Through fieldwork, students obtain exposure to a variety of clinical specialties, including prenatal, pediatric, cancer, fertility, cardiovascular, neurogenetics, and multidisciplinary specialty clinics.
Students must complete 18 credits of clinical training:
- First year fieldwork: Introductory Fieldwork (1 credit)
- Summer Intensive Internship (5 credits)
- Second-year fieldwork: four blocks - Fall 1, Fall 2, Spring 1, Spring 2 (12 credits)
Students begin applying their fundamental genetic counseling skills to simulated patient sessions in the spring semester of their first year. Summer placements are typically full-time at five days per week for eight weeks or four days per week for 10 weeks. Throughout the second year, two days per week are dedicated to fieldwork.
Across each students’ fieldwork path, there is a concerted effort to ensure a diversity of patient populations, practice settings, counseling and supervision styles, and service delivery models. Most placements conducted during the academic year are based in the greater New York area. For the Summer Intensive, students are encouraged to seek out sites where they would like to learn and work; going abroad is acceptable, as is staying in the New York area.
Sarah Lawrence has established affiliations with more than 50 genetics centers in the New York metropolis – the greatest concentration of such centers in the world, where students encounter an ethnically and socioeconomically diverse population and have the chance to work with genetic counselors and other health care professionals in direct and indirect patient care, including clinics, industry, research, public health, and education.
Our fieldwork partners include most of the major academic medical centers and top research institutions in the region, such as:
- Albert Einstein College of Medicine/Montefiore Medical Center
- New York Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center
- NYU Langone Medical Center
- Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center
- New York Medical College/Westchester Medical Center
- Northwell Health
Additional Fieldwork Opportunities
Sarah Lawrence has longstanding affiliations with two Leadership Education in Neurodevelopmental and Other Related Disabilities (LEND) fellowship programs:
- Rose F. Kennedy LEND program at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine (https://www.einsteinmed.edu/centers/childrens-evaluation-rehabilitation/training/)
- Westchester Institute for Human Development LEND program (https://www.wihd.org/training/lend/)
Each year Sarah Lawrence first year genetic counseling students are invited to apply to each of these LEND programs. Selected LEND fellows meet for interdisciplinary training one day per week throughout their second year of graduate school.
More information about the LEND program can be found here: