 Okay. Good morning and good afternoon. I know many of you are from different parts of the world, but we welcome everyone who has joined us today for our alumni panel for the Harvard Medical School Master of Science and Bioethics program. My name is Joni Bishansky and I am an Associate Faculty Director of the Bioethics Master's Program and Co-Director of the Capstone Experience. I am joined today by several members of our dedicated education team to make this webinar happen and to answer all of your questions. Sam Pitkin is our Education Program Administrator who's joining us along with Crystal Chang, the Associate Director of Education at the Center, and Jesse Tucker, the Education Recruitment Administrator, who many of you have been in touch with regularly as you have been applying to the program. We're in the process of admissions for our 10th entering class and there has been so much accomplished during the past decade of the Harvard Medical School Master of Science and Bioethics program. We are delighted that our community continues to grow and we think that the best way we can tell you about the program and its incredible value is by hearing directly from graduates of the program and today you will hear from three esteemed alumni, each with a unique story of what brought them to the program and what they have been doing since finishing their bioethics degree. Our plan is to spend about 40 minutes hearing from our panelists during which time many of the questions you have will be addressed by them. If you do have other questions please type them into the Q&A box and the Education Team will answer them along the way. At the end of our panel discussion we will present some specifics about the graduate program and if time allows we will answer some additional questions. So let's begin. I'm joined today by Christina Larson, Amy Marcus and Unini Odama. Christina perhaps you can start by introducing yourself and tell us what first got you interested in bioethics or maybe what made you want to pursue a master's degree and why you actually chose Harvard Medical School. Great well thank you Joni and thank you all for inviting me here today. It's wonderful to be with you and hello to everybody around the world. I am Christina Larson and I graduated from the program in 2022. I've always been interested in the dynamic relationship between science medicine and society. I have an undergraduate degree in the history of science and a graduate degree in law and I love that bioethics brings together so many disciplines and affects all of us and I wanted to pursue a master's degree in the field of bioethics largely because I have had previous experience teaching university students courses related to history of medicine and I loved being an educator but I had taken a certain amount of time off to raise my three children and I felt like returning to school was really an important next step to reactivate my career and so I enrolled in the bioethics program because it's you know covers all the areas that I love and I hoped it would give me the pathway to pursue you know work in in education which it has been great. Thanks Christina. Amy you want to answer that same question. Sure hi everyone I'm Amy Marcus I was part of the first class and I went part-time so I ended up graduating in 2017. I was part-time because I continued to work during my studies and I am a health and science reporter at the Wall Street Journal. I went because I wanted to deepen my knowledge of an area that I think is so crucial to understanding modern medicine and to I guess allow me to improve myself as a reporter so I could ask better questions and frame my understanding of what's happening in medicine in novel ways and I felt like the program did help me achieve those goals. Thanks Amy. Bonini what first got you interested in bioethics and why did you pick Harvard Medical School? Very good question Joanie thank you so much for asking and good morning good afternoon to everybody. I'm delighted to be here to share my passion about bioethics which really started way back when I was young. I always saw my parents treat people with so much dignity and it regardless of where they came from and regardless what their their status and life was it was always this idea of dignity and that kind of started my passion for wanting to to understand of course I was a child and I did not know then I went into the space of healthcare I'm a physician by training I'm a nephrologist and I started to see that there were very different outcomes in my patients and I wanted to understand that a little bit more and so I decided to go into public health went into public health and my favorite semester was when I was doing a class on bioethics but it was such just the tip of the iceberg and I always said to myself if I ever had the opportunity to go back to school I would go for bioethics but I was a full-time mom I was a full-time nephrologist in my practice and I just could not take that chunk of time off so I decided to just look at all the programs the the main programs I was looking at and look looking at their curriculum to see what they offered different bioethics programs have different emphasis and focus and when I signed on to the newsletter for the Center for Bioethics long before I joined and just waiting for the opportunity to to arise and when they opened it up for a virtual part-time I jumped at it and I said this is the time and the curriculum matched exactly the questions I had in my mind and I was looking for answers ways to be able to frame things like allocation distribution and why some patients had different outcomes from others and just healthcare delivery and what health really meant and so this really started me on the quest and I was just delighted when I was accepted and I came in and I have not been the same since then so thank you that's great