BGSU College of Health & Human Services: Q&A with the Dean

OK, hello everyone, good afternoon think we'll start things kind of slowly let people kind of trickle in my name is Shannon Tyler. I am from the Office of Admissions and thank you so much for coming to our President Sabre virtual weekend. I'm sure a lot of you have been going through our different webinars, but today we especially want to thank you for coming into our Q&A with the Dean of Health and Human Services doctors Ciesla

Doctor Ciesla. He is going to go over anything in everything, HSS related things like our different majors where students have done internships and Co. OPS and kind of give you a glimpse into what it's like to be a student in our Health and Human Services college. Now, if you've never been in a slate webinar, this is platformer on a really great feature is there's actually a chat box where I will be during the presentation and my colleague Julie will be during the presentation.

So if you have questions during this time, please go ahead and ask them this time. It's all about you and making sure you get everything you need, so don't want any questions to go unanswered. Now we do have the ability to moderate questions, so if you submit a question that maybe is very specific, has to do with you and your application, or maybe Julie and I see a question that keeps coming up, we're going to hold on to those questions, maybe not answer them in the chat.

Instead, what will happen is I will talk to Doctor Ciesla after he's done his presentation will do a big Q&A with some FAQ alright, but without any further delay I will turn it over to Doctor Ciesla.

Hello everybody welcome. Welcome to BGSU. We're very glad you're here. Just as a frame of reference, you probably already know this, but be Jesse is about 20,000 students and it's divided into 6 academic colleges and the Dean of the College of Health and Human Services, where the third largest. And we're growing very rapidly. Now, about 2200 students, and I'll go through the various departments and majors, some some of our students or graduate students, but mostly undergrads.

I think our students feel very at home once students find their way into our majors, they usually become quite close with the faculty and with their classmates. This ends up being their academic home on campus. They come here a lot. They hang out between classes. This is where clubs meet. A lot of extra curricular activities. It becomes this kind of the center of your of your experience at BGSU. Let me move through a couple of slides here. I'm just going to quickly. These are. These are.

This is our final product. We're always very happy when our students go across the stage and graduate.

Um our college is broken into.

Three, I'm sorry. Five departments or schools. The Department of Human Services has criminal justice, social work and gerontology.

Communication Sciences and disorders are where people who are interested in becoming speech language pathologist, an audio ologist major. We have a Department called Public and Allied Health which has quite a few majors in it. Public health food and nutrition. Medical Laboratory Sciences, Health Administration and a number of other majors that I'll get to in just a few minutes. We have a School of Nursing.

New Director of nursing. We're very excited about nursing. Where in the process of building some clinical and some educational space here on campus, which will be done to spring. And we also have a school physical therapy. Physical therapy is doctoral level. It's graduate, but we have many pre physical therapy students on campus and we see it or we will be seating in the time that short BGSU, about 100 students a year into a doctoral physical therapy program. So this is a very exciting.

Tuning we have the PT program is new and nursing is I would say new and improved. That's the way I would describe it.

Let's go through majors.

If you're into criminal justice and criminal justice is a broad field.

You folks ordinarily think of criminal justice graduates as being police officers, but our degree program prepares students to work in probation pardon parole. The court system we have on any number of alumni who are in the Federal criminal justice system at the FBI and federal law enforcement, and a lot in state law enforcement, and we have a specialization in forensic investigation. It's which you might see going on in CSI crime scene investigation work.

I think students find that very often very interesting gerontology. We have a long term care administration specialization.

We're very happy that.

There's general gerontology but long term care men.

Qualified students to sit for nursing home licensure examination with many grads who are nursing home administrators, those are excellent jobs. That's a very actively growing area.

And we think that students who find their way into the Gerontology program into long-term administration, long Term Care administration are very, very happy with their choice. They really like working in that area. Social work is accredited.

Um, it's a very active field. We tend to.

Emphasize a little bit more on the medical social work side of things, but you can get a good generalist background in social work. As I mentioned a few minutes ago, communication Sciences and disorders is the is the track where we have pre speech language pathology and that's a excellent Department in an excellent major. I'll talk a little bit more about that in a few minutes. Dietetics is very interesting if you want to become a dietitian.

Um, we have an excellent food and nutrition program here in the in the college. Longstanding programs been around for probably 75 years. We have alums all over the place.

We have a Health Sciences major which is an excellent major for pre physical therapy pre occupational therapy pre Med pre pharmacy. I think there's many others as well pre dentistry. If you want to be an optometrist or physician assistant we can advise you for the right classes to take and our Health Science graduates are very successful at getting into graduate level Health Sciences including medicine and the others I've mentioned.

