“I switched into the Human Biology major early on at USC, and I’m so glad I did! The program is
incredibly supportive, with amazingly responsive, helpful, and kind advisors who helped me
Frankenstein my courseload together so I could graduate on time with two degrees. For
pre-health students, this program also offers unmatched flexibility by overlapping core
requirements with all the major prerequisites you’ll need to apply to medical school. My courses
were the right amount of challenging and interesting, and I loved how professors integrated their
research interests into class: Dr. Polidori’s love for nutrition made her classes directly applicable
to real life, and Dr. Borner always made sure to explain the connection between complex
metabolic pathways and the cutting-edge research he was conducting. In my Health and Disease
capstone class, we even got to create a poster presentation using Dr. Schier’s own
recently-collected data! Exploring trends within real data and learning to summarize it gave us
skills we’ll carry into conducting and presenting our own research down the line.

Last but not least, I got to take the coolest lab classes at USC! We explored exercise physiology
by testing on our favorite subjects – ourselves! We learned how to take glucose and insulin
samples, operate a metabolic cart, analyze nutrition intake, and so much more that I’m probably
forgetting right now. Dr. Kiki was one of my lab instructors, and he walked us through each lab
with incredible detail and support. I later took Endocrinology and Metabolism with him, and the
care he took to make sure we understood every step of a metabolic process turned what could
have been a nightmare class into one of my favorites at USC.

I highly recommend Human Biology to anyone at USC with an interest in medicine and/or the
biological sciences!”