thank you all for introducing yourselves and and laying the foundation for what it is that brought you to the program and certainly busy lives is something that needs to be addressed and it's hard sometimes to go back to school certainly but you all managed to do that and that's really in essence this panel today that we hope we can convey that to many of the people that are joining us from all over the place to hear how you actually integrate this into the rest of your lives and what it actually can do for you so Amy you started to mention some of the work you've done but what are the other things you've actually done in your career that you wouldn't have been able to possibly do without this MBE one of the things that I wanted to accomplish and and one of the reasons I decided to go back to school in the middle of everything is I had been closely writing about more a phenomenon that I started to notice of patients becoming more active in the in their own treatment and in their own pursuit of drugs and demanding to be closer collaborators with doctors and researchers and clinicians and when I interviewed them I sensed that they were trying to do something that was different than the accepted norms and the traditions that guided medicine but I didn't have enough background to really articulate sharply what it was that they were doing that was so novel I think that you know I wanted to go back to school so I could get the academic foundation to understand what is it that all these patients I'm observing in the real world are resisting are trying to change I and that is what I focused on through the two years I chose classes that would allow me to do the research I focused on this topic in my capstone I sought out faculty advisors who could help me frame questions and find the sources and opportunities to study this question I don't think I would have understood things as clearly and as fully without an academic background to do it it really helped in understanding and putting into focus what I was observing from my own real life reporting yeah no as a certainly as a journalist and an author it sounds like it really gave you the foundation that you were looking for so Amy I know you have a book out how did it actually help inform some of the work in the latest book that you wrote well it was it was huge I mean first of all some of the short essays that I wrote in class served as the springboard for ideas for chapters the scoping and the literature that I read helped me shape some of the introduction and then I did even end up in one of the chapters of the book talking about class like I I took narrative bioethics I mean I think it's not a surprise that someone who is a writer would gravitate towards narrative bioethics as a frame for understanding the world and I ended up putting in one of the chapters my whole experience in that class so the class even became a character in the book I love that and narrative ethics is a favorite of many and I know why because the faculty leader of that course is just an incredible individual and that's nice of you to share so thank you for that Christina what about your teaching research how has bioethics really informed your understanding of the role that you've now taken on and how did it set you up as a success for some of the things you're doing oh my gosh in so many ways but before I tell you about that I want to second the narrative ethics class that was an amazing class I took that to loved it I loved all my classes in in the program and I didn't come to the program with a background in science or medicine so for me this was really interesting to have the chance to interact with many many professionals who had work experience in areas different than my own that said one of the things that was really important to me was public engagement and how do we communicate the kinds of things that we're thinking about as science is affecting society and all of us and how do we together decide what we want our world to look like and that sort of deliberative process how do we go about conducting that was really important to me and so the capstone project that I did was focused on clinical trials of stem cell transplants for Parkinson's disease and a big piece of that was public engagement so trying to figure out how the researchers who are developing these trials and these studies are communicating with not only the patient groups but the caregivers and working together to make sure that we're answering the questions and structuring things that are in ways that are beneficial for for everyone involved and actually what grew out of that experience was the opportunity now I'm actually an advisor group of scientists so sorry there's my dog a group of scientists who are based out of the University of Rochester and they're currently seeking FDA approval research study on AI based Parkinson's disease this detection device that they've created so that's been something that specifically came from the work that I did on my capstone research I'm also exploring in a more broad way how we can use visual art in public spaces to engage audiences in the kinds of deliberations and conversations we want to have about new technology within society so and then to circle back to career I'm really fortunate that I've actually been given the opportunity to work with the Center for Bioethics I'm a capstone leader so I get to see the process from the other side and I've done this now this is my second year I'm blown away by the remarkable work that all of the students bring to this program and it really is an exceptional an exceptional thing that we get to do through the capstone it's one of the reasons I was drawn to the program at Harvard Medical School and I also am a teaching fellow for the foundations course so I've really been able to fulfill my goal of getting back into the world of an