Path to Medicine: The Big Switch

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This month on UMich Med Mosaic, we meet Sam Lehn, Rodriguez Roberts II and Alexander Young, all medical students at the University of Michigan Medical School. Each decided to become a doctor after pursuing careers in fields spanning public policy, teaching, consulting and film production. Hear why they decided to make the big switch, how they went about it, and in what ways they’re bringing their previous career experiences into their medical school journey.  

More Resources

What to know more about the topics mentioned during the show? See links below: 

AAMC: Restarting Your Journey to Medical School 

MD Admissions Requirements | University of Michigan Medical School

Biorhythms | University of Michigan Medical School

University of Michigan Student-Run Free Clinic

Emergency Medicine Interest Group (EMIG) | University of Michigan Medical School

Learn more about the programs at University of Michigan Medical School

Transcript

Mackenzie Kay:

Hi everyone and welcome to UMich Med Mosaic, a medical student-run podcast we've created to shine a light on the diverse backgrounds and experiences of our students here in Ann Arbor. I'm Mackenzie Kay, a first-year student at the University of Michigan Medical School. I wanted to start this podcast to build community through hearing the stories and experiences of my peers. And as an avid podcast listener, I feel passionately about podcasts as a medium. I'm so happy and grateful to be here at Michigan. Through these conversations, we hope to show that there is a no one-size-fits-all definition of a medical student. Whether you're a current or prospective medical student, we hope that you feel inspired by these narratives.

So, the topic today of our pilot episode is non-traditional medical students. Medical students who didn't take the "traditional" path to medicine. This can be taking more than two years in between undergrad and medical school, this can be a mature-age applicant, this can be a career changer, or this can be somebody having a non-science background, so studying a humanities major or maybe even a combination of a few of these factors. I'll say I'm biased. I myself am a non-traditional student who took six years out. My background is I worked in emergency services for a couple of years as an EMT and a paramedic. Afterwards I moved to Norway to pursue a master's in international community health at the University of Oslo. And then I returned to the U.S. to do a post-bac program at Goucher College while working for two years in reproductive healthcare with Whole Woman’s Health.

And I think that in this time and on this meandering path, I gained a lot of meaning with the people that I met and the experiences that I gained. And I think that the combination of these two things really deeply reinforced my commitment to this discipline and to pursuing a medical education. And these reflections are really what sparked my interest in hosting this episode here today. And so as a result to share their experiences, I invited three lovely humans, Sam Lehn, Rodriguez Roberts, and Alexander Young here to share their non-traditional backgrounds. So let's do some introductions. Sam, I'll start with you. Hot seat. Can you first by telling us a little bit about your previous career and what were you doing before you got into medicine?

Sam Lehn:

Yeah, of course. That was so beautifully said. I don't know, I'm going to be able to follow up on that. But give a bit of background. So I grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts. I went to Columbia for undergrad. So I was in New York for a few years and became really interested in policy and working in social service work while I was in school in New York. And that pushed me to move to D.C. after, and I spent about five years working on Capitol Hill. Kind of started out first answering phones, doing that sort of work and then eventually moved up the ladder and did a lot of economic policy, spent about the last three years working on that.

And over those years and throughout COVID, I became interested in medicine and of course I can talk about that a bit more later, but also did a post-bac in my sixth year before coming here. I did it also at Goucher. Mack was actually my TA, which was a pretty special experience and one of the reasons I ended up here at Michigan. So happy to talk about that more, but that's kind of the winding path that I went on into medicine.

Mackenzie Kay:

Thank you for sharing your story, Sam. Now Rodriguez, you're in the hot seat.

