Columbia-Bassett Program

Message From the Deans

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

Katrina Armstrong, MD 

Dear Applicants,

The Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons (VP&S) has been proud to partner with Bassett Healthcare in rural upstate New York since 1947 to give our students a unique clinical experience. Generations of Columbia graduates have described their rotation in Cooperstown as among their best clinical experiences during medical school. Columbia and Bassett were proud to expand this experience by establishing the Columbia-Bassett Program, which welcomed its first class of 10 VP&S students in 2012 as they began their Major Clinical Year in Cooperstown.

Cooperstown is a beautiful and exceptional village, and your time at Bassett Healthcare will expose you to an efficient health system and a longitudinal integrated curriculum that allows students to follow a panel of patients for a full year across specialties. A great clinical education always accompanies a Columbia diploma, but participants in the Columbia-Bassett Program also will have innovative experiences by learning about health delivery in an integrated hospital network.

Your time in the Columbia-Bassett Program will not only enrich your medical school experience, it also will benefit your patients throughout your career.


Katrina Armstrong, MD
Chief Executive Officer, Columbia University Irving Medical Center
Executive Vice President for Health and Biomedical Sciences, Columbia University
Dean of the Faculties of Health Sciences and the Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons
Harold and Margaret Hatch Professor in the Faculty of Medicine