educator yeah your career has just grown immensely I think and and thanks for mentioning that you didn't come with a science background and I think that's an important statement for everyone to realize that not everyone does come with a science background and that's okay that's what brings such depth and into the program overall and when you get to share with individuals coming from a strictly science background and those that don't it makes things very rich and interesting so thanks for mentioning that and we'll probably ask a few more questions to everyone else at the end about capstone because I'm sure the audience has some interest in hearing a few more details about that uh Unini um you touched upon you know certainly you are a nephrologist um and what about the relationship between bioethics and health justice um you know how has it really enhanced your role as a nephrologist thank you for asking Joanie um so I came in at the time of COVID and at that time we had a lot of issues with resource allocation I mentioned it previously who gets dialysis who gets this scarce resource and I did not have um the framework to be able to really decide was I making the right decision and and on what basis was that so that really bothered me and and so coming into the program I was really seeking to understand the foundations we call the foundation about ethics well it really gave me a good foundation framework to be able to look at our our patients as persons so moving from physician-centered to person-centered care well that took understanding all the faces of injustice and what justice looked like and I was so so so pleased with the foundation courses that we took because it really gave us the opportunity to just really unveil all the perspectives of what justice looks like and what it could look like and it gave me a deeper understanding when um approaching my patients and and really switched my the whole paradigm to person-centered as opposed to me centered or other centered and so um at that point also I also switched from pure clinical nephrology and I started to work for a large kidney care organization and I was the physician lead for health equity okay so health equity the basis of health equity of course about ethical consideration so as I was learning at school I was immediately able to apply at work what was you know the expectations and able to help advocate for the patients that we don't see to be a voice and to really unveil you know whether we were talking about policy I drew from my health policy classes whether we were talking about patient care I drew from what I was learning whether we were seeking to put together a practice at work well I was able to understand that there were faces and voices that probably were not at the table and who should be included so all the while I was learning I was applying immediately in the work that I was doing and at the end of the of my two years I also was in the part-time virtual program because of work I I focused all my attention on kidney health and what kidney health justice looked like because kidney health is one of the kidney disease one of the diseases that have the greatest disparities whether it's in risk factors whether it's in the kind of dialysis whether it's in transplant so you could really really you had you know the platform to dig deep into disparities and and justice and I began to see justice not just as social justice as I understood it before but as health justice you know and what it all all the things that really went into into health you know as a whole and I was able to work on that as my capstone and unveil unveil unveil was what I pretty much did and then I was able to create a framework for what kidney health justice could look like looking at all the parameters and all the stakeholders and where we needed to insert bioethical principles you know the principle whether it was dignity we were looking at or whether it was you know collective action taken together where autonomy came in place and where other things you know a broad view of justice came in into place and after my capstone I was able to present that at our professional organization the American Society of Nephrology and that was accepted and the work that I still do is hinged in here like I said my life changed forever because my trajectory just really became this bioethical framework the lens that I look at things now are very different it's patient centered we've been able to do a lot of work really interviewing patients focusing on patients what is their perspective and our last recent work was published in the new england journal of medicine and recently actually today they highlighted that there was one of the spotlights as patient centered kidney care delivery and so it continues to inform what I do and also I was given the opportunity also to to remain as part of the teaching faculty and I was able to be a teaching fellow in global health ethics this last fall it was just a blast and wonderful and while doing that I was also able to put that into practice so it's all this you know I learn put in practice it's not like you learn and you store away in a backpack you're able to apply it every day and not just in global spheres where I've been doing some global health work but also at home my kids are always like oh my goodness do we need to push that fat man off the hill please don't ask us that question and I incorporated in everything and they are becoming many um bioethicists themselves so that's how I've used it thank you you bring up several points um as to Christina as well and Amy um one of the things is since you don't have to wait till the end of the program to incorporate what it is you learn you incorporate it all along the path um I always like to tell students too that you don't have to wait until you graduate in order to pursue a new career or