Amy Li 14 had two summer jobs, but her work did not end when she went home for the day. She spent half of her summer at a clinical internship in Alabama and the other half on campus doing molecular biology research.

Li was also registered to take the Medical College Admissions Test in September, so she spent her nights self-studying biology, chemistry, biochemistry and anatomy.

I wanted to study for the MCAT, but at the same time I didnt want to lose a valuable summer for clinical work or research, Li said. So I decided to just work really hard and try to do both.

Li is among a group of students who choose to take the MCAT the summer before their junior years. To these students, that summer is the perfect time to study for and take the five-hour test, which covers diverse topics including biology, organic and general chemistry, physics and anatomy and is a critical part of a students application to medical school.

Premedical students often factor studying for the test into their workloads and extracurricular options, according to Health Professions Advising director Kate Fukawa-Connelly.

You always have to take into account what youre going to be doing when you take the MCAT, Fukawa-Connelly says. If youre taking it your senior year, you have to plan your two-course semester and your thesis work with preparation for the MCAT in mind.

Li said that for students who want to go straight to medical school, the summer before junior year is an ideal time to devote to studying for the test. These students then spend their junior years focusing on schoolwork before beginning their application processes in the summer and fall of their senior years.

Its good to get it out of the way at a time thats most convenient, because you can dedicate an entire summer to studying and then focus on schoolwork during the year, Li said. It makes the most sense.

Patricia Yeh 14 also studied for and took the test this summer. Matriculating at medical school immediately after graduation was her biggest priority, she said, so in the course of planning activities for her summer, she made sure she had time to study.

I knew studying would be the most time-consuming activity I had, so I was volunteering a fair amount, but not enough to deter me from studying, she said.

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On medical school entrance exam, students get early start to stay ahead

How a local government, university, hospital, medical school, non-profit, and corporation in Bethlehem, Pennslyvania are working together in an approach to education that encompasses health and well-being.

Just getting to school each day, for the students of Broughal Middle School in the south side of Bethlehem, PA, was a strike against their ability to achieve in the classroom.

When undergrads from Lehigh University spent a week following students to and from school with hand-held devices that measure air pollutants, they found that the kids' daily walks could be contributing to the high rates of asthma that were keeping them out of the classroom.

Redirecting their path through the major intersections of downtown Bethlehem, the city joined forces with community partners to repurpose an old railroad line into a safer path to school. It's lined with trees, ends half a block away from Broughal's front doors, and, if those hand-held monitors are to be believed, contains significantly cleaner air.

Such are the small changes that the national community school initiative aims to bring about, aided by mutually beneficial partnerships. "We think that health and education go together," said Martin Blank, President of Institute for Educational Leadership and Director of the Coalition for Community Schools. "While some people in the education reform business don't want to acknowledge the linkage -- they think it's all academic -- the reality is that kids who are sick miss school time." Among other initiatives, the Coalition works closely with the National Assembly for School-Based Health Care to address the high rates of chronic absence that often occur in areas where diseases like asthma are common among students and good primary care is unavailable to them.

In Bethlehem, the government (the department of Parks and Recreation), the university (Lehigh), the hospital (St. Luke's), the medical school (the St. Luke's campus of Temple University), a non-profit (the United Way of Greater Lehigh Valley), and a locally-owned corporate sponsor (Just Born, Inc) work together on goals tailored to the community's unique needs, and to the willingness of its partners to help meet them. With the public school as its hub, the partnership focuses everyone's efforts on common goals.

"If kids are growing up in an environment where they are healthy and eating well, and where their parents are committed to their own growth and development, and have opportunities for good jobs, the chances of our students being able to learn better go up significantly," said Dr. George White, Iacocca Professor of Educational Leadership and Director of Center for Developing Urban Educational Leaders (CDUEL) at Lehigh University.

The community health initiative is only one part of the larger project, which also emphasizes literacy and numeracy and adult education and job training. And the Greenway, as they're calling the new route to school, arose from the simple realization that students can't thrive if their basic health needs aren't met. The students, 94 percent of whom qualify for free or reduced lunch and many of whom are at a high risk of diabetes, are also benefiting from healthier meals. Their breakfasts and lunches -- along with the community's two new farmer's markets -- include items grown in the after-school organic gardening club's greenhouse, which itself will soon be supporting by a composting program via Lehigh's engineering department. A fitness center is open both before and after school. According to Blank, schools often work to integrate such practical health education into their classroom curriculum.