As you know, we have a Bachelor of Science in nursing that major starts junior and goes through senior year. We have two tracks as it now stands one we send about 80 students a year, 40 this fall in a partnership with Mercy College of Ohio. It's about a 15 miles away in Toledo and our students do their third and 4th year there and then. Starting this fall will also be tracking about 80 students into a nursing program here on campus.

If you're following the math here, starting next academic year, we have the capacity to seat well over 150 students in what we call the pre licensure sequence of nursing, and we're very excited about that an I'm glad to take questions.

And explain all the nuances and details applied. Allied Health is an excellent major uh, for students who are interested in public health. We have any number of students who work in environmental, health, health promotion. We have accelerated Health Administration degree. It's excellent degree. If you're interested in going into the management side.

Of hospital and health services delivery and that that degree program is you don't have to have a Masters degree. You can just get a bachelors. But if you wanted to do a Masters, it's what we call accelerated with the with a Masters degree program so you can seamlessly go from undergraduate to graduate and it takes a little less time to finish both degrees if you do them together.

Medical Laboratory Science is the excellent major we have in this college and not a lot of people understand that the people who run laboratories and hospitals are certified mill is medical laboratory scientists. These students tend to not not a lot of students come to BGSU knowing a lot about M LS, but those that find their way into the program end up being very, very happy. That program has been around and this University for well over 50 years have alums.

All over the place and they are excellent jobs and then we have a major in nutrition science. This is for people who are interested in not necessarily becoming a clinical dietitian, but are interested in food and nutrition. Working in food science. Nutrition Science is an excellent pre medical major. It's an excellent venue into graduate work. It's an excellent into an excellent way to go into athletic training in other areas as well. So as you can see, our majors cover a lot of ground.

There are several minors that I'm going to mention here.

So you can for example get a minor in gerontology along with, for example a bachelors degree in Health Administration. There's almost limitless number of ways to combine minors and majors.

So let me let me see if I have questions materializing in the chat.

What are clinical opportunities are I'm going through here? I'm interested in communication science and disorders. What clinical opportunities are there so really good question. We have a clinic in the building. In fact, just outside my window I see somebody bringing in one of their children. Who's going to go for speech therapy. We have about 1700 clinical visits a year. It's basically a health care clinic are.

Undergraduate speech language pathology. Students can go in the clinic and observe. Sometimes working with faculty and it's an excellent way to get to know the discipline and then perhaps apply for the graduate program. We accept about 30 two students into the Masters degree program. We have a very high success rate of our undergraduates in except it into our graduate program, and besides the clinical opportunities that we provide in the building here in the clinic, we also place students in.

In public schools, hospitals, all kinds of other type of rehab clinics we have in the college as a whole. More than 200 different places where we send our students for applied professional experiences. Usually these take place in junior senior year, sometimes in social work, for example. They start earlier. There are no majors in the College of Health and Human Services that don't have.

A practicum field clinical type of placement. It's a very important part of the education. We never let our students go out there on their own. We have clinical faculty who helps oversee the applied professional component of the degree. We help students to match the type of facilities and locations that they like. We can always guarantee a clinical super close to campus or maybe close to home or wherever you want it, but.

We do a pretty good job of matching students up with with what they request. They're very highly structured and we have this is, I think, a very, very important component of the College of Health and Human Services here BGSU is. We have a very large number of Contacts in the professional community.

Many of them are alarms, their graduates of the program. Many of them are both alums and have served as clinical sites for many years. And for example, there's probably 20 police forces. the Ohio Department of Corrections, about 15 or 20 different courts, federal, state and local courts where our criminal justice students go for their ally professional experiences.

I know that we have well over 2530 hospitals, clinics, everything from rural what we call critical access hospitals all the way up to fancy University Medical Center. Tertiary care centers are nursing students, medical laboratory science students, dietetics students have a wide variety of options for the clinical placements. An as you might guess, given the types of degrees we have in this college, that's a very very important part of the overall educational experience.

I'm going to go through and look for other questions.

Oh God Shannon.

Sure.

Yeah, we if you've applied for directive MIT, you'll hear from BGSU very soon. We just vetted the names on that list and sent and sent them to our partners at Mercy. We may have another wave of direct admitting going on here in the next couple weeks. You'll hear from us very soon about that with nursing. It's important to look on the website and as news about progress in the development of the nursing program moves forward. And again, we we.