request some promotion or engage in new activities and that's something that's individuals don't always realize so it's great to hear you say how you've incorporated it right from the get-go and it continues to serve you as you grow and congratulations on the New England Journal um article it's uh not an easy task to um to get to and maybe that's something we can share with um individuals I'm sure you'll see it in our newsletter as well in the future we we certainly like to um brag about our alumni and the other thing too that um you mentioned are ways in which you have engaged with the center with teaching as teaching fellows um as leading a seminar in capstone and those are the other opportunities that come from this that stay connected with us and one of the things that we're looking forward to is really building our alumni and we have quite a few um alumni now which is great and we look forward to you know more students joining us and becoming alumni and it really is enriches the overall program and by bringing you all back into the fold and inviting you here today is one of the ways we get to showcase what you've done and um our value that we see in you so um I can't help but thank you at this point and I'll thank you at the end as well but you know it's really um wonderful to hear your hear your stories so let's um sort of explore a little bit more of um mentioning um the part-time nature of the program um how was it working and taking the program part-time or how did you manage your time um and what are some of the things you wish you knew before studying part-time um Amy I'm not sure did you do the program full-time or part-time I did the program part-time there okay so everyone did yeah there was no virtual option at the time that I did it um you know we had to go in um I I'm sure that having sort of either a combination or access to the virtual option does give people more access now but at the time um we had to we only had one choice be there right right and um what about you're incorporating it into your work as far as juggling time management yeah I mean I'm a working reporter and deadlines arise at very unusual moments and many of my professors and colleagues in my classes would see me get a call in class and have to run outside and take a call and deal with things um I did try to arrange to you know for classes at certain hours colleagues would cover for me if I had if I was running a little bit late I often you know I spend my day writing and reading that is my actual job too so I ended up doing a lot of my homework for class late at night and um at the time my youngest child was still living at home and finishing um high school and the two of us would commiserate about our incredible workloads but it was fine um I mean you know I think that everyone on this call and I'm sure people in the audience too juggle many different things at the same time and I don't want to sort of sugarcoat it and say that it was easy because it wasn't it was complicated and required a lot of um changes and and contributions from family members and colleagues to help with the time management but having said that I feel that it was enriched it was so enriching and such a worthwhile experience both from the people that I met and from the ideas that um I was exposed to I felt that it made me not only a better reporter but a better person so I don't think I think it is complicated um and it's great if you have like some help you know from the network of colleagues and friends but it's you can do it if you know if if it's becomes your goal there and I found that the professors and like I said students my fellow students and colleagues were helpful in helping me get to the end of the program successfully thank you and um we know that um juggling home life work family school can be a challenge and everyone was challenged with that certainly during the pandemic and what the pandemic allowed us to do was to actually create a virtual program and so we have a part-time virtual program and then a full-time in-person program now and that has really lent itself I think to the program's growth and one of the things this is that we're now um not quite there yet for our deadline for our virtual part-time program but that will be upon us soon and um I know we'll talk about that a little bit later but Cristina what about you and um how you managed sure so uh I actually did the program during the the longest duration of lockdown that we had so I was home with all my three kids at home as well as my husband and everyone was juggling and trying to get quiet time and computer time um but there was really a silver lining and that is that um for me this was a very social opportunity obviously it was very hard academically and a lot of work but I met so many people through being part of this program virtually and I think at the beginning I was not sure how that would go being online and being in classrooms and I have to say the program did an amazing job of just shifting everything into the virtual world and in many ways I feel like I developed really really strong close relationships maybe more so because you know we we were working with each other and could connect with each other whenever we needed to we could zoom we had study groups together um the faculty was always accessible so in a weird way that was a very social time in my life as well despite that it was locked down but it was it was a demanding amount of work and I enjoyed it but there were many late nights and I think that going into the program it's really important to recognize the demands that are going to be on your time and be fair to yourself too you know that some things might have to give a little bit um obviously we all try to plan and we try to manage um but it it was a lot and it was very triumphant to get the degree at the end and feel like it had been accomplished