At Advocate Genetics, we believe in supporting fertility patients through the often exhausting journey to creating their families. We provide tailored genetic counseling specifically for patients who are seeking fertility treatment.
As a Grad School Prep Program student, you will have a front-row seat to the internal workings of a telegenetics company, and the opportunity to grow your clinical genetics knowledge and learn from a diverse group of amazing genetic counselors. The hours are flexible, but we ask that interested applicants set aside 5-10 hours per week to participate in this opportunity. There will be a one-hour weekly discussion group during work hours (sometime between 9-5 PST, but specific hour TBD based on voting of the students).
Specifically, you will:
- Receive education/participate in discussions about genetic counseling in reproductive medicine, as well as shadowing opportunities to see if this is the career path for you.
- Learn how to analyze a genetic counseling case, tease out important elements for counseling, and prepare appropriate counseling resources.
- Learn how to analyze a research paper and draw meaningful conclusions for patient counseling.
- Develop a showcase project, a self-directed exploration of a topic or media in reproductive genetics through the lens of patients and providers.
- Contribute to our mission by helping us process medical literature and news in reproductive medicine, and encourage substantive engagement with the larger community.
- Create a portfolio of work (examples might include counseling materials, summaries of genetic risk considerations, blogs, social media posts, contributions to a research or community outreach project) that can be used for graduate school applications and interviews.
- Gain a community of trusted colleagues as you launch your career.
Required Qualifications:
- Completion of upper-division genetics course, with a strong desire and competency to enter the field of genetic counseling.
- 1-2 years of work/internship experience that may be in the following areas: healthcare or laboratory research, customer service, social media management, peer counseling, journalism, or student leadership.
- The desire and capability to learn quickly, and to work independently, with care and compassion in our sensitive line of work.
- Experience with multi-tasking responsibilities, desire to take ownership of projects.
- Demonstrated analytic and reasoning skills: highly organized and detail-oriented.
- Strong interpersonal and communication skills, both verbal and written.
If you are interested, please share your contact information and upload your resume, unofficial transcript, a cover letter (optional, but helpful) and a writing sample (a paper for an upper-division genetic, biomedical, psychology, social science, or philosophy course would be ideal, though any other paper demonstrating your writing skill is fine). This will come in handy as we help you polish your grad school application and reach your career goals.
We will keep anything that you share with us confidential. Acceptance notifications will be processed within 3 weeks of submission. If you do not meet our criteria for admission to the program, we will refund your program fee.