The UT San Antonio merger and Strategic Planning Initiative are vain fronts made to inflate the campus’ self-importance and relevance. Future doctors and scientists coming from the self-declared “preeminent public research university” are being ignored in favor of the university’s public image. Undergraduate pre-med students struggling to register for their required courses cannot easily connect with research opportunities nor have open access to UT Health resources, while administration boasts big-idea plans and neglects the details.
Undergraduates have reaped nothing from the university’s expansion except surface-level bragging rights from attending the third-largest research university in Texas and parking passes now working at select lots on the UT Health campus. The two joined universities have remained fundamentally separate when viewed past the public relations veil. Tuition, fees, stipends, academic calendars and professors are not shared between the campuses. Events are also secluded to one campus.
The College of Sciences’ events calendar rarely advertises events scheduled at UT Health and gives no details or external links to learn more. Undergraduate pre-meds who default to this resource miss out on conferences, seminars and workshops they are eligible to attend. Pre-med undergraduates must dig through the UT Health events calendar to find events open to them, indirectly dissuading them from networking across campuses.
To pre-med students, clinical exposure, shadowing, research and hands-on learning are as important as their classroom material, none of which have become easier to access post-merge. The Research Department at UT San Antonio lacks centralized resources for students to access opportunities. Undergraduate students have resorted to forming clubs as a crutch to fill the gap and find the experience they need. The merge could have alleviated this issue — by facilitating connections between undergraduates and UT Health personnel — but fails to even consider it. Instead, students rely on word-of-mouth, scattered faculty websites and department announcements for experience.
Disorganized course registration only worsens the pre-med students’ journey. The biology premedical sciences concentration adds 38 hours of courses, including six courses that are semester specific — Advanced Physiology I, Clinical Anatomy Laboratory I, Advanced Physiology II, Clinical Anatomy Laboratory II, Introduction to Clinical Medicine and Pathology, and Advanced Clinical Medicine and Pathology. Failure to enroll in any of these courses could delay graduation by up to a year, yet UT San Antonio registration turns a blind eye to waitlist counts. A university wanting to advance as “world-class” cannot ignore these systemic barriers impacting its students.
The university is focusing on the wrong things to strengthen students, by prioritizing decades-long plans without a care for next semester. If the university wants to boast interconnectivity, the COS needs to bridge undergraduates to UT Health. Pre-med students are being stunted, and it is time UT San Antonio stepped up.
