Medicine and other health professions

Knowledge Integration provides valuable skills and perspectives in preparation for health professions.

For me, healthcare represents the intersection of various disciplines that I’m interested in — sociology, biology, psychology, ethics and design. I’m so grateful to KI for giving me the perfect background to be a lifelong learner in medicine!

Congratulations to Alex, BKI'16! She was our first KI grad to go to medical school, and we are very proud of her. She graduated from the MD Program at McMaster University in 2019 and built on her KI foundation and appled her KI skills and perspective.

And the tradition continues: in September 2018 Jamie, BKI'16 started medical school at McMaster, and Rachel, BKI'17, started medical school at Queen's University, and many more have followed their path.

KI is flexible enough that you can take prerequisites for medical school, and other professional health programs such as optometry and pharmacy.

The benefit of your KI experience is that you will take the unique KI core courses where you will develop skills including critical and creative thinking, collaboration, design and problem-solving that are important for success in the medical field.

In addition, since almost half of the KI courses are electives, you can choose courses in areas that will give you a valuable and broad background, such as psychology, history, political science, and even areas such as fine arts that can have very interesting connections to health professions.

"I have to thank the KI community for their support. I also think KI allowed me to have a diversity of experiences that helped me stand out in terms of the sketch I had to provide to get to the interview stage.

Once I got to the interview stage, KI had prepared me with an amazing framework to approach the MMI questions. I felt I was able to use my design and systems thinking approaches to break down different problems they gave me, and I think all of the group work in KI gave me good experience to approach the interpersonal issues and group tasks in the MMI. When you’re really nervous, like everyone is in those interviews, it can be difficult to think straight, but I think KI gave me so much practice being comfortable in new situations that all of those skills kicked in as second nature.

I’ve always thought KI is just about finding the area that you, as in individual, want to problem solve in — whether that’s within a traditional discipline or at an intersection between several traditional disciplines."

-- Alex Pearce, BKI 2016, MD Program at McMaster University, grad 2019

Learn more about the many paths KI grads follow.