College plans to retire Health Sciences minor effective Fall of 2013
By Jennifer Kiebach, News and Web Editor
Starting next fall, students will no longer be able to declare a minor in Health Sciences.
According to department co-chairs Daniel Drury and Kristin Stuempfle, the College made this decision with the hopes of alleviating issues of overcrowding in Health Sciences classes.
As of Nov. 14, a total of 196 students—182 majors and 14 minors—needed to take Health Sciences classes to fulfill their degree requirements. The department, however, only has five tenure-track faculty lines.
Although Health Sciences minors only make up a small portion of these students, Stuempfle said the department needs any relief it can get.
Health Science Co-chair Kristin Stuempfle
“We’re at the point now where literally every seat in every class is full with a waiting list, so even having 14 less students in the department will help some,” Stuempfle said.
The decision to retire the minor is also in line with recommendations that came out of a routine external review of the department last year.
Although the College initially hoped to retire the minor during the current semester, it ultimately decided to leave the minor open until the fall of 2013.
It will consequently remain open to new students until the end of this academic year and the change will not affect students currently declared in the minor.
The department also hopes to bring on two additional tenure-track faculty members, but it does not know if the College will accommodate this request.
“We’ve been applying for those two people for several years, but because the economic situation has been so tight, we keep requesting them, but the College hasn’t had money to fund them,” Stuempfle said.
The department will apply for the additional tenure-track faculty lines this coming spring and will know by summer whether or not the College will move forward in the hiring process.
The overcrowding that has emerged in recent years has been somewhat of a bittersweet reflection of the growth that the department has experienced since it first came to the College almost 20 years ago.
According to Stuempfle, about 25 students were graduating with the equivalent of a Health Sciences major when she started working for the College 16 years ago. At that time, the department had three full-time faculty members.
“Then all of a sudden we had 50 students in the graduating class,” she said. “That’s how we went from three to five [tenure-track faculty lines]. Now we just need to go from five to six or seven.”
Health Sciences Co-chair Daniel Drury
Co-chair Drury credited word-of-mouth for much of the department’s growth, as well as the department’s move to the Science Center in the early 2000s.
“Moving into the Science Center was also something that brought additional interest to our area,” he said. “It [was] a brand new facility. People toured it and saw we had a nice facility, so that helped us.”
The departments’ two degree options—a Bachelor of Science and Bachelor of Arts—have also attracted a wide range of students. Drury noted that students in both degree tracts benefit from the “unique human focus” of the Health Sciences classes.
“This [human focus] is attractive to a lot of people going into medical school, physical therapy, occupational therapy [and other health professions],” he said.
Students who have declared minors, on the other hand, have typically come from a range of majors, often biology or biochemistry and molecular biology, and have more of a “personal interest in the human body and health sciences,” Drury said.
Eventually, the department hopes to offer a Global Health minor, which has been an area of growing student interest on other campuses.
This minor, however, may take several years to become a reality, if it materializes at all.
“That [the Global Health minor] is not imminent,” Stuempfle said. “It’s something we would like to do, but it’s something we can’t do without more faculty resources.”
For now, the department will focus on providing necessary accommodations for its current students and preparing for future growth in the existing majors.
“We’re really happy to see the growth in our department over the years,” Stuempfle said. “We’ve worked hard to have this be a successful department, and it’s paying off.”