As you might guess, we offer direct admit and then sometimes students choose to go somewhere else. So then we send further invitations for direct admission into nursing. We think that's a great option. It kind of gives you a little Peace of Mind when you get here. If you don't. If you're not directly admitted, the nursing program, probably about 2/3 of the students are not directly admitted, so it's perfectly reasonable for you to get here. Take all your science classes and all your pre nursing classes and get right in.

I can honestly say we I've never, ever thought that we ever admitted a student in the pre nursing who couldn't do it if they wanted to. We have lots of supports. The pre nursing curriculum is as you might guess, there's some science and math there that can be challenging. We have many ways to help support students. For example, we have a residential learning community called the national. The natural Sciences residential learning community. If you become interested in BGS you to the point where you're signing your dorm deposits to look in the NSR, else.

We hire somebody who can who can tutor in chemistry, biochemistry and math who works right inside the residence Hall. Who's there every evening? So if Biochem gets a little tricky or microbiology maybe isn't clicking the best you'll be with other students in the residential learning community here in the same classes. And then there's some America schiffler surname. She's great. She has a Masters degree in chemistry and she sits there in tutors. She knows all the professors she knows all the all the ways that you know.

What's in all the biochem books and then the chemistry books and math books an students, by and large are a lot more concerned about these courses then they are there more successful than they think they're going to be if they work hard, of course, but but usually end up doing quite well.

Awesome, thank you. Another question that I think we always get kind of throughout the year is students say I want to be a pre Med major. I want to be pre pharmacy so and we know that premed isn't actually major right. Your Health Sciences and then kind of go on. So what does that look like in the College of Health and Human Services when students are doing this pre professional programs? What kind of support do they have to help them when they're getting into Med school or or anything like that?

You have access to the pre professional advising office and that's sort of an Uber advising you'll have an advisor and and uh, and uh, life design coach assigned to you when you get here and then we have a professional advisor who keeps up with some of the nuances of the testing and the admission requirements of many them in schools in the region and throughout the country.

So not only will you get the right classes and the advice on you know how to prepare yourself, maybe during summer to do some volunteer work or internship work. But the pre professional advising office keeps track of some of the nuances. Like if Ohio State is looking for particular types of applicants or we know that there there may be placing more emphasis on writing skills than chemistry skills she keeps up with those nuances. And then if you know if you make your advising appointments and check in.

You'll always sort of know what's up and each medical school or dental school or physical therapy program has some differences. If you think you're interested in primary care medicine, are pre professional. Advising folks might suggest a certain medical school too. If you're interested in fancy high tech stuff, perhaps you'll go to Medical College of Ohio, or perhaps Ohio State. So there's a lot of nuance there an we think that it's not just getting into medical school or just getting into dental school. It's getting into the right one. That's that's a good match for you, just as.

Your match at BGSU is very important. We want you to feel comfortable here and I think and I think you will. Same thing goes for your postgraduate education and I will plug. We have one very special accelerated pathway with the University of Findlay College of Pharmacy and we work with them very very closely. We they are helping us pick which classes are the best for the students to meet their prerequisites for pharmacy and there will be a few classes less.

Essentially what you do is you start at University of Findlay your junior year, and then you transfer back to BGSU some credits to finish your Health Sciences degree and then they double count for your doctor of Pharmacy your Pharm D degree. So it's it's an accelerated total pathway and what we've figured it out so that all the tuition financial aid stuff is pretty seamless and Finley is 25 minutes from here. So if you are a junior and had an apartment off campus and your friends and

sorority fraternity people and all that stuff, you can just just turn the other way and go down and finish pharmacy school.

And but you know, I can't make any promises. Depends on your CC credits and how you do in pre pharmacy. But you could be done in six years and be ready to go out and practice pharmacy.

Uh, and the physical therapy again. We in the time that if you join us in the fall in the time that you're here, they will open up 100 seats of BGSU physical therapy slots in a really cool program. It's most doctor of physical therapy programs take three years, we've decided to accelerate hours. It goes year round. So I'm sorry, no summer break once you're in PT school and no spring break. But you'll be out in two years, two years and one week. So think of it, you can.

Get out there and start working and Ann Ann, you know and there's a rule in physical therapy about jobs which basically says.

There's no such thing as unemployed physical therapist, so you might you might get weekends or evenings or something like that to start off with, but.

We can't graduate. Physical therapy doctoral students fast enough for the number of jobs that are out there. Similar with nursing. Actually, I can't think of a major where there aren't jobs sitting there waiting for, um, for students.

So basically you're in very good hands for career outlook if you're going to be in the services.

