Valerie Neff Newitt
August 2026—A series of hands-on or role-playing workshops created by pathology student interest group leaders at a California medical school introduced pathology to dozens of students who would have otherwise completed their curriculum without that exposure.
“Exposure sparks curiosity and confidence to take action,” says Sarah Galloway, a third-year medical student at California University of Science and Medicine, in Colton, who cofounded the CUSM pathology student interest group with Ella Martinetto and Anthony Mamaril during their first year of medical school.
“Many medical students graduate without an understanding of how pathologists contribute to patient care. This workshop series inspires some to further explore pathology and teaches others how to work well with their future pathology colleagues,” Galloway says. “And it’s a program that’s adaptable and practical to host at other institutions,” including those with limited resources.
They didn’t set out to persuade students to choose pathology, Galloway says, but to encourage further exploration of pathology during clerkships. They targeted first- and second-year students.
At one of the SIG’s early meetings, Galloway and her cofounders talked about how to introduce other medical students to pathology. Galloway, who this year completed a post-sophomore fellowship in pathology at Stanford Medicine, proposed a hands-on simulation workshop. “Then collaboratively the idea evolved into the six-part annual workshop series that we love.”
They met twice monthly to design the first few workshops and secure funding, obtain IRB approval, and conduct a pilot session. After the first workshop was held, in 2023, three other SIG members—Ty Thompson, Julia Gonda, and Francesca Johnson—joined them in designing and implementing the workshops. Helena Spartz, MD, PhD, who at that time was associate professor of pathology in medical education and pathology and SIG mentor at CUSM, worked with the students. She is now in a new position in Texas.
“It was 100 percent student driven,” Dr. Spartz says of the workshop series.
Flyers were the means of communicating about the workshops, and food was the draw.
The subspecialties highlighted in the workshops were endocrinology, gastroenterology, cardiology, hematology, dermatology, and obstetrics-gynecology. All were one hour except for the two-hour Ob-gyn workshop, presented by Galloway, in which students were led through the stages of patient care for an ectopic pregnancy case.
In the cardiology workshop, led by Gonda, students were led through a porcine heart dissection with a paired lecture on cardiac anatomy and pathophysiology. In the gastroenterology workshop, each student assumed the role of pathologist, surgeon, oncologist, radiologist, gastroenterologist, or internist to simulate a tumor board discussion for a colorectal cancer case.
In endocrinology, students practiced ultrasound-guided fine-needle aspiration on nodular thyroid phantoms. In hematology, they reviewed mock blood transfusion reaction cases, determined causes of the reactions, and completed prevention assessment explaining how to reduce future such reactions. And in dermatology, they worked through a mock squamous cell carcinoma case.
“We ensured at least one board-certified pathologist was present at each workshop to answer questions, offer clinical insight, and connect with students and provide a networking opportunity,” Galloway says. CUSM, which opened in 2015 and had its first cohort in 2017, doesn’t have an affiliated hospital, but it does have a partnership with nearby Arrowhead Regional Medical Center. “Pathologists were kind enough to come over and volunteer their time,” she says of the pathology faculty members, who also reviewed for accuracy the materials used in the workshops.
The pathology workshops have been held every year since 2023, even as the pathology SIG leadership has transitioned to new students. “It’s been especially rewarding to see the program become self-sustaining,” Galloway says, “and that continuity has helped establish PathSIG as one of the most active student interest groups on campus.”
Surveys were administered before and after each workshop in the 2023–2024 series and 15 months after the last workshop in that series, with results reported in Archives of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine (Galloway S, et al. Arch Pathol Lab Med. 2026;150[7]:564–571).
“Feedback was overwhelmingly positive,” Galloway says. “Nearly every participant reported they enjoyed the workshops, would attend more sessions, and found them valuable as a study tool for exams.”
Responses from each survey were analyzed to look for changes pre- and post-workshop. Significant improvement was seen in the attendees’ reported understanding of the roles of a pathologist and of the field of pathology, but there was no significant difference in the degree to which they were considering pathology as a career.