There's also a dental office right in the school building -- twice a month, St. Luke's sends a dentist to perform fillings and extractions. The community college, for its part, sends over people from its dental hygienist program for cleanings. Once a month on Saturdays (and soon to be twice a month) for the past year and a half, the Temple University medical students have run a free clinic for un- and under-insured families. The school provides the space, physicians volunteer their time, and undergraduates at Lehigh who are just starting to explore the field of medicine are trained to work as "health coaches." The students follow-up with patients by giving them rides to pick up their medication, for example, or showing them how to use blood pressure cuffs.

"It's not just do-gooder work," said White. "In each of these cases, the partners gain as much as they give." The medical students, for example, get valuable real-world experience from their work at the clinic. In the long-term, the hope is that the wellness initiative's focus on prevention and healthy lifestyles will strengthen the health of the overall community. The potential benefits for all of Bethlehem are wide-ranging.

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A Community Success Story: Combining Public and Private Sectors for Health Care and Education

COURTESY WILLIAM CAREY UNIVERSITYThird-year medical students Shanique Jarrett of Gainesville, Fla., and Alaukik Bhasin of Columbia study the structures of the human face at the William Carey University College of Osteopathic Medicine.

HATTIESBURG -- Brent Arnold was planning to get his doctorate in biomedical engineering from Louisiana Tech University in Ruston, La., but in his senior year he decided he wanted to be a doctor and work directly with patients rather than doing research.

Arnold enrolled in the first class at William Carey University's College of Osteopathic Medicine and this year will begin his clinical rotations. After that, he will do an internship and residency before he begins practicing as a doctor of osteopathy, or a DO.

"William Carey is close to home and close to family," said Arnold, a native of Alexandria, La. "I want to practice in the South."

The medical school, or COM as it's known, was supposed to open in 2005, but Hurricane Katrina interrupted those plans.

"We were first contacted by the state osteopathic medical association about opening a school, but we didn't know a lot about osteopathic medicine," said Tommy King, president of William Carey. "The more we learned, the more it fit in with the mission of the university."

Osteopathic doctors are known for their "whole person" approach to medicine, rather than just treating symptoms. They focus on preventive health care and natural treatment rather than medicine, although they can prescribe medication.

"It's the osteopathic emphasis on the holistic approach that we liked," said Darrell Lovins, dean of the medical school. "We treat the whole person."

King said that 76 of Mississippi's 82 counties are considered medically underserved, and the university wanted to provide more medical care to areas of the state that need it.

"We had investors ready to put up the money, but then Katrina hit," he said. "We were preoccupied with recovery from Katrina, but when we got on our feet, we started thinking about it again."

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WC medical school training doctors of osteopathy

WORCESTER Two professors at the University of Massachusetts Medical School are playing a role in a global effort to unlock the mysteries of the human genome, which is the complete set of genetic instructions for humans.

Medical school professors Job Dekker and Zhiping Weng participated in an international consortium of scientists from 32 institutions that made headlines this month with its findings. The scientists involved in the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements project, or ENCODE, announced that parts of the genome often dismissed in the past as junk DNA actually play an important role in regulating what genes do.

Through the projects research, scientists have gained an understanding of 80.4 percent of the human genome, the UMass Medical School professors said.

That is a tremendous improvement in our understanding of the genome, said Mr. Dekker, who holds a doctorate and is professor of biochemistry and molecular pharmacology and co-director of the schools Systems Biology program.

Researchers involved in the project used a range of experimental approaches to understand what pieces of DNA are regulating genes. The research labs of Mr. Dekker and Ms. Weng, who holds a doctorate and is the director of the medical schools program in bioinformatics and integrative biology, worked on separate projects that contributed to the effort.

The findings of the international project appeared in 30 papers published in the journals Nature, Genome Research and Genome Biology. Mr. Dekker was the lead author of one of the Nature papers. The results of Ms. Wengs efforts were published in Genome Research. The consortiums work received funding from the National Human Genome Research Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health.

The professors touted the data produced by ENCODE which built upon the Human Genome Project completed in 2003 as the basis for further study in the genetic causes of human disease and a potential boon for pharmaceutical and other medical research.

For the past decade, Mr. Dekker has helped develop methods to create three-dimensional models of folded chromosomes. Those models can be used to determine which parts of the genome touch each other, according to the medical school.

Scientists have believed for a number of years that a regulatory element could control a gene by physically interacting with that gene, Mr. Dekker said. His goal is to measure the three-dimensional structure to see which regulatory elements physically touch what genes, he said.

We have gone from this view of the genome where we have here and there a gene and then large sections of unknown of territory, Mr. Dekker said. We now have a much richer picture of the genome, where we can see genes, and we can set lots and lots of these regulatory elements.

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UMass Med professors are sleuths of the genome