Homewood welcomes new pre-professional advisor

Kelli Johnson was named the new director of pre-professional advising at Hopkins in late January, taking over from outgoing director David Verrier, who is retiring. Johnson has spent the last four years as the assistant dean and director for pre-professional advising at New York University (NYU).

In an interview with The News-Letter, Johnson explained how she hopes to best serve undergraduates in her new role.

“I’ve had experience as a career counselor, as an academic advisor and as a pre-professional advisor,” Johnson said. “Having exposure to all of those three things gives me a unique perspective. I’ll always be evaluating the services that we offer to make sure that students are being served in the best way that we can possibly serve them.”

Johnson, who has a background in law, said she was initially focused on pre-law advising at NYU but gained experience with pre-health advising after transitioning to work with undergraduates.

“I only spent a year working solely on the pre-law program at NYU, and then I was promoted to oversee the whole office,” she said. “So I was working with pre-health and pre-law students. I feel very well-versed in pre-health advising. I get really excited about helping students set goals and reach them.”

In her first weeks on campus, Johnson said she has mostly been observing the pre-professional advising office.

“I’m hoping to bring a fresh eye to pre-professional advising,” she said. “I’m still getting up to speed and I want to make sure that I have a real understanding of what’s going on here, why we do things the way that we do.”

Sophomore Ruchita Kothari was part of a student panel that interviewed the candidates for the position and reflected on some of her first impressions of Johnson.

“I remember being really surprised at first because she’s actually pretty young,” Kothari said. “She definitely had a lot of experience. She knew what she was doing and she seemed like she had a lot of good ideas to reach out to freshmen and sophomores.”

Johnson is taking over the position from Verrier who many students regarded highly. Kothari said that transitioning students from Johnson to Verrier was only a small concern for her.

“Ms. Johnson coming from more of a law background is a little bit concerning, but she has worked with a lot of students in pre-med as well,” she said. “So I don’t think that’s as much of an issue.”

Junior Clarissa Martin agreed with Kothari that Johnson’s previous experience with pre-med students at NYU makes her qualified for the position.

“I think it’s preferable that she have more experience with applying to med school, because that’s what most of the applicants who utilize the pre-professional center do,” Martin said. “But she’s already been working with pre-med students applying to med school.”

Both Martin and Kothari agreed that it was good to see Verrier helping Johnson with the transition. Sophomore Ramya Prabhakar offered a slightly different perspective as a pre-law student.

“I don’t think that her legal background hinders her ability to lead the department as a whole,” Prabhakar wrote in an email to The News-Letter. “In fact, I think it’s better that she doesn’t come from a medical background. There are ample resources for pre-med students but not a whole lot for other pre-professional advising programs.”

Johnson said that she hoped to expand the pre-professional advising department to be more all-encompassing so that all students feel supported by pre-professional advising.

“One of the things that was important to me in my past experience was to put more of a focus on being a pre-health advising office rather than a pre-med advising office,” she said. “Just exposing students to careers in healthcare that aren’t specifically in the clinical practice of medicine. Here, there is a very strong focus on medicine. There’s certainly nothing wrong with that, but I do want to make sure the students are informed about other career opportunities.”

Johnson said she would also like to expand the services offered to pre-law students. However, she does not expect to make any immediate or dramatic changes.

Some students have expressed discontent with changes in the pre-professional advising policy that limits underclassmen access for advisor appointments, which some feel unfairly prioritizes juniors and seniors.

“I think that’s wrong,” Martin said. “The pre-professional office is not just important for applying to medical school. I used it to find out what my schedule should be for my sophomore year when I was a freshman. If I had never met with Dr. Verrier, I probably wouldn’t still be a neuroscience major, and because I followed his advice, I did really well last year.”

Kothari, on the other hand, sympathized with the office and said that it wasn’t a huge change.

“As far as I know, freshman and sophomores do meet with the pre-med advisors but not as often,” she said. “Dr. Verrier only met with upperclassmen who were really going through the process, because they are pretty overwhelmed with the amount of students.”

Agreeing with Kothari that the office lacked resources, Prabhakar wrote that this specifically affected students who were not pre-med. She indicated that she had made an appointment with Johnson and met with her to talk about a summer internship, despite being a sophomore.

“She told me she had a legal background, which was particularly helpful because she was able to give me some solid advice,” Prabhakar wrote. “She seemed to know what she was talking about and had a great balance of not telling me exactly what to do but giving me enough information to allow me to make my own decision.”

Johnson stressed that the office aims to be accessible for everyone but that they were taking steps to more efficiently provide underclassmen with baseline information to free up more time to meet with juniors and seniors.

“Our goal is always to make sure that we’re able to help our students be successful,” Johnson said. “All of our students are important to us. We encourage all of our students to make contact with our office early and often.”