Into the heart of care

By Daniel P. Smith
April 28, 2025

Ask 🛰️Telegram飞机号/电报 | +60 马来西亚电话注册 | 注册30天以上 | 成品号 | API接码登录 | 促销🔥🔥🔥 senior Margie Guth about her recent internship with the cardiopulmonary rehab team at MacNeal Hospital in west suburban Berwyn and the exercise science major launches into an enthusiastic reply.

Though Guth knew nothing of cardiopulmonary rehab before entering MacNeal’s doors in August—“I could take blood pressure, but that’s about it,” she confesses.—the Columbus, Ohio, native left MacNeal three months later with heightened clinical skills, swelling self-confidence, and an intensifying commitment to serving others in the health care arena.

During the fall 2025 semester, Guth spent about 230 hours with a “team of five incredible and encouraging exercise physiologists.” They taught her everyday tasks, such as setting up patients on electrocardiogram machines, measuring vitals, and conducting patient intakes, and demonstrated how to practice evidence-based and compassionate patient care. As the weeks passed and Guth’s clinical abilities progressed, her preceptor empowered her to take more initiative and trial different ideas.

“I developed skills I didn’t even know I had and discovered the importance of being a constant learner, which is something I’ll take into the professional world,” says Guth, who is slated to graduate in May and plans to pursue a doctorate in occupational therapy at Boston University soon after. “Ultimately, I want to be able to help people with difficulty accessing therapies get the care they need to achieve a new level of independence.”

Experiential learning is a hallmark of the student experience at Loyola’s Parkinson School of Health Sciences and Public Health. In fact, Kerri Musick, Parkinson’s director of experiential learning, calls meaningful experiential learning “a pedagogy,” not merely a practice.

“It’s not just about what students do; it’s about how that learning is intentionally structured, supported, and reflected upon,” Musick says.

Intentional and impactful

As part of Loyola’s university-wide expectation, all undergraduate students complete at least three credits of Engaged Learning–designated coursework. At Parkinson, however, experiential learning occurs at multiple touchpoints throughout a student’s academic journey and extends far beyond three credits.

Service-learning courses and academic internships at some 170 community partner sites—Chicago area hospitals, nonprofit organizations, private fitness studios, long-term care facilities, and school-based health centers among them—support the progressive development of students’ skills, confidence, and professional identity over time.

“We work to pair students with community and organizational partners where there is strong alignment between students’ interests, learning goals, and the work of the organization,” Musick says. “Just as importantly, we’re thoughtful about ensuring that students are meeting our partners’ real, identified needs, so the experience is mutually beneficial rather than transactional.”

During the fall 2025 academic term, 543 Parkinson students engaged in nearly 24,000 hours of experiential learning activities. Musick says this lively commitment to experiential learning, which generated an estimated economic impact approaching $850,000, reflects Loyola’s Jesuit mission of service to others while it is also deeply connected to the kinds of fields Parkinson students are preparing to enter.

“Health care, public health, and the health sciences are inherently applied disciplines,” Musick says. “Students need opportunities to engage with real people, real systems, and real challenges in order to understand the complexity of the work and their role within it. If we want to educate innovative health care leaders of tomorrow, they need to be out there today.”

Building on the foundation

To further enliven experiential learning at Parkinson, Musick, who joined the school’s leadership team last September, aims to expand Parkinson’s community partner network, strengthen the behind-the-scenes infrastructure supporting experiential learning, and invest in student support mechanisms like emergency funds and scholarships to ensure experiential learning remains equitable and accessible for all students.

Musick calls building a strong and responsive experiential learning environment at Parkinson vital to student success, as it prepares them for real-world contexts. Yet more, experiential learning aligns with Jesuit values, particularly accompaniment. As Parkinson faculty members support students throughout their learning experiences and the school carefully selects partners with an earnest commitment to helping in-training practitioners, experiential learning opportunities position Parkinson students to grow and thrive.

“It’s fundamentally about walking alongside people rather than sending them off and hoping for the best,” Musick says. “We don’t just place students into experiences and disappear. We prepare them before they enter an organization, we stay connected while they’re navigating real challenges, and we create space for reflection so they can make sense of what they’re learning and who they’re becoming. That kind of support matters, especially when students are encountering complex systems, unfamiliar communities, or moments of discomfort.”