Columbia-Bassett Program

Message From the Dean

A stone bridge near Cooperstown, New York.
Henry F.C. Weil, MD

Dear Applicants,

In 2010, Columbia opened the Columbia-Bassett Program. You can learn a great deal about this program, its location, its focus on root causes of illness, and its underlying health systems rationale on this website.

The first year and one half of this curriculum takes place in New York City, where you will join your classmates in largely pre-clinical studies, complemented by special Columbia-Bassett sessions on systems-oriented skills and trauma responsive care. The second phase, will be based in Cooperstown, where students’ clinical experiences at Bassett’s campus will consist of a carefully designed mix of scheduled inpatient and outpatient experiences in parallel with longitudinal care of your own panel of patients. The third phase is a year and a half of electives and pursuit of an area of research drawn from the available full array of opportunities at both campuses.

In addition to the above, at Columbia-Bassett:

  • You will work in an environment that emphasizes relationships on all levels.
  • These longitudinal relationships will not only facilitate your education, but provide an intimate view of the various subspecialists and their lives with patients, as you try to pick your own career path.
  • You will engage in a supportive process to determine which career path within medicine is most interesting to you and most suitable to your innate skills.
  • You will experience health education in the best of two worlds: NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital and Cooperstown’s Bassett Healthcare. The contrasts of setting and patient population will merge for you in the single mission of learning to help people in their pursuit of health.

I look forward to meeting you.

Henry Weil, MD 
Senior Associate Dean for the Columbia-Bassett Program

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