Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Baltimore, United States; Department of Mental Health, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, United States
Graduate programs in the biomedical sciences dedicate considerable resources to recruiting students from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups. However, students from these minoritized groups have decreased access to the ‘hidden curriculum’ that must be navigated in order to be successful in graduate school. Here, we describe a student-led initiative at Johns Hopkins University, the Hidden Curriculum Symposium, that is organized to help prepare new students from underrepresented groups for graduate school. Preliminary evidence from surveys suggests that the initiative does increase the preparedness of minoritized students, and we believe this approach could also prove useful at other academic institutions.