Upper Peninsula Health Education Corporation

UPHEC - Medical Students

Welcome to the Upper Peninsula Campus of the Michigan State University College of Human Medicine!

W. Donald Weston, M.D., former Dean of the MSU-CHM, believed doctors could be trained in a remote area like the Upper Peninsula, but only with the support and effort of the people of the area. With a shortage of physicians interested in rural primary care, the best way to recruit and retain physicians was to reach those individuals who were from a small-town, rural environment and were interested in medicine. These individuals could train and ultimately practice in a rural area.

The Upper Peninsula Health Education Corporation (UPHEC) was created in partnership with Michigan State University and is one of six community campuses located throughout the state. The five other campuses are located in Flint, Grand Rapids, Kalamazoo, Lansing, and Saginaw. We are a small community campus providing personal, individualized training to 10 students per class, and we are considered the only rural primary care program of Michigan State University.

The U.P. program is unique in that additional emphasis is placed on applicants from rural areas and those interested in primary care. We do not, however, limit candidate selection to only those individuals. Many of our students are from local areas in the Upper Peninsula, Northern Lower Peninsula, Wisconsin, and surrounding states, but also as far away as Maine and Montana.

Upper Peninsula students follow the same curriculum as students on other campuses, and all take the same exams. Grading criteria is exactly the same. However, with our emphasis in rural medicine, we provide students, not with eight weeks of family practice as the other communities, but with twelve weeks, of which eight are spent at a “rural” site.

UP Experience

After completing their first two years on campus in East Lansing, the U.P. students begin their education in the Upper Peninsula with a one-week orientation and a one-month family practice clerkship in the Marquette area. Practicing physicians with offices located throughout the medical communities of Ishpeming, Marquette, Gwinn, and Negaunee, and at Bell Memorial Hospital in Ishpeming and Marquette General Hospital in Marquette, provide the students with their first exposure to hands-on patient care.

Later in the curriculum, after completing clerkships in psychiatry, internal medicine, obstetrics and gynecology, pediatrics and surgery, students are assigned to one of the several rural sites throughout the Upper Peninsula. The students will spend eight-weeks at their assigned site working one-on-one with primary care physicians with an emphasis on family and community medicine.

Students then return to Marquette to complete clerkships in advanced medicine, senior surgery, and a number of electives.

Marquette General Hospital, a regional referral center with 352 beds, serves as the training site for the core clinical curriculum. With over 200 physicians in a state-of-the-art facility, our students have the resources of a first class teaching hospital at their service. On the cutting edge of technology, informatics, and education, the physicians and staff in Marquette prepare our students with the knowledge and skills to be able to become outstanding physicians. Our students are able to enter any specialty and historically have been highly successful in their chosen careers.

Additional prescribed and elective time is available in Marquette, anywhere in the MSU system, and, in fact, nation and world wide.

Clerkship Directors | Electives | Rural Sites | Student Scrap Book