but uh I think what I take most of all from it is that it's really does create a community um and many of the people who were colleagues in the program with me Unini being one of them we keep the network up and those connections are very valuable as we um find opportunities for ourselves you know post graduation um and it's professional as well as social yeah thanks Christina Unini you want to add any other thing to what Christina and Amy have said I conquer and I agree you know completely with Christina and Amy and um I I think what really helped me was because I wanted this so bad you know I wanted to learn so bad and I enjoyed every single class so the pain was kind of you know soothed by my desire to just you know suck everything in and that really helped it but yes that there was a good amount of work my my days were very scheduled you know so this is any time for work except when I was on call then of course you know everything went out of the the door but evenings very precious evenings um your your family has to be really bought into it because I think that really helped the kids the kids knew at least after a while they knew I was in school um and my my husband knew and so gave me that you know freedom and time and respected that time and my weekends also I really really put in a lot of time a lot of my work I used my weekends and and so for yeah for two years but again the friendships that you make Christina you said so I mean it's just you know I now I can just if I need anything I know somebody who who who has a niche in that area in that discipline you just get to know work with people you know journalists and lawyers and and and people clergy and and just you know just people that I would never have really come across with so it was very fulfilling it was good work and good work is always hard work and I would do it again so yeah that's great um you know it is it is juggling but it's making that commitment and it's the time commitment and Amy as you said you read and write for living and in so many ways reading and writing is is a huge part of this program and I just like to remind everyone of that so let's shift a little um I know a little bit was mentioned about capstone um Christina um the capstone project certainly sounds like it's been moving forward somewhat or has led to other things um but can you comment any further on how it actually worked as that mechanism to change or influence um what you're doing now sure um I can as I mentioned I came to the program without a science background but just a really strong interest in uh the intersection between a lot of the fields medicine the history the so you know sociological effects and um one of the things that's permeates all of that is how do people make decisions and what do fair decisions look like and so for me that piece of public engagement how can we fold in all the stakeholders and create um a conversation in a dialogue about what we want our society to be like was really important but beyond that I didn't actually know what I wanted to dig into and I was matched with my um my mentor from my capstone who's a remarkable person in Suhyun he works part-time teaching but he's got a really big job at the museum of science in Boston and he understood this field of stem cell brain transplants and I had the opportunity to speak with four of the leading researchers in the worlds one-on-one conversations to learn all about not only the science and the goals that they had medically but also how they communicate out the work that they're doing how they hear back from the patient populations about their needs um so that was actually really eye-opening for me and as I mentioned earlier now I'm advising for this particular device that's being developed and the the trials that are going on with that so it definitely opened those doors for me and it's an area that I continue to explore and Amy you know you talked about how narrative ethics ended up in so much for your writing what what about your capstone project and how that actually influenced some of the things you've done since yeah my capstone project focused on what became the subject of the book which is new models of collaboration between patients doctors clinicians and researchers in particular I was curious about sort of the ethical questions that arise when people try to collaborate as equals because I I think so often in the traditional literature including the literature I read often during my class um in my studies you know there is this assumption that the doctor is going to lead the way or that the scientist knows more and certainly they obviously know more about certain things and they bring a level of rigor and training that um a patient may not but what I focused on in the capstone was how can how can people develop their own expertise and how can lived experience be considered central to understanding science and how can scientists who don't have traditional backgrounds and are patient driven and immersed in what it's like to live with the disease how can their science be recognized by the broader official science movement I found that um you know I found that through the capstone I experienced some of the same issues that patients do um because I'm not a scientist myself and yet I was I was articulating a new vision my advisor was Effie Vianna who had taught also at the medical school and now and now is a she's a professor at ETH in Zurich and we worked closely together on trying to construct ways to elicit information from both communities also to think about ways that patients could collect their information that it would be recognized by the scientific establishment and then also ways to kind of get the story out there and um you know I found the whole capstone experience to be really like exciting because I got to present at Harvard Medical School you know the