If you’re a prospective applicant for the University of Pittsburgh’s Genetic Counseling Program, odds are you’re already familiar with this image, which represents our first-year curriculum:
As an applicant, I remember wanting to know more about each of these courses and how the current students felt about them. If you feel similarly, you’re in luck: keep reading for an exclusive sneak peek into my experience with the first-semester courses, how they fit into my understanding of genetic counseling, and an assignment/project highlight from each class!
Obligatory disclaimers: Pitt GC’s curriculum is subject to change, and our program leadership do, in fact, make changes based on our feedback each year! My impressions are reflective of the courses as they were in Fall 2024. Also, I will be omitting the human genetics seminar, case conference, and grand rounds courses for the sake of brevity.
1) Principles of Genetic Counseling (aka Principles)
Taught by Pitt GC’s own Jodie and Robin, this course is the primary genetic-counseling-specific course you’ll take in your first semester. In it, we covered a variety of core genetic counseling topics (including a sizable module on pediatric genetic counseling) alongside a series of assignments designed to help us practice GC skills as we learned them and to build confidence in communicating complex information clearly. We also had several community panels where patients and/or their families came in to share their stories with us–these panels were an extra notable highlight for me, and I learned so much from them!
There’s not much I can share visually given that most of our assignments were text-based, but here is a simple, on-the-fly visual aid for autosomal recessive inheritance that I created as part of our “genetic concept explanation” assignment, where we had to explain a wide variety of genetics terms as though we were speaking to a patient with limited health literacy:
Overall, I felt that the Principles course provided an excellent introduction to the genetic counseling profession and helped me to practice the type of thinking and problem solving that genetic counselors do on a daily basis.
2) Molecular Basis of Inherited Disease (aka Molec)
Molec was, in short, a journey. Led by Dr. Beth Roman and a few guest lecturers, we explored the foundations of molecular biology, the mechanistic basis and inheritance of various Mendelian disorders, and the ins and outs of single-gene impacts on so many different body systems. Both didactic and practical, I had a blast (get it?) in this course. The grading for Molec is based on homeworks, quizzes, and exams, so I have no projects to show here, but I do have this relevant meme that I made that exemplifies the molecular concepts we learned about:
In this meme, famous musical artist Eminem is throwing Wikipedia’s top image for “nonsense mediated decay” (NMD) at the viewer. NMD was one of my favorite topics that we covered last semester; I had never heard about it before taking the class, and the quality control mechanisms that our bodies use to keep things running smoothly never fail to amaze. In short, eukaryotic cells are able to detect when translation has ended prematurely, whether by way of a premature stop codon caused by a mutation or through other mechanisms, and subsequently degrade the transcript before it is fully translated. Intricate molecular mechanisms like NMD were a regular topic in Molec, and in a level of detail that I was never exposed to in undergrad!
Although the information overload could be a bit overwhelming at times, developing such a strong molecular genetics foundation in my first semester really did help to contextualize the concepts I learned in my other classes and will definitely continue to help me along the way to becoming a full-fledged GC. Knowing what the information found in variant databases, patient laboratory results, etc. actually means on a molecular level helps me to internalize that type of information so much more effectively!
3) Introduction to Statistical Methods (aka Biostats)
In Biostats, taught by Dr. Haley Grant, we made our way through six modules each taking us through different aspects of data management, statistical principles, and data analysis. We utilized R/RStudio throughout the semester, which is a valuable skill to have on hand, and also applied the concepts we learned through written analyses of real-life research articles. While I had some familiarity with R and basic data analysis going in, Dr. Grant’s course filled in the foundational gaps that I had and introduced me to newer, more efficient ways to manage and analyze data. My newfound biostats knowledge will almost certainly come in handy when it’s time to work on our thesis projects, and having a strong understanding of statistics is key for effective genetic counseling. Whether a statistical novice or an R pro, Biostats will have you creating and interpreting figures like this one in no time:
4) Introduction to Population Genetics and Genetic Epidemiology (aka Pop Gen)
Having last taken a course about population genetics in 2018, I was a bit nervous going into Pop Gen and having to revisit ancient concepts like Hardy-Weinberg (HW) equilibrium and genetic drift. However, Dr. Shaffer made these topics so fun and engaging that my fears faded away quite early into the semester. This course provided a broad, application-based overview of HW principles and the impacts of violating them, statistical tests for trait association and inheritance, and an entire module on genetic epidemiology and gene mapping. The genetic epidemiology section in particular overlapped strongly with the content from my other classes (especially Molec and Epi), and by the end I started to feel much more confident in my ability to read and understand genetics literature. Pop Gen is largely homework- and exam-based, so there isn’t much I’m able to show here, but I can share a simple graph that I made to represent how the frequency of a major X-linked allele would change over time if a certain Hardy-Weinberg assumption were to be violated (can you guess which one?):
5) Principles of Epidemiology (aka Epi)
Lastly, co-instructed by Drs. Songer and Costacou, our evenings spent in Epi lecture sessions collectively took us through the entire epidemiological practice cycle. We covered (among other topics) fundamental epidemiological principles, global health assessment, disease surveillance systems, and approximately nine million different measures of variable association. Before coming to the Pitt GC program, I had almost no exposure to epidemiology and likely would not have thought it would be an area that I’d have any interest in. However, I found that many of the core concepts we learned in Epi tied back well to the field of public health in general and to the genetic counseling profession. Having a solid understanding of the epidemiological approach and good research practices allowed me to dive more deeply into genetic epidemiology and to think carefully about how academic research is presented.
Conclusion
Thank you for joining me on this whirlwind tour of my first semester as a Pitt GC student! While it may seem like a lot at first, I found the course load to be very manageable with a bit of schedule planning and lots of support from my wonderful cohort. As the semester went by, the different topics from each of my courses started to fit together in a way that really helped with my overall understanding and, just as importantly, with my confidence as a student and as a future genetic counselor. There is still much to learn, and I look forward to seeing how the second semester courses expand on what I’ve already experienced!
