Mini Med School Makes a Mighty Impact on High School Students

Photography by: Alonso Nichols

When high school students in the Tufts Mini Med School program enter the simulation center, they don’t know what they’re going to encounter. Their patient—a realistic manikin that can sweat, bleed, and even scream—could have been stabbed, shot, or hit by a duck boat. It’s up to the students to diagnose and stabilize their patient as if they were handling a real emergency. 

“They have to pack the wound, start an IV, intubate him, get his vital signs—all the skills they’ve learned,” said Riley Mitchell, M28, who served as a teaching assistant for the Mini Med program in summer 2025. “Watching everything we’ve taught them culminate in these scenarios is so rewarding.”

Mini Med School is a pre-college program offered at Tufts that gives high school students a taste of what it’s like to be in the medical field. In addition to learning hands-on skills in the simulation center, they attend seminars and lectures with various experts, conduct lab work, analyze case studies, and participate in dissections and anatomy lessons. The students also work in small groups to complete a capstone project—either a presentation or a video depending on the session—on a particular medical topic.

“We want to help students take a vague interest in science and medicine and turn it into an understanding of what these various careers actually look like and what they want to do,” said Elizabeth Genné-Bacon, co-director of Mini Med School, assistant professor of medical education at Tufts University School of Medicine, and associate director of The Center for Science Education. “Getting to experience what it might be like to be a doctor is very clarifying for them.”

The summer program has grown significantly since it first launched in 2020, this year serving close to 320 students across three sessions. The one-week commuter session primarily draws students from the greater Boston area, but the one- and two-week residential sessions include participants from all over the world. They have the opportunity to meet like-minded students, explore new career paths, and get a feel for life at Tufts.

Med School Plus

The Mini Med program allows high school students to explore the breadth of the medical field—not just the track to becoming a doctor. The students hear from physician assistants, dentists, clinical researchers, and other specialists to get a better idea of what each career, and the path to get there, entails. 

“Even though it’s called Mini Med School, we really believe in exposing the students to different career paths in medicine,” said Tony Gao, co-director of Mini Med School and an assistant professor of medical education at Tufts University School of Medicine. “Sometimes students come in thinking they know exactly what they want to do, and then they learn about these other career options they didn’t know existed. So we want to encourage them to explore.”

Brianna Carlo, A28, who attended the Mini Med program in 2023, said the emergency care simulation in particular helped her identify some of her strengths. The experience led Carlo, now a biology and biotechnology major at Tufts, to become a certified EMT.

“I had always been interested in emergency medicine,” said Carlo, who returned to intern with the program this past summer. “But I realized that I worked really well under pressure and that I liked the quick aspect of emergency care.”

Carlo is on the pre-medicine track and intends to pursue a career in medicine, but thanks to the Mini Med program, she knows that medical school isn’t her only option. She is also considering physician assistant (PA) programs—a career she didn’t even know existed until Beth Buyea, the director of the PA program at the School of Medicine, came to talk to the Mini Med students. 

Students in the program also spend some time at Tufts University School of Dental Medicine, learning to take dental impressions and suture gums. And they take a day trip to Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine in Grafton to learn more about what a career in animal medicine could look like. 

“Tufts has this constellation of programs and schools that most places don’t have—medical, dental, veterinary, engineering, arts and sciences—and it gives us an opportunity to expose students to a range of careers they may not know about yet,” said Berri Jacque, co-director of Mini Med School and professor and chair of medical education at the School of Medicine. 

Sometimes this means that students leave the Mini Med program realizing that they don’t want to go to medical school at all. They’ve found a better fit in another aspect of medicine or another field entirely. And the instructors are just as happy with that outcome.

“I wish more students had the opportunity to really explore their career interests and figure out whether they do or do not want to do something,” Gao said. Gao himself planned to go to medical school and only realized partway through his master’s degree that a Ph.D. would be a better fit for what he wanted to do. “Had there been a Mini Med School for me way back when, maybe it wouldn’t have taken me so long to figure that out.”

Peer-Led Learning

While lectures and talks are given by specialists in their fields, much of the hands-on and small-group instruction during the Mini Med program is led by rising second-year medical students. Almost a quarter of the eligible medical students at Tufts apply for roughly 11 teaching assistant (TA) positions each summer. It’s a chance for the medical students to grow as educators and communicators and to provide an inside scoop to high school students considering the same career.

“I had so many sit-down conversations with my TA group asking me questions like, ‘Is this worth it?’ and ‘Are you happy with what you do?’” Mitchell said. “I really appreciated being able to be an honest voice for them so early in their journey to becoming healthcare professionals. And I feel like they walked away knowing that it will be hard, but if they want to do it, they absolutely can.”

The TAs teach many of the hands-on skills, like intubation and IV insertion, which can seem overwhelming to the Mini Med students at first. But by the end of the lesson, Mitchell said, the students had the hang of it and were taking videos to share with their friends and family. 

“It’s a great experience for the medical students to learn what it’s like to teach and be a mentor,” Gao said. “These are skills they’re going to need later in their career if they have to manage a team of medical professionals or explain things to a patient.”

This year, the sessions also included a panel with third- and fourth-year medical students at Tufts. These older students were able to talk about their experiences in the later aspects of medical school and talk about their clinical rotations.

“Students really take away some of the practicalities of what they need to do to apply to medical school and what life is like as a med student,” Genné-Bacon said. 

It’s an experience that Genné-Bacon and Gao hope to be able to offer to even more students in the future. They intend to continue growing the program and ensuring that it is accessible to as many students as possible.

“We’re trying to give these students a holistic experience of not just medicine, but health science in general,” Genné-Bacon said. “It can be a really transformative experience.”