Students will officially launch Duke's chapter of the American Medical Student Association at a meeting tonight, creating the University's first comprehensive undergraduate pre-medicine group.

AMSA is a national student organization representing physicians-in-training. The Duke chapter plans to combine resources with similar organizations on campus to help students find research and internship opportunities.

AMSA will also sponsor educational events so undergraduates can hear advice from physicians and medical students, and will help students network with people associated with the profession.

"The need was always there, there's not a central pre-med organization at Duke for everyone," said sophomore Alex Mathai, co-president of the AMSA chapter, noting that prior to the group's launch, the only pre-med groups on campus were organized around race or ethnicity.

"There's not a resource for information for guidance from older students [and] there's no one really putting on informative sessions regularly for pre-meds," he added.

The group is not being founded to replace the current pre-med groups on campus, but rather to create an "umbrella organization" of pre-med students, said sophomore Bilal Lateef, co-president of the AMSA chapter.

"Working together is going to make everybody's projects more successful," Mathai said. "When they do projects, we can help support that, and when we do projects, they can help support us, and it's just everybody working together for the same goals."

Lateef said he observed that some students were either becoming or dropping pre-med for the wrong reasons. He added that pre-med students tend to focus too much on grades and not enough on community service and work experience.

"Even though you may not be doing well in chemistry, don't drop pre-med," Lateef said. "Go to the hospital, shadow a physician, talk to different med school students.... We're trying to bring an extracurricular component of pre-medicine to the students at Duke."

AMSA will help the Health Professions Advising Center address student concerns directly and enable students to learn more about the resources HPAC offers, Mary Nijhout, associate dean of Trinity College of Arts and Sciences and interim director of HPAC, wrote in an e-mail.

"[I] hope that AMSA will coordinate programming for pre-health students to make it clear that admission, especially to medical school, will require strengths in service and patient-centered activities," she said.

Current projects AMSA is planning include a mentorship program between medical students and pre-med undergraduates, a program for pre-meds to sit in on medical school lectures and a program for admissions officers and medical students to critique pre-med students' resumes.

"One of the things we want to do is to be a venue for student leaders to step up and lead projects," Mathai said. "Every kid should have something they can talk about in... their application for med school of how they took a leadership role doing something."

Some students said they think AMSA will increase opportunities for pre-meds to learn about available resources and help them plan their four years at Duke.

"I'm pretty set on medicine, but I'm not exactly sure where to start-I don't know which different types of medical schools are out there," said freshman Upom Malik, a member of Duke's AMSA chapter. "I basically expect a way to organize my future."