Rodriguez Roberts:

Got you. Again, thanks for having me. So my name is Rodriguez Roberts. I'm originally from Atlanta, Georgia, Decatur technically so I'll be specific. I left Atlanta and went to Harvard College for undergrad where I studied neurobiology. But I like to say I had some professional commitment issues. The long path that medicine is was a little bit daunting to me at 22 years old. So I elected to explore some other jobs. So I worked at Bain & Company for two years across the wide variety of industries and then I wanted to try my hand at some creative work. So I worked on film sets for two years and around that time I had been giving thought to what people had been doing, what the jobs and roles looked like for people who were 20 years older than me and did that in consulting and in the film industry. And there was some incongruence there between what I wanted to be like at that age and what they were doing. So, I elected to work as a medical scribe for a year and spend some time with the physician and that kind of reassured me that I really wanted to go back to medical school and then unfortunately medical scribes are very underpaid and I had some responsibilities to take care of back home. So I worked for a small healthcare startup for the last two years before coming to medical school. So that's my kind of winding path to get here.

Mackenzie Kay:

Wow, that's an amazing path. I don't think I actually heard about that last little bit in there. So thank you for sharing. And now you Alexander, last but not least.

Alexander Young:

All right, yeah, thank you for the introductions and so good to hear both Sam and Rodriguez, both of y'all's stories. I'm Alexander and I originally grew up in Huntsville, Alabama and I studied economics and human organizational development at Vanderbilt for undergrad. I was pretty confident I was going to go into finance or consulting. Just following the path, was seeing a lot of what a lot of my friends were doing. And about around about senior year, I had kind of a quarter-life crisis. I realized that I was just not going to be happy sitting down at a desk all day. I just couldn't do it. So I talked to some of my own personal mentors from back home. I talked to some people I really respected and a few of them had done a program called Teach for America and I ended up applying and was accepted to be an elementary school special education teacher way out in the middle of nowhere in Idaho.

So I taught in the small town of Weiser, Idaho, population a little over 5,000 right in the middle of the Coronavirus pandemic. So in 2020, 2021, 2022, I did Teach for America for two years, and during that time I pretty quickly realized like, hey, I love teaching my students but I'm really most fired up by learning about their medical issues. That's what I could stay up late reading about. And the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to give medicine a shot. So I applied to Goucher along with Mack and was the year ahead of Sam and was accepted and the rest is history.

Mackenzie Kay:

Thank you for sharing. Even though we've used the term non-traditional medical students in this podcast, I should also note that the admissions team at Michigan Med doesn't refer to students as traditional or non-traditional because I just want to note that more than half of Michigan medical students have been out of school for more than two years and they very much value our life experiences. That's the reason why all four of us came here was because of the value that University of Michigan Medicine places on non-traditional applicants or "non-traditional" applicants is because of the wealth of experiences that they bring here and the diversity of the student body. And so I just wanted to add that note in here on language.

So yeah, I am so grateful for all three of you for being here. I want to talk now about the switch, the point in which you all three decided to make a switch. Was there a specific moment or a story or a turning point, and I'm going to open this up to any three of you, where you made the decision that medicine was the path that you wanted to pursue? And what was it about medicine that drew you to it?

Rodriguez Roberts:

I feel like people are looking at me, so I'm going to give it a shot. I don't think there was a specific point for me. It was more so kind of a gradual progression. I had some close family members who were dealing with mental health issues from the time I graduated college all the way through current day. And watching them interact with their care teams I think was a big part of what motivated me to towards healthcare in general. But then specifically that time I got to spend, I worked with an oncologist when I was a medical scribe. That year, I got to spend seeing patient-physician interactions in depth and just kind of the human side of medicine, which I feel like is hard to get a good glimpse of if you're just in school studying. When you're on the pre-med track, you need to spend some time clinically. That gave me a glimpse into that relationship being something I wanted to be a part of and that being a place where I think I could have a real impact.

Mackenzie Kay:

And did you, Rodriguez, just to finish up on that thread, did you have the pre-med requirements that you needed to pursue medical school or did you have to go back to school?

