The automatic doors of Knox Community Hospital’s emergency department slide open, and a Kenyon student steps inside — for the first time as something other than a patient or a visitor. They are here to help, and for many of them, nothing in their college career will compare to what comes next.
Their class, Biology 211: Health Services and Biomedical Analysis, is built around a simple but powerful premise: You cannot truly understand medicine solely by reading about it. Once a week, every student completes a four-hour volunteer shift in the Mount Vernon emergency department — shadowing physicians and nurses, watching cases unfold in real time, and absorbing the particular rhythm of a rural Ohio hospital.
“The speed at which decisions happen is a surprise to almost everyone,” says Peter Kropp, Harvey F. Lodish Faculty Development Chair in Natural Sciences and assistant professor of biology, who began teaching the course in 2024 after a five-year gap caused by the pandemic. “You have to be able to make decisions quickly and trust those decisions. Sometimes with, sometimes without consultation with others.”
Afterward, students return to the classroom each week and do something more difficult than it sounds: put language to their experience. They talk about what they saw, what they understood, and what they didn’t. It is in the friction between experience and reflection, Kropp says, that genuine growth happens. By the end of the semester, the difference in how they carry themselves is visible.
A Living Course
Though the in-class portion of the seminar can prepare students for a lot, it cannot equip them for everything. No syllabus can fully prepare a student for watching a physician make a life-altering call in under 30 seconds. Or for sitting with a frightened patient who has no one else in the room. Or for witnessing someone’s death.
These are not things any syllabus can anticipate, and Kropp has never pretended otherwise. That commitment to honesty extends beyond the hospital — it shapes the curriculum itself. Seminar topics shift from semester to semester, chosen in close consultation with hospital staff to reflect what cases students are most likely to encounter. The goal is a course that stays current, not comfortable.
When Kropp first taught the course in fall 2024, the class was already scheduled to examine the American health insurance industry — how coverage decisions shape patient care, how providers and patients navigate a system that frequently works against both. Halfway through the semester, the topic became not just timely but urgent.
“It wasn’t intended to be a current topic discussion, but it turned into one,” Kropp said, citing the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in December 2024. “We were able to use that to talk about the dissatisfaction people have with the insurance industry, and how policy currently moving through Congress may be impacting some of these aspects of healthcare.”
The same responsiveness has shaped how the course handles COVID-19 — not just the biology of the virus, but its lasting effects on healthcare workers’ mental health; vaccine policy and public trust; and the infrastructure of emergency care that the pandemic strained to its limit. Where other courses might treat these as settled history, Biology 211 treats them as live questions.
Sustaining that responsiveness, though, requires something less glamorous but just as important: ongoing relationship-building. When Kropp stepped in, he inherited a partnership with the hospital that had gone quiet for five years. Rebuilding it meant re-educating new hospital leadership, re-establishing trust with Kenyon’s Office of Community Partnerships — work that continues quietly in the background every semester.
“Like any relationship, it takes work to maintain,” Kropp said. “But we continue to see improvements, and we are constantly working together to try to make it as good as possible.”
What Students Take Away
Kropp’s answer to what he’s proudest of isn’t what you might expect. He doesn’t reach first for academic outcomes or placement statistics (though he could, as most students who take the class go on to medical school). He talks about what happens to students when the comfortable assumptions they arrive with start to break down — when the hospital doesn’t match the version of medicine they had in their heads.
These experiences also have a way of posing a question students may not have expected to face so soon: Is medicine the right path for me? Many students arrive in class certain they want to be pre-med and leave with that conviction deepened. But some have the opposite experience entirely — and Kropp doesn’t see that as a failure.
“In some ways, I would argue that that is a more valuable experience — to learn that now, before going into medical school or physician assistant school or nursing school, and discovering it’s not the career path for you.”
Either way, this is what the course is designed to produce: an honest encounter with medicine before the stakes become permanent.
“Many students are forced into maturing to some degree,” Kropp said, “They are experiencing things they have never seen or experienced before.”
That maturity isn’t taught. It’s earned — standing in a working emergency department, watching someone make a decision you couldn’t have made, and then going back to class and trying to explain why it stayed with you. That gap between experience and language is where Biology 211: Health Services and Biomedical Analysis does its most important work.