When Dr. Amanda Jensen Wright ’03, met the more than 200 incoming first-year medical students and master’s degree students at Marian University’s Tom and Julie Wood College of Osteopathic Medicine this fall, she greeted them as she does every new class – each with an acorn and a special message just for them.
May you be curious.
May you be strong.
May you keep promises.
“I’ve taken the Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College’s (SMWC) acorn and lovingly stolen pieces, and it’s become a neat tradition now at Marian, too,” said Wright, who has been dean of Wood College since 2020. “I stress that they have all the potential to do anything they want, but it means they’ll have to have the right soil, and we will provide all of it that we can.”
It’s an offer now extended to her alma mater after SMWC signed an articulation agreement with the Wood College of Osteopathic Medicine last May.
Under the agreement, Marian’s Osteopathic Medicine program will reserve a total of 10 interview spots for SMWC students. Five spots are for early decision, meaning qualified students could interview for Marian’s School of Osteopathic Medicine in September of their senior year at SMWC and receive an acceptance decision within one week.
The other five spots are for students in the guaranteed interview track. This ensures students an interview in October of their senior year at SMWC with an acceptance decision by November.
To qualify, students must be biology majors with a preprofessional concentration. Depending on the track they choose, they must maintain at least a 3.5 GPA and score no less than 500 on the MCAT.
Keeley Cleghorn, assistant professor of biology at SMWC, serves as a mentor for students. She says students often know they want to be a vet or a doctor, but they haven’t chosen a field.
“As they take classes, we talk about different routes – physician assistant, dental or medical. Now, we have a new path they can get into – osteopathic medicine,” she said. “It’s a medical doctor that emphasizes more holistic methods. There’s a push now to look at the well-being of the whole person, and this gives students a chance to really expand and look at the entire human being.”
After graduating from SMWC, Wright earned her doctor of osteopathic medicine degree at the Chicago College of Osteopathic Medicine and completed her family medicine residency at the University of Illinois College of Medicine at Peoria.
She says osteopathic physicians and schools used to make up only a small sliver of the market, but the field is growing fast. Right now, one in four medical students is an osteopathic medicine student. That figure could grow to one in three students by 2030.
“You’ll find that a lot of osteopathic medicine physicians go into primary care,” she said. “I think that harkens back to our foundation of helping empower patients to care for themselves and live a healthy lifestyle. At our school’s last (residency) match in March 2025, we had 59 percent of our students going into primary care specialties.”
The need is especially great in Indiana, where Wright says 62 of the state’s 92 counties are experiencing primary care shortages.
“We have to do better for our state to prepare for the future of healthcare,” she said. “We want students who do their undergrad in Indiana to do medical school, residency and practice in Indiana.”
Applying to medical school is both competitive and expensive, though, making the agreement between SMWC and Marian an even greater opportunity for students.
“You put out so many applications, and you don’t know if you’re even going to get an interview, let alone get in. I think that’s the major benefit for Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College students,” Wright said. “If they have a certain GPA and MCAT score, and they send an application to Marian, they know they’re guaranteed an interview. It’s a 100 percent guarantee. There aren’t many of those.”
Wright says the partnership is a testament to the reputation of SMWC and its students.
“It means that Marian’s Wood College of Osteopathic Medicine thinks that great students come out of SMWC,” she said. “I have a lot of faith in a Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College graduate’s ability to come in and present themselves well and be a highly competitive applicant once the door is opened. This agreement just makes it much easier for that door to swing open.”
Even freshmen and sophomores at SMWC can prepare for the program, Wright says, by maintaining the GPA requirement all four years, especially in science courses, and preparing to take the MCAT, most likely junior year.
Wright says Wood College offers more of the same student-centered approach they’ve grown accustomed to at SMWC.
“I love when students come from somewhere like Saint Mary-of-the-Woods,” Wright said. “You’re going to be in a class with 160 students, but their faculty will know their names like they’ve had before. They will have people who are committed to them. I cannot ask a student to be holistically centered on the patient if we are not holistically centered on them as a student when they are here.”