lived experiences of patients and to really I mean many of the people in my classes were future doctors or practicing doctors nurses scientists social workers people that were inside the official system and um so I found all of that incredibly helpful and a lot of the data that I gathered during that capstone did become information that I relied on when I sat down to write the book and then in a full circle moment after the book came out Effie invited me to come to Zurich to her university and to give a presentation to her students and to the wider community in Zurich about the findings and so not only was it an honor to be able to present you know the book and the research but to be able to sort of credit Effie um as someone who helped me think rigorously about my own questions and therefore to um to you know enable me to reach audiences that may not have listened to these patient stories before yeah what wonderful accomplishment really congratulations and I think I need to read your book um so and perhaps everyone on this panel um if you haven't read it yet um I'll plug this and um again make sure that we highlight that further as well um Nene what else do you can think of related to your capstone you mentioned you know sort of some things but um can you maybe talk a little bit more about your mentor and how that worked out for you I had a great mentor Katie uh Peeler and um she came from like a human rights background which was not something I was really um used to you know just healthcare delivery just very narrow minded you know in that and and so initially at the parent I was like why would they pair me with a pediatrician and a human rights expert I'm a nephrologist adult medicine you know but there was uh there was a method I mean and it worked fantastically because what she did was she brought in my view and she made me think beyond the scope I was thinking and she pretty much made sure that she made me uncomfortable where I wanted to be because I just wanted to be at the comfort level and she's like no no no no this work is a work of advocacy and so she planted that the seeds of advocacy uh in me and and showed me that about ethics was more than just just words you know just learnings and just leaving it within the academic walls no no no that there was a bigger role that ballot ethicist could play in advocacy so that really really again it helped me to make a switch and to know that um one has to commit to the work and and be filled with courage to be able to take that work the next step so you know like ideas of you need to you need to send this to your um your your your professional society I never thought about that before just like they need to hear about the ethical considerations of this think about the journals that you could um you know you could and she said try for the best and go for go for it I mean she was just such a great cheerleader and she really really helped me with that courage to be able to move beyond the comfort zone and um also to look at all the work that that that I learned about as a continuum and as a step to the next level and not to settle for it so the work that I do currently also I have um opportunity to work with advocacy and policy makers and of course I bring all this about the cool background and the framework and and the way to be able to approach it and advocate for my patients and bring to the table you know whether it's a politician I'm speaking with a legislator or whomever but to find that common ground and be able to listen and understand their own perspectives but still have a common goal so about ethics really really is to me is a foundation of every everyone should have this foundation because from there you can uh really really jump off and Amy said something about assignments and homework one thing that I also did was I focused a lot on health and kidney health in particular and I've been able to use some of those assignments and some of those essays you know as luncheon pads for manuscripts that I have submitted you know for example we were doing in clinical ethics we talked about decision making and I use I wrote a paper on decision making in end stage renal disease you know I was able to present I was able to submit that at the international society of nephrology and that's going to be presented soon and then in the narrative class I heard everyone talk about narrative again listening and learning about narrative ethics again opened up my my eyes to many things and I've been able to take all those learnings and and suggest a proposal for how do we listen well that all came from narrative ethics I would not have thought about that before and you know took some of those learnings took some of the essays I wrote put it together in a proposal and it's going to be presented at the world congress of bioethics in June so it's just it just keeps given bioethics is this gift that just keeps given and it's given a lot and I hope to be able to use it again not to store it but to use it to continue to move health justice forward it's nice thank you for thank you for sharing that thank you all for sharing just to ask openly has anyone any other classes that you want to highlight um any one of you I'll just let you jump in I know we've talked about narrative ethics certainly clinical ethics research ethics and such any other particular course anyone wants to say was one of their favorites and why global health for me very again because health is is global you know and we do a lot of work transnational work and we have a lot of gaps and opportunities to include bioethic ethical considerations or more of bioethical considerations in in what we do and so for me that has been a very big and it was one of my favorite classes as well as course foundations everything builds off foundations you can't do anything without foundations about ethics so but just great