Healthcare careers begin with a moment that feels real.
COPE Health Scholars creates structured, real-world experiences that help aspiring professionals discover where they belong while helping healthcare organizations invest in the people who will shape what comes next.
Not everyone begins with a perfect plan. They begin with curiosity.
The right experience can turn that curiosity into career clarity. COPE Health Scholars helps people understand healthcare from the inside while building the habits, confidence, and perspective required to move forward responsibly.
“The goal is not simply to observe healthcare. It is to understand how people, teams, systems, and service come together.”
See healthcare up close
Move beyond assumptions through structured exposure to real healthcare environments, roles, workflows, and patient-centered service.
Build professional confidence
Practice communication, accountability, teamwork, reflection, and professional conduct with preparation and ongoing guidance.
Move forward with purpose
Connect each experience to future education, applications, interviews, training, and meaningful work across healthcare.
Academic perspective, centered on real-world healthcare.
Through collaboration with UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, select COPE Health Scholars experiences connect public health and management perspectives with applied professional learning.
Systems perspective
Explore how policy, leadership, operations, and community needs influence healthcare delivery.
Applied learning
Connect academic frameworks to guided case work, discussion, and professional reflection.
Broader context
Understand how individual experiences connect to the larger healthcare system.
Collaboration details, faculty participation, learning activities, and completion credentials vary by program and cohort. Review the applicable program page for current details.
Experience becomes momentum when every step has purpose.
Preparation, meaningful participation, guided reflection, and a clear next step turn exposure into lasting professional growth.
Prepare
Understand expectations, responsibilities, safety, professionalism, and the purpose behind the experience.
Participate
Engage in approved activities, learn alongside healthcare teams, and contribute with care and accountability.
Reflect
Connect real moments to career interests, personal strengths, healthcare systems, and areas for continued growth.
Progress
Carry stronger examples, clearer direction, and greater confidence into the next educational or professional step.
Developing professionals who understand the human side of healthcare.
Healthcare is rooted in connection. Through patient support, outreach, hospital initiatives, and select global service opportunities, Scholars learn to see people, not just processes. They are encouraged to approach service with humility, awareness, and respect.
One experience can influence an entire career.
For more than 25 years, COPE Health Scholars has helped future healthcare professionals build experience, confidence, leadership, and clearer career direction.
Experience can grow into leadership across healthcare.
COPE Health Scholars is designed to build more than career exposure. Scholars strengthen communication, accountability, teamwork, mentorship, and leadership that can carry into future roles. The alumni community now spans medicine and surgery, nursing, physician assistant careers, therapy and allied health, healthcare administration and executive leadership, public health, research, quality and operations, and care coordination.
Leadership that protects quality while creating room to grow.
Our team brings together healthcare workforce development, program operations, international education, technology, and regional leadership to support Scholars and partner organizations.
Allen Miller
Principal & Chief Executive Officer
Alexis Pierce
Assistant Vice President
Matthew Helfand
Technical Solutions Lead
Kiyoko Miller
Principal, International Education Programs
Virginia Kosinski
Senior Operations Manager
Cameron McKain
Technical Analyst
Emma Balouzian
Regional Manager
Christina Boryk
Regional Manager
Find the experience that moves your healthcare goals forward.
COPE Health Scholars offers distinct pathways for hospital experience, early career exploration, patient navigation, and global healthcare learning. Eligibility, schedule, location, and activities vary by program.
Health Scholars
Build structured hospital experience, support patients and healthcare teams within an approved scope of practice, explore available departments, and develop professional confidence.
Junior Health Scholars
A structured introduction to hospital environments before college, with preparation, guidance, and site-approved responsibilities.
Explore Junior Health Scholars
Care Navigator Scholars
Build experience in patient communication, resource navigation, outreach, documentation, and care coordination.
Explore Care Navigator Scholars
Japan International Health Scholar Intensive
A 12-day professional global healthcare intensive in Tokyo that combines graduate-level lectures, clinical site visits, comparative health systems learning, expert faculty and healthcare leader panels, curated cultural excursions, and faculty mentorship, culminating in an interdisciplinary comparative case study and formal group presentation.
TOKYO, JAPANCompare audience, eligibility, setting, time commitment, and career focus across every pathway.
Choose the next experience that fits your goals.
Explore COPE Health Scholars programs for aspiring healthcare professionals, or visit the partnership page to learn how healthcare organizations can bring Scholars to their communities.