You're you know you're in the right place. It didn't take this pandemic for us to realize that you know. Nurses are like really important and they work everywhere and same thing with all the related disciplines. Health Administration jobs. They're very rewarding sometimes. Some of our very most successful graduates, the John Starcher. I'm going to name drop is the President and CEO of Bounce occurs mercy. The whole big organization. He's one of our grads. He was here for commencement.

He keeps telling us when we talk to him, send us your good students will see if we can get them placed in internships etc. So you know the.

BGSU College of Health and Human Services is very well integrated into the professional practice community and the service delivery community in the in the region. For example, in nursing, we're going to have skills and simulation facilities. An practicing nurses and physical therapists and respiratory therapists will go through simulation and skills with our students. They're going to be doing their continuing education because nurses need.

Every year to keep their skills up with our pre licensure students so there almost be these built-in mentoring relationships between. You know somebody who maybe is has been a nurse for 15 years and there re. They're refreshing their skills alongside students who are or building going through the initial education process.

Awesome, I love that very integrated really in the community and you're part of a really good family so that it brings me to the next question we had. Was someone said it is there somewhere that we can access data in regards to hiring salary and jobs for our Health Administration graduate? So is there any kind of report out there that that list that info?

Expedia.

You know I can find 1. There's some general information about our grads on the website. I think all the all the colleges websites have. You know it's in the 90% those students who, when they graduate within what is it? Shannon six months or five months there? Either they're either working.

In Graduate School or someplace they want to be, they've gone to the military, peace Core America, or start a business. There's very, very few percentage of of our students in any of our majors, who in five months after graduate, graduating or not doing something that they wanted to do, mostly there employed. Of course, because that's that's the that's the big first step. But Health Administration in particular? I'll tell you what if you get the name of the person who's interested, I'll get you the stats. It's it's the job. Take theirs is really quite good.

About half of our health and students go right into a Masters degree and probably 60% or so or maybe a little bit more. End up sometime in their career, finishing up with a Masters degree. But you know, it's not required for entry level jobs, and I think mostly people get the master so they can sort of once their midcareer can kind of advance. And by the way, I have a Masters degree in that as well here so.

Awesome, thank you Lauren. She's interested in the communication Sciences orders program. She was wondering about going into private practice. Do you see a lot of graduates going in and into private practices? Or maybe starting up their own practices after?

Yeah, it's possible, and it's doable. Usually SLP's either work registry for like a hospital, has a registry, or work full time. I do know of several private practices where SLP's work. Usually it's a little bit better to have three or four together just so the administrative expenses are shared, but for example, grace speaks as a clinic in Finley.

And we both have our students and faculty there, and an SL other SLP's. And I'm guessing there's like 5 SLP's total there in partnership there.

Awesome and then I think the last question. I think both of us can kind of feel Mackenzie. She was wondering about pre professional students an are you still able to be involved with campus activities while really focusing on your studies? And I definitely say yes. I know Doctor Ciesla you brought up learning communities right where you live with students who have the same major or something similar or even honestly just common interests outside of the classroom and live and work together. So that's one really nice way to kind of.

Yeah.

Use in without involvement, right? Because you were like minded students and then there are all kinds of organizations for pre professional groups and there are even some fraternities and sororities based on majors, so you can definitely still be involved. Make your college experience what you want, but do you have any personal experience? Maybe with the student doctor Ciesla that you've worked?

Lydia bias, for example, was one of our stellar students. She was also a when we call an ambassador, she.

Probably spent 20. I talked to Hurlock as she because she was an ambassador, worked out of the college office. Oh, she would probably 20% of their time doing. She was working with the Food Bank. We have food bank on campus, 'cause she was interested in that particular activity. I believe she was in a sorority. She was in honors college. There's plenty of time to do these things. I'll tell you a little secret. Medical schools, graduate programs, and physical therapy. They don't want a bunch of bookworms.

They want somebody who pretty good and solid in the classroom, but who has some experiences they would be just as happy to hear you say that you studied abroad, for example, or did some volunteer work in Puerto Rico, then taking maybe an additional chemistry class that you aren't required to have to get into Med school. They want they want you to be real live in, you know, social people an we think that that's a I know that's a huge consideration in the college. You know where there's the universities structure their student affairs. And then there's academic affairs.

We work very closely together.

About our residential learning communities. We have a brand new criminal justice learning community, so none of this is required. But someday we'll either carpool or getting a bus and go to court Judge Reger off campus. Here will have court someday. If there's some interesting cases. If you're interested in that part of criminal justice just goes. And then he'll invite you in the back afterwards and talk. Talk to you. Well, you know if you're interested in working at Wood County Hospital in the rehab, I'm personally going. I haven't been there yet. I'm going to go on a tour.