Dr. Sadeff was just an amazing professor and I went back selfishly and I requested that class because I really wasn't done learning I wanted to learn more even though I was a teaching fellow but it was a very also self-interest decision to go into about to go and learn more about global health ethics I loved it and of course health policy was also great that's great Christina anything you want to add or yeah I I took an AI ethics class with Professor Shen that was amazing really looking at some of the issues that have not yet been well debated and and how to go about regulating in this field that's emerging and that was really really interesting and I also enjoyed a course with Michelle Goodwin which was specialized topics in bioethics and that looked a lot at pivotal cases cases and how the public response to the legal system and the kinds of work that it does in terms of deciding really important things whether or not we should permit someone euthanasia or other things that have become sort of these paradigms for our field and whether we want to move away and of course this year with abortion having been you know in the news so much and and where we've gone it's interesting to look at the trajectory and to think about how do we as a society shift and change bring new ideas to the fore and respond to new developments and so I think that was also really important but one of the things Joni that I just wanted to step on to what Unini was talking about which is if you have a desire to do something the faculty is incredibly supportive of helping you realize that and so it just takes putting out your ideas and trying to find ways and people will support you to do that and I think that's really important because bioethics is still emerging and the kinds of careers and jobs and opportunities that we may have coming out of this program there's not a direct path there's not something that says you have a law degree then you go practice law what does it mean to practice bioethics it can mean whatever it is that we want it to mean and we have to reach out and do it and so I had incredible support from people along the way in fact one of my professors who's still teaching research ethics she was fascinating and invited me to collaborate with her on research and then I ultimately became the first author on a paper that looked at data sharing during COVID which was so current so important it was really phenomenal work and I think that it's sort of that if you build it they will come you have to make it yourself you have to carve your own path and everybody in the bioethics program is cheering for you and finding ways to help you achieve that so that's really really wonderful about the program and I think it's important for people to realize that you can make your own path out of this thank you Christina it's the network that you develop as you all mentioned network with the your students with your peers but network with your faculty certainly Amy want to just make any final comment yeah I know I loved health policy also and but I also one of the things that took me by surprise also is taking a class called methods a little bit more outside my comfort zone where we examined how people construct scientific studies and how how to read a paper how to analyze the data that's in a paper not only is that extremely useful for me just because I read a lot of scientific studies but it reinforced my sort of belief that ethics and science should belong to all of us it should not be something that's only confined in an academic setting or or sort of a you know that the the sort of establishment it doesn't just belong to the doctors and the scientists it really should be out in the public I felt like after that class that I thought everyone in like in high school science should take a methods class because what it made me recognize is that we're taught so much that scientific data is neutral and objective but it actually isn't it depends so much on who is enrolled in a study how the data is collected how the information is presented what's you know and whether it's reliable or not and you can you you're sort of instructed to depend on peer review to ensure that it's reliable but what I learned so much from this class is only we can ensure that it's reliable that we have to train ourselves to become better readers better examiners of the information that's being presented to us and this class gave me the tools to do that and you know I a few people not Nene who obviously has a science background but a few people me and Christina have said we didn't come from that background but I if you don't I feel like you can become empowered to to feel that you can understand things and that you can critique the information you're getting and I feel like that's not just good for your professional life it's good for for all of your life all aspects of your life to understand data and how to criticize it well thank you for that comment um I'm actually a clinical research scientist and data are incredibly important especially in this new wave of artificial intelligence and where we're headed with that and that's going to be something that we all deal with and also so many of the students now I think there's at least six of them interested in their capstone and they're working in artificial intelligence with data and concerns with that so thank you for raising that point I want to thank you the panelists for sharing your journey and more specifically your career trajectories it's incredibly helpful and I let us go on a little bit longer because you have so much to share and I just want to congratulate you all on everything you've done since the program and continue to do with the program we are truly grateful that you're able to join us today but truly grateful that you'll continue to be a part of the Center for Bioethics so thank you all for