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The Office of Pre-professional Advising's Eileen Korpita is the recipient of the 2006 Ada B. Thomas Outstanding Staff Advising Award.
Korpita has been at the University since 1989, when she became a health educator at the Thomson Student Health Center. In 1996, she joined the Office of Pre-professional Advising. Both jobs gave her the chance to work with students.
"I love the student contact," she said. "It is something different, something fascinating every day."
Originally from Upstate New York, Korpita has a B.S. degree in education from Courtland, a SUNY school, and a master's degree in public health from USC. She comes from a medically-oriented family.
"My mother was a nurse, my father was a doctor, my brothers and sisters are in health-related careers," she said. "So I'm very familiar with the whole medical profession, and this certainly helps me at work.
"Our office helps students be as competitive as they can be when it comes to applying for professional schools such as medical, law, dental, optometry," Korpita said. "We make sure they are aware of what they need to do: take the right courses, get exposure to their chosen career. We also do a number of things during the application process: help them understand the timing of the application, help them with personal statements and interview skills, mock interviews; anything we can do to help, we do.
"Pre-med students have a number of required courses, plus healthcare exposure activities, and we help with that," she said. "We have a large shadowing network of roughly 200 physicians in the area who have agreed to allow students to shadow them. Even before the students begin their coursework here at USC, we offer a summer camp for incoming pre-med freshman and they live in Preston for that week. We give them information about what they have to do to be successful in applying to medical school, give them a tour of the gross anatomy lab at the USC School of Medicine, have doctors and med students come in to talk to them. By the time they start classes, they know what they need to be doing. We also offer pre-med 101 courses and a capstone course (pre-med 401) for students graduating from USC and about to go to med school."
The Office of Pre-professional Advising also oversees living-learning communities for freshmen pre-med and pre-law students.
Korpita likes almost every aspect of her job. Helping students who don't get into their chosen school, however, can be a challenge.
"Lots of tears have been shed in this office," she said. "But we help students through that, too. We help them find something else to do, or we help them try to improve their application so they can reapply."
Whether it's due to genetics or their mother's enthusiasm, Korpita's two daughters already are interested in health care careers.
"I take my 16-year-old out to the gross anatomy lab at the med school at the VA campus and she loves it," she said. "My 12-year-old is leaning in that direction, too."
5/06
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Eileen Korpita, pre-professional advising
