward to the next generations of mbe students um before we move i turn this back over to jesse i want to acknowledge the other members of the education team who make the program possible um each and every day day in and day out um and are if not uh on in the front of the scene always behind the scenes so our associate director of education pristol chang uh sam pickin um uh our specialist in education helsey barry co director of the master's program and associate faculty director of the mbe um in addition to jesse wanted to make sure that um as everything good that happens in bioethics this is a a major team effort and with that let me hand it back to jesse to bring us to a close of our panel with again my gratitude to uh alumni slash new colleagues in the field of bioethics in our growing community jesse well thank you very much dr brindle and thank you to the panelists that was wonderful i do just want to round us off here quickly looking at the deadline and some of what we're asking for your application it does seem that many of you have already applied um that's wonderful but hopefully some of you are here and you have now been convinced and this is something that you really would like to do so march 15th is our next deadline that is exactly a month away from today um our online applications they can assist of you having to submit your cv a statement of purpose and three letters of recommendation as well as your transcripts from all of the institutions that you have attended there is a hundred dollar application fee um and all of your test scores that you might have had like your g re or your m cat those are completely optional okay so upload them if you want like if you have a test score but it is now expired you don't have to worry about it if you are an international applicant and you did not study somewhere where the language of instruction was english you will have to submit a language proficiency exam score if you're worried about this being last minute the duolingo proficiency test that takes very little time and you'll also get your scores back very very quickly okay so for more information we do have a center youtube channel on this we have our other general information sessions we also have a student panel experience where we heard from current students about the things that they've done this year and a lot of people really enjoyed that that's on our youtube channel there's also over the years we've put on events and there's a range of topics and a range of lectures that you might be interested in and that could really give you a good idea for some of the stuff that the center does here so before we end it thank you everybody we did answer a lot of questions in the q&a we typed these out so please just take a last couple of seconds to look through that we tried to get to everything and some of the questions that were also typed out i you know i can let me speak to those now so everybody can hear them if you applied january 15th to that first deadline we we usually look to have decisions out four to six weeks later so we're looking at early march and for the march 15th deadline decisions will be that same timeline four to six weeks from march 15th okay our admission standards are the same regardless of if you apply to study in person or virtually and and then there's also a question regarding when do we start the capstone so if you're studying full time that's going to take right you're going to do that pretty much right at the beginning all along with your courses throughout the year if you're studying part time over two years the bulk of what you're doing with your capstone happens in the second year if you're not located on eastern time the foundations classes if you're taking this for the part time online foundations classes and our core classes are usually seven to nine p.m eastern time okay and then the electives are about the same time but they can start sometimes at four o'clock so i hope you all have enjoyed this session thank you so much for attending thank you so much to our panelists and our wonderful alumni for joining thank you to crystal and sam our program staff and thank you to dr brindale for moderating today i hope you all have a lovely day goodbye everybody