Dear Texas State Pre-Health Community,
I wanted to let you all know that Dr. Pesthy will be on medical leave for the remainder of the spring semester. As such, she will not be able to do any work for Texas State to include tasks and duties associated with teaching and advising.
HIPAA prevents me from providing further details, but I have spoken with Dr. Pesthy, and she is well. I am quite sure she would welcome your prayers and positive vibes and thoughts. We ask that you respect her privacy and not bombard Dr. Pesthy with emails sent to her university email account.
Clearly, for many of you, this may raise some questions and concerns. Let me attempt to address them here.
- For any student who had booked an advising appointment with Dr. Pesthy for this week, next week, or beyond, those appointments have been cancelled and will not be rescheduled. Dr. Pesthy’s advisees may not schedule an appointment with me, but I am willing to respond to emails with clear, specific requests for information if that would be helpful to you.
- For any student who is assigned to Dr. Pesthy for pre-health advising, please note. This semester, and this semester only, you may need to rely more heavily on your academic advisors for course planning, our pre-health advising website for general information, and your professors, advisors, peers and colleagues for support.
- For those of you who are planning to apply to medical or dental school this cycle and were planning to get a committee letter from Dr. Pesthy, DO NOT WORRY. We are already putting contingency plans in place and you will all be able to participate fully in the committee letter process and we will ensure that high quality committee letters are written and submitted for you.
- For those of you who are planning to apply to medical or dental school this year and had signed up for one of the application workshops that Dr. Pesthy was going to oversee, those workshops will go on as planned, in-person, but I will be presenting them. You could choose any workshop you wanted, it did not matter who was running it, so this should not be an issue.
- Freshmen who are assigned to either me or Dr. Pesthy for advising, and believe they are eligible to apply for admission to the Joint Admission Medical Program (JAMP) this year, you need to email me soon.
The spring CARS (Critical Analysis and Reading Skills) workshop and the Personal Statement writing workshop will go on as planned this semester. Be on the lookout for more information about those workshops in the next few weeks.
Remember also that the annual Health Professions Programs Fair is coming up on Wednesday, February 24. I will send out a reminder about this event soon as it will go on as planned.
Finally, it is, as always, my privilege and honor to work with the wonderful pre-health students that we have on this campus, and I am committed to doing all I can for you. However, I must ask for your grace and patience going forward. I may not respond to emails or phone calls as quickly as I normally do, and I may even let an email slip through the cracks now and again. Gentle, kind reminders are appreciated if that appears to be the case.
I will continue to update you with relevant information as it becomes available.
Thank you for taking the time to read this email.
Respectfully,
Dr. Banta
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Marilyn R. Banta, Ph.D.
(she,her,hers)
Pre-Health Advisor
Senior Lecturer
Department of Biology
Texas State University
601 University Dr.
San Marcos, TX 78666
(off) 512.245.3367
(fax) 512.245.8713
Mb79
Click HERE to schedule your
pre-health advising appointment!
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