If you want if we wanted our residential learning community in health Wellness in you to go. If they wanted to go to go on a tour, the rehab facilities will arrange a trip. We will send you to jail if you'd like to go there and look around. We have a field trip to one of the state prisons. If you're in criminal justice, I think it's a little creepy to me. I don't want to go visit in jail, but I guess Crim justice students like to do that. So and then a lot of on campus stuff. Tons of volunteer opportunities. I'll tell you about Covid.

This this universities testing is almost 100% run by our medical laboratory Sciences faculty and students. They're doing all the testing in the student center. They're sending the lab there, either doing the lab tests here on campus, or their dissenting in Wood County Hospital. We have quite a few public health students. You've heard this term in the news. They're doing contact tracing. There actually were a little community little village here at BGSU and we've been very successful not having outbreaks actually remarkably successful. There have been no.

Major outbreaks of covid on campus. But when we do hear about these things or somebody, even if even if they hear about it from home, they we do this telephone follow up in the contact tracing to help figure out of if people need to go into quarantine, etc.

Yeah.

Oh

yeah.

Yeah, I I love that story and I love that you brought up. They want someone who's well rounded, right? You mentioned a mericourt before when you're talking about getting involved and I actually did America, or for a year graduated and one of my friends from America where she went to Med school after. And that was for big thing of you know, you know volunteering for a whole year does make you very competitive on those beds school applications. But she needed to learn about other people and how to work with people. Not all. Just that hard Sciences and.

Yeah.

Sorry, I've been bringing up a lot is Doctor Fouchy right? I mean around doctor, his undergrad isn't in biology or chemistry. It's in classics like knowing how to work with people is just as important as knowing all those hard Sciences. I don't know if anybody's been to a doctor when you're not comfortable with them. It's hard to open up, so having all of those experiences and being really well rounded is is really important, so I'm glad.

It'll make it easy for you to write a good admission essay if you've done some volunteer work or you go to America or Ann and they're going to interview you and they're going to tell they're going to want to know, are you sort of uni dimensional, or do you have social skills and have you seen a little of the world? Or is there some depth or or do you have a hobby that's not related to dentistry?

That you pursued an you have you know something that you kind of stuck with. You know throughout or where your varsity athlete that they believe it or not. There very happy 'cause it 'cause their perception is that you learn team skills and competitive competitiveness and a space. If you're a D1 athlete like we have here at BGSU, you lot of self discipline involved. So this is what they're looking for. They love Asian bees and Cameron bio. Don't get me wrong but but but sometimes they don't just force rank GPS and let people in like that. That's.

That's what I'll say.

OK, well I think Oh yeah.

Yes, my classes in cyber security you can take in. I'm just looking at some of the other questions we most definitely do. A couple of them, they're doing some gaming and you talk so many political science is actually pretty cool. BGSU's ability to pick the curiosity of students are interested in any kind of forensics or even eventually going to have forensic accounting, which is a big part of criminal investigation. Forensic science, crime scene forensics and some cyber security etc.

Awesome, but I think that was everything that we had. I think we had a really good conversation. Is there anything else you would like to add before we kind of sign off Doctor Sezela?

Yeah, just one of the things. It's OK if you if you think you're sort of generally interested in programs in this college, you don't have to be decided an you can change with pretty great ease. I mean for the most part, your fellow classmates.

Your first semester here will be taking general education classes. If you go so you go to the clinic and think you know, I really thought I wanted to be an SLP, but that looks a little boring to me or I'd rather I'd rather go right to Med school or my roommates in nursing and that looks a lot cooler than I thought it did. You can you? How do you say you'll have a good way to get exposed to them so you'll know what you like and don't like and so you can come in and be a chess undecided and will get you started with basic classes and then?

Help you probably meet students on your own. There are out in the lobby you know out in light cord all the time and hanging around before and after class. But to get some word of mouth from them and from the professors about what might be an area that interests you that you didn't think was going to do so. There's lots of there's lots to discover and lost to explore.

A lot of changing over those four years a lot. Lot of things will change for sure, but.

No, I'm sorry.

For joining us today, Doctor Ciesla. Thanks for sharing your expertise and learning so many things about HHS. For us, we really appreciate you all coming. Let us know if you have more questions. I dropped a link in the chat where you can sign up for more Presidents Day sessions and we hope to see you in person at BGSU pretty soon.

Thanks everyone, take care.

Thank you everybody.