PITCH Components

Community Engagement: The community engagement internship provides students with community exposure in a variety of ways. Each student will be assigned to a community organization and are tasked to work with the community organization to develop a community engagement experience that would benefit the organization’s consumers, as well as provide a great learning experience for the student by allowing the students to learn about the needs, resources, and strengths of that community. The community engagement component is a 5 to 7 month longitudinal project in which the students develop, implement, and/or evaluate programming for the community organizations and will begin in late September/early October. All community organization partners provide social services, serve a diverse population, and have strong commitment to serving the underserved populations. Students will also have the opportunity to engage in health advocacy activities as well as participate in the School of Medicine and School of Nursing poster sessions in Spring. This component will be optional to Nursing, PA, and MEPN students, but mandatory for medical students. 

Apart from the monthly commitment of 5-7 months, there will also be an hourly commitment. This will be between 70-100 hours depending on the start date of the community engagement  experience. All hours spent  on-site as well as off-site will be counted towards the hourly commitment. This includes time spent in meetings, trainings, off-site project work/coordination, health advocacy activities, time spent on creating poster, etc.  

Interprofessional modules and workshops: Our interprofessional seminars will utilize content constructed by PITCH members and presentations from guest-speakers. These seminars will be sensitive to the time constraints of both block and quarter scheduling to facilitate participation from all health science students. Students will also participate in Dr. Susan Adam’s leadership course from January to March on selected dates.

Evaluation: In order to see how we can best serve our students, our cohort will be taking surveys through the year during their time in PITCH. At their community sites, they will be evaluated on their performance by their site supervisors and will also get the chance to evaluate the site they worked with as well.  Using that data, we will continue to improve on our program with the end goal of making PITCH a self-sustaining program that can be integrated into the health education curriculum.