Richard

Greetings all! I discovered this thread while searching the web and found your conversation very relevant... Just recently took 8 students to the AMHPS symposium in Orlando, FL. It was a wreck from the moment we stepped into the hotel! For those of you who do not know of this symposium, it's touted as being a conference to help influence our young HS and fresh/soph college students into considering the medical or health fields as a possible career/study choice. It is also run by and exclusively influenced by the HBCU's. Don't want to go into great detail of the utter sub-standard quality of the conference, but none of my students will be attending a HBCU after that experience. A couple of glaring problems with the conference: 1. ONLY HBCU's represented (as if minorities in the health field was not limited enough) 2. Only 2-3 of the HBCU's had medicals schools????? 95+ of students were interested in medical school, but got an inordinate amount of information about Veterinary Medicine???? 3. Very little or no qualitative/professional information provided concerning the fields 4. TOO much recruiting slant! It seemed to be a symposium designed more to recruit students to attend HBCU than about motivating students to enter medical fields 5. Speakers, presenters were very uninteresting Goodness, i could go on, but will spare you all. The nice thing was that the symposium paid for the air transportation, hotel and food. Imagine, 600 students....that's a lot of money! Wasted! I was approached by a recruiter from Texas Southern asking if we would like her to visit our school (Private school north of Dallas). After the conference and the troubles with Texas Southern, I won't be giving her a call and besides, I don't believe it would be worth her while. HBCU's, unfortunately, are a mess. Save for a handful of schools, most of the HBCU's are a reflection of just how low we as a people have gone to accommodate our educational needs. Absence of SAT/ACT requirements, lower GPAs, substandard facilities, cronism among the adminstrative ranks, mismanagement, etc. Richard