Beginning with Purpose: Inside the School's Month-Long Orientation
For the inaugural class at the 51猎奇入口Stephens Family School of Medicine, medical school begins with something more fundamental than the curriculum. It begins with four weeks dedicated to understanding themselves, building relationships, connecting with community, and thinking deeply about the physicians they hope to become.
The school's month-long orientation was designed intentionally to create that foundation before students move fully into their academic program in September.
For Dr. Keyna Bracken, Associate Dean UGME, the thinking behind this approach began years ago. Drawing on her previous experience leading the first half of the UGME program at the Michael G. Degroote School of Medicine at McMaster University in Ontario, she saw an opportunity to rethink what orientation could accomplish.
Rather than simply introducing students to schedules, systems, and case-based learning, Dr. Bracken wanted to start with bigger questions. "Why are you here? What about this journey excites you?" she says. "It's really trying to put all of the pillars that the school stands for into place."
For Dr. Bracken, that means preparing students not only with the knowledge and clinical skills they will need as physicians, but also the ability to think critically, understand the importance of listening to the stories each learning encounter brings, appreciate health within overlapping systems, recognize the connections between human and planetary health, and build meaningful relationships with the people and communities they will serve.
At the heart of it all is relationship.
"Everything is about relationship," Dr. Bracken says. "You have a relationship with the person that's seeking care, you have a relationship with that person and their family... you have a relationship with your colleagues, your learning community, your own community, the planet, and you have that relationship with yourself."
Creating time for those relationships is one reason four weeks matter. With an inaugural cohort of 48 students, orientation gives students time to get to know one another, their faculty, and the communities in which they'll learn. It also creates space to reflect on their own experiences and assumptions before the pace of medical education intensifies.
Indigenous ways of being and knowing, connection to land, and land stewardship are foundational to the experience. Students began their orientation on the land at the Katzie First Nation Longhouse, grounding their initial experience within community and on the land. They also visited Tsawwassen First Nation and the First Peoples' Gathering House at SFU鈥檚 Burnaby campus for talks and opportunities to learn from Indigenous perspectives and knowledge holders.
For students, that philosophy extends to an orientation program designed to challenge typical assumptions about medical school and what it means to become a physician. Alongside introductions to clinical skills and case-based learning, students explore topics such as relational competence, financial literacy, resilience and wellness, use of AI and medical technologies and planetary health.
Sessions including Introduction to Population Health; Building a Shared Language: How the Words and Frames We Use in Medicine Shape Well-Being; and Technology and Communication: How Can We Still 'See and Listen' with Devices? encourage students to think critically about the human side of medicine, while a three-part communication series helps them develop the listening, empathy, and relational skills that will shape their future practice.
Through partnerships across SFU, students are also encouraged to draw connections between medicine and disciplines they may not have expected to encounter in their training, including humanities and medical anthropology; experiences with art challenge them to consider different ways of seeing, listening and interpreting, while experiences on the land introduce different ways of knowing and understanding health and wellness beyond Western perspectives.
Underlying it all is an invitation to remain curious鈥攁nd occasionally to be uncomfortable.
"We want to challenge their assumptions about what medical school is," Dr. Bracken says. "When you put people into a situation where they feel slightly off-balance, that's often where the most transformative learning appears."
Ultimately, Dr. Bracken hopes students finish their first month feeling two things: "invigorated and inspired." Years from now, she hopes they remember more than any individual session.
"I hope (orientation) lets them see themselves in their true self as a physician, rather than what they think they have to become. Bringing their authentic self forward, and not having to change to meet a standard imposed by others鈥攖hat's an important piece.鈥