There were 151 total attendees at the workshops, 111 of whom completed the pre- and post-workshop surveys. Sixty-seven individual students contributed the 111 responses because students attended multiple workshops. (The workshops were open to all CUSM students, but study participants were limited to pre-clerkship students. The 67 students were about one quarter of all eligible participants.)
The 15-month follow-up survey was distributed to 54 attendees and 40 responded. All 40 agreed the workshops were successful in demonstrating how pathologists contribute to patient care. When asked if they were considering a career in pathology, two of 40 agreed, 14 of 40 were neutral, 14 of 40 disagreed, 10 of 40 strongly disagreed, and none strongly agreed.
Sixteen of 40 responded to the question about how the workshops influenced their clerkship experiences, perspectives, or intentions. Seven of the 16 said the workshops sparked and/or solidified their interest in pathology and led to their considering or applying for a pathology rotation.
“Many students acknowledged the effort it looked like it took to put on the workshops,” Galloway says, “and they were grateful for the opportunity to have this exposure.”
As to the impact of workshops on whether the students consider pathology as a career, she says: “Choosing a specialty is such a multifactorial decision. We just wanted to provide meaningful exposure to enable informed career decisions rather than encourage a particular choice. Our primary objective was educational.”
Dr. Spartz, SIG mentor, agrees. “These are first-year medical students, and they don’t yet know what they want to do,” she says. “I don’t feel that is a negative outcome as long as they become interested in and understanding of the roles of the pathologist.”
Still, Dr. Spartz would like to step up the focus on the choice of pathology as a career in her plan to recreate the workshops in her current position at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center in El Paso, where she is associate professor of pathology in medical education and pathology. “Our goal is to demonstrate we can use the different set of resources at different institutions to roll out these workshops, as long as you have a lot of student interest, as long as the students are developing it, as long as the students have a good feeling for what’s available and not available in terms of support,” she says.
Her hope, in short, is that by replicating and tweaking it, they will learn how other institutions can modify and implement the workshops. “A lot of what was started in California is informative of next steps to enhance the next iteration,” Dr. Spartz says.
Though more resources are available at Texas Tech than at CUSM, “I’m trying to do it with as few resources as possible, or with as few new resources as possible, to keep it inexpensive,” she says, so it can be implemented across institutions of varying resources.
Galloway estimates the cost of the full workshop series (catered lunches and materials that can be reused each year) at $1,000, with the SIG budget covering food and a CAP Foundation Sparking Interest in Pathology Award “instrumental in helping to make the workshops possible.”
Now that Galloway has completed her post-sophomore fellowship and her SIG colleagues their pathology clerkships, they see how the workshops can be strengthened and have developed several ideas to do so. Two examples: “I would incorporate models of skin biopsies into the dermatology workshop and, for another session, create a simulated breast cancer resection to teach students how to gross and ink surgical specimens,” Galloway says.
Their aim in publishing the details of their workshop series in Archives of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine, she says, was so that the specifics would serve as a guide for other groups “to develop even better workshops that serve their students.”
Having learned what she learned, she has advice for others: Create a budget and get it approved ahead of time, and strategically schedule and advertise workshops to get maximum participation from students. “If they don’t know, they won’t come. And if it doesn’t sound exciting, they won’t come.” In addition, prioritize hands-on simulations over lectures alone.
Dr. Spartz, too, has advice. The engagement of the pathology department and other departments is important, she says, as is the engagement of pathology residents and determining what resources are available.
She hopes with further development the workshops can generate interest in pathology as a career, “because we do have a deficit.
“I think we can get there,” she continues. “I think we can get more interest in the field, in the students at least doing an elective to explore pathology as a career, and maybe going into pathology.
“That was an original goal, and I think we can get there.”
Valerie Neff Newitt is a writer in Audubon, Pa. Galloway and her workshop team welcome questions from interested readers; she can be reached at sarah.galloway00@gmail.com.