Certificates & Curriculum

3 units

This is where the program begins. You will be introduced to the many lenses gerontology draws on and what makes aging different in rural places. 

You will also build the essential knowledge every practitioner needs: professional ethics, recognizing elder mistreatment, the long-term care continuum, and the realities of dementia and family caregiving. 

From the first week, you will begin an Elder Life History Interview, two conversations with an older adult in your own community that unfold across the full eight weeks. Many students find this relationship is what stays with them longest.

3 units

This course explores the physical side of aging through a whole-person lens that includes personal, environmental, and social factors. 

Over eight weeks, you will design a Healthy Aging Program Plan for a real older adult in your community, built around their goals and grounded in a walk-through assessment of the neighborhood where they live. 

You will look closely at rural health access, nutrition and food access, and how health programs can be adapted to fit the cultures and circumstances of the people they serve. 

GERO 305 is open to students from any major. It also meets a general education requirement — Upper Division Area 2/5: Composed of Area 2 Mathematics or Area 5: Physical or Biological Science, pending review by GEAR/ICC.

3 units

This course turns from the individual to the community. You will study the social forces and policies that shape how rural elders experience aging, and you will learn to navigate the service systems a practitioner works within every day: Medicare, Medi-Cal, In-Home Supportive Services, Older Americans Act programs, and end-of-life planning. 

You will map the services and gaps in your own community and write a professional advocacy message to an agency or decision maker who could act on what you found. 

This is a writing intensive course, with drafting, peer review, and revision built into the work.

3 units

This course explores how thinking, emotion, memory, and well-being change across later life, and how culture, income, environment, and history shape those changes. 

You will examine stereotypes about aging, the diversity of aging experiences, mental health and brain health, and what it means to age well. 

You will ground this study in a consented observation visit with an older adult and create a digital poster about what aging well looks like for a population you care about. 

The course also addresses conversations about end-of-life wishes and decision-making as cognition changes.

3 units

This course considers how individuals and communities across cultures and faith traditions have understood dying, grief, and what comes after. 

You will reflect on your own experiences with loss and mortality and bring them into conversation with literature, philosophy, and religious thought. 

You will also interview a working end-of-life care professional in your community, such as a hospice nurse, chaplain, or bereavement counselor, and bring that practitioner's voice into your final work.

3 units

This course prepares you to lead. You will study organizational leadership, workforce development, program planning and evaluation, policy advocacy, and how to work across county, state, health system, and tribal lines. 

Leadership in a two-person rural senior services office looks very different from leadership in a large urban agency, and this course takes that difference seriously. 

You will analyze a real aging services organization and write a professional assessment with a recommendation its leadership could act on.

3 units

This is your bridge from study to practice. Over eight weeks, you will complete 135 hours with an aging services organization or community program, under faculty and on-site supervision. 

Each placement is built as a partnership: your learning goals and a need the site has identified are both part of the agreement. 

You will build a portfolio of evidence showing the professional competencies you have developed. This course is designated Service Learning.

3 units

In your final course, you return to the older adult you met in your first week of GERO 301, now with the whole program behind you. 

You will revise and bring together your work from every course into one professional portfolio that tells the story of aging in your community: how it serves or falls short of the people growing old there, and what you would change. 

You will present your portfolio to faculty, peers, and, where possible, a community partner.