being here with us and now I'm going to turn this over to Jesse Tucker who will share some slides and follow up with some details about applying to the program I know that there's many of you who have put questions and answers into the Q&A box and we've been answering them along the way and so Jesse I'll let you take it from here Thanks Joni let me start sharing the presentation okay everybody can we see the screen all right well thanks Joni for passing it on and thank you panelists that was a really great discussion I think that we just had and I hope that it was really useful to hear some of that for all of you so currently actually in the program we have 122 students and that's between our online class and our in-person class and over the nine years of doing this actually we have students and alumni that have come from 27 countries you know today you've heard from three of our alumni from different backgrounds but of course you know when you're in the classroom there's going to be people who work in psychology in social work in policy setting and and so many more so it's a really varied class with varied students and it provides an awesome experience in the classroom so the deadline for part-time virtual study is March 1st and so right that's about three weeks left so you know we wanted to highlight that we have this option and many of our alumni did this part-time online so you know if you kind of focus on the right hand side of the screen here that's what makes up our curriculum and so as a part-time online student you'll take both of the foundations courses in your first year right one each semester in your core classes you can kind of separate out more through the two years and then through your electives and your capstone experience this kind of gives you the ability to shape the program as you'd like we offer a lot of electives both in the fall and the spring but we also give you the chance to cross-register into any graduate level course almost any graduate level course at Harvard and you know your capstone experience we call it an experience because it doesn't just have to be you know literature review you can really make it what you want and shape it to you know your career or maybe what you want to make your career and that consists of a seminar course in your mentored experience and in the part-time program you're going to focus on your capstone for the most part in your second year now all classes are live and online and these for the most part happen once a week though some classes are bi-weekly for a shorter amount of time most classes are also in the late afternoon or evening classes for eastern standard time and the HMS academic year falls between September and May so again March 1st is the deadline there's a couple of weeks it's an online application process entirely so from any institutions that you mentioned in your application you will need to submit unofficial transcripts for this this can be a really clear image more preferably a PDF and it should list you know all the courses you've taken and all the grades received for those courses other than the transcripts you'll need an updated CV a statement of purpose and three letters of recommendation if you're an international student and you went to school where the language of instruction was not English that's the only instance where you will have to provide a test score okay but other than that test scores are optional and just some admissions tips here you know your your statement of purpose should kind of really follow these four questions and be between 500 to 750 words but it should be a thoughtful narrative of why you want to study bioethics why it's important to you and why at Harvard and so if you're interested in applying start your conversations with those three recommenders you know right now get to that today okay because there's about three weeks left and it's always good to give people some time this is what the tuition and fees look like currently for this year so if you're going to apply and you know matriculate in the fall you can expect that there might be around a two percent uh raised to these numbers that you're seeing now some people do have questions if you've looked at the cost of attendance page that's on the website it does mention um cost of living of course as an online student you don't need to take that into account for the total amount you would pay to hms okay and right there if you have your own health insurance that's great and you can waive that fee and i know that we got some questions as well um in the qa about financial aid there's no direct funding through the center for bioethics but of course there is um graduate plus loans uh for us citizens and but there are also resources through hms itself and that consists of the dean's scholarship which we encourage everyone to apply to if you need some financial help paying for the program and that's a 15 percent reduction in tuition so information about the dean's scholarship if you're interested in applying probably just came out um a few weeks ago and people are notified i think sometime uh in may now um you also encourage everyone to there's a resource called the committee on general scholarships and you know we'll send out a follow-up to all the pamp the participants who are here today with some helpful links and so i can uh send that along so uh what's next here is you know submit your application by march 1st the center for bioethics has a number of you know resources we have weekly consortia we have a newsletter that you can subscribe to you can follow us on linkedin and so i really encourage you to do all of that and i know we had a really wonderful uh panel today and and i hope it answered a lot of your questions but if it didn't you can of course email us at this address that you see here um and with that i just want to thank all of you