Joseph Nika

By Brian Sodoma (contact)

Friday, May 1, 2009 | 2 a.m.

Joseph Nika plays an important role in getting University of Nevada, Las Vegas students into top medical programs, while elevating the university’s status as a premed destination.

As the director of UNLV’s preprofessional advising program, Nika helps students navigate their premed academic, volunteer and professional experiences to put together the best medical school application possible. A biology major in college, he also teaches a variety of premed courses, usually two each semester.

“I’m spoiled at UNLV. My classes are all senior level courses, and students that make it this far are really enriched and highly passionate about learning,” he said.

In 2005, Nika came to Las Vegas from the University of Dallas, a small Texas liberal arts college known for preparing students for medical school. He wasted little time in making an impression on the UNLV staff and the heads of the premedical and prepharmaceutical programs. When Nika arrived, only 33 percent of students classified as premed went on to medical school. Within two years, that number jumped to 51 percent, bettering the national average of 43 percent at the time.

But those figures underscore the program’s other successes, said Nika. Upon arriving at UNLV, he helped establish the nationally chartered prehealth honor society, Alpha Epsilon Delta. Nika also identified a student who could serve as the local chapter’s first president, and helped draft a constitution and file an application with the national charter. By the fall of 2005, the local chapter was started, and today, it has 172 students. But most importantly, its distinguished membership enjoys an 87 percent medical school acceptance rate.

“Once the students started to see the results, the chapter grew like wildfire,” Nika said.

Additionally, UNLV is seeing more students gain acceptance to more prestigious programs at schools such as Penn State, University at Albany, Temple University, University of Pennsylvania and University of California, Los Angeles, to name just a few.

Nika helps coordinate student clinical experience, community service and noncurricular requirements. For physician shadowing experiences, many students tend to tap into local physicians or their own doctors, Nika said. The group also relies heavily on Sunrise and Summerlin hospitals.

But in the area of community service, UNLV’s premed students are great assets to the valley. Because the group has a young and driven student population, humanitarian projects can be completed in a fraction of the time it takes many other groups, Nika said.

Aside from helping students move forward with successful medical careers, Nika offers two annual presentations that highlight the UNLV premed offerings for Clark County School District students.

“Many students are unaware of the fact that there are tremendous resources available at UNLV to allow them to build a competitive application for any health science program,” Nika said. “We have a comprehensive program — not only in terms of a science curriculum, but appropriate clinical experiences — engaging humanitarian service experience and research opportunities. … You’re not going to find another university in the country with better resources to help students build competitive applications than UNLV.”