Author: princeagbedanu

Experiential Learning is the New College

At Friends University, pre-health students engage in professional shadowing to gain real-world experience and clarify their vocations and career paths. These activities have shown to be instrumental, helping students assess their interests and capabilities in various healthcare professions. Reflections from these experiences often reveal significant insights into their vocational choices.

Prince Agbedanu

As pre-health students wrestle with doubts about the paths they’ve chosen or struggle to find their place within the healthcare sector, vocational exploration is more crucial now than it ever has been. In our pre-health programs at Friends University, students want to engage in activities that give them real-life experience to help them navigate these challenges. These students want to know that their learning is useful and applies to their careers—to see with greater clarity their professional futures as they begin their training for it. In short, they want experiential learning.

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Teaching Vocational Exploration in the Biology Classroom

The idea of vocational exploration is golden. But to be able to explore it meaningfully with first-year students who just want to study biology, we must help them gain clarity on what it entails.

The title of this post may make you pause, first to consider what it means to teach vocational exploration in biology, and then to consider how it could be done in your courses. In the undergraduate biology classroom, you may have to explain the expansive meaning of vocation as well as give students a reason to explore vocation “at this time and in this place.” Most students in biology seem either to be undecided about what to do next or to have pre-determined ideas, such as attend medical school. For this reason, we might be tempted not to consider other vocational opportunities that could resonate with the students’ natural talents.

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