An international medical fraternity will join the campus ranks next fall, aiming to bring together pre-medical students to help them prepare for the competitive nature of medical school.

Eric Davis, one of the founders of Phi Delta Epsilon at Syracuse University, received e-mail confirmation Wednesday that the fraternity will colonize at SU. The fraternity is only for pre-med students, he said.

Davis and co-founder Paul No, both sophomore pre-med students, have already reached out to SU professors and plan to reach out to local hospitals for members to find internship opportunities in the medical field, Davis said. He predicts about 30 students will join the fraternity next fall.

About 15 people attended a general interest meeting about the fraternity on Feb. 18 and were thrilled by the possibility of it, Davis said.

‘They liked the fact that we would all be pre-med and that we’d be able to do our work together,’ he said.

In a time when pre-med students are competing with applicants of all different backgrounds and connections for medical school, Phi Delta Epsilon will aim to make SU pre-med students just as competitive as those at other schools, such as Johns Hopkins University and Yale University, said No, the other SU pre-med fraternity founder.

Rather than just helping members receive good GPAs, the fraternity should give members the opportunity to work with other pre-med students, No said. Some pre-med students apply to medical school with decent grades but don’t get in, he said.

‘That’s the biggest problem: a lot of students that have the grades, but they’re not well-rounded,’ No said.

No and Davis developed the idea to bring the fraternity to SU after Davis spoke with a friend during Winter Break at the Phi Delta Epsilon fraternity at Binghamton University, where the first Phi Delta Epsilon pre-med fraternity started in 1994. After hearing his friend highlight how members worked together to reach medical school, Davis went home and researched the fraternity, he said.

He then told No about it, and both reached out to Phi Delta Epsilon’s CEO when they returned to school in January, Davis said. During an hourlong conversation, Davis and No found out what they needed to do to start the fraternity at SU and learned about the history of Phi Delta Epsilon, Davis said.

Davis and No are officially recognized as an interest group of the fraternity until they colonize next fall, Davis said. An interest group is responsible for finding university faculty who will help students discover resources to get into medical school, said Phi Delta Epsilon CEO Karen Katz.

‘Our fraternity has more than a handful of interest groups around the world,’ she said.

Though Phi Delta Epsilon started in 1904 as a medical fraternity, it didn’t start pre-med chapters until 1994. Now the fraternity has 45 pre-med chapters, Katz said.

When determining whether or not to colonize at a university, Phi Delta Epsilon officials look at the number of students who apply to the university and get into medical school, the number of pre-med majors, the type of education in the area and where partners and physicians are, Katz said.

‘When we start a colony, we do so only if we know that the student group will thrive for years to come,’ she said.

The founders of the SU chapter will hold another general interest meeting March 25 in the Lundgren Room of the Life Sciences Complex, where Davis said the group will continue to hold meetings in the future.

mcboren@syr.edu

Published on March 9, 2011 at 12:00 pm