Rodriguez Roberts:

So I had about 90% of them done. I think the last two and I've taken I think probably the most time off out of anyone here so things are a little fuzzy to be honest, but I believe the physics courses were the last two things I had to do. But after I graduated, other than that I had taken care of things so I had to return to ... I did my post-baccalaureate physics courses at Georgia State back in Atlanta while I was scribing.

Mackenzie Kay:

Awesome.

Sam Lehn:

And they didn't make you do the other courses that you'd taken in undergrad?

Rodriguez Roberts:

Again?

Sam Lehn:

Yeah, because I remember hearing that sometimes it's like five years, you can do it in five years and then if it's beyond that you have to take them again. Did any schools ever challenge you on that?

Rodriguez Roberts:

So I wasn't challenged necessarily on it, but I know there were some schools I didn't apply to necessarily because of that limitation. The list was short though, but there were a couple that, again, I can't remember specifically which ones they were, but they had some of them listed on their websites like, "Oh, if it's remote in time then you need to retake it." And those that I kind of just scratched off the list because I didn't want to repeat that many courses personally.

Mackenzie Kay:

And I know some schools like Michigan is one of them, have moved more towards the competency-based requirements. So you don't necessarily have to have formal coursework like physics courses or biology courses or biochemistry. If you're able to complete the courses by virtue of taking the MCAT, then you've shown the ability to complete that competency. And so a lot of schools have moved more towards that, I believe for their admissions criteria. So I wonder if that maybe was part of it. I know that's helped a lot of non-traditional applicants.

Sam Lehn:

Sorry, I don't mean to keep asking you questions. I'm just so interested in this. I know Mack, Alexander and I, we took the pre-med classes and then immediately took the MCAT and we were kind of at the peak of our pre-sciences knowledge, pre-medicine knowledge and I could not imagine taking it a year later, two years later. How did you go about doing that?

Rodriguez Roberts:

So I actually took the MCAT once in college when I was technically pre-med. I was studying neurobiology but I was technically pre-med at the time, but kind of came to the realization that I wasn't ready to go down that path at the time. So I took the old MCAT and was a little frustrated that however many years later that my score had expired, but understandably I just had to kind of retake it. I will say that I find, and this is something I'm thankful for in med school, I find the human body pretty fascinating. So even though there were some parts of it that were more recent in memory, the physics part was more recent, I found studying for the biology aspect of it a little bit, I don't know, more fun, which was kind of a good lead-in to med school. So I was encouraged by, I don't want to get into scores, but my score changed obviously significantly from one test to the other, but the biology section was something that motivated me to study a little bit harder for.

Mackenzie Kay:

I definitely found that my frontal lobe had clicked into place when I was a little bit older and emotionally ready to study. I think if I had tried to do this path when I was 21, 22 and everybody's different of course. But if I was trying to do this path before, I think I just wasn't quite ready to sit down and hit the books and be able to synthesize all this information in the same way. I think it not only was the information and the MCAT studying, but also just the compilation of experiences. I think I needed the time and the maturity to be able to actually sit down and study for the MCAT and so I'm grateful that it took another four years to get ready for it.

But I can't imagine sitting down and studying for it a second time after the test had changed and all that. So kudos to you. Did you guys have a moment where when you made the decision to switch to medicine where your family was like, "Whoa, I didn't expect this," or were they like, "Oh, I always knew this was going to be a thing?"

Alexander Young:

I actually have a moment from before when I decided to become a teacher. I was really nervous to tell my parents. I had kind of been on the track, I was like, "Oh, I was going to try to move to some big city, work for a fancy company." I was like, "Mom, Dad, I'm going to move to the middle of nowhere and do something really off the wall." I was nervous. I was like, what are they going to think about this? My mom just chuckled over the phone, was like, "Oh thank God." They were like, "You're going to be miserable doing what everybody else was doing." I had to go, I think, spread my wings a little bit, find who I was, explore a little bit and I think the more I explored, the more I naturally came to realize that medicine was what excited me in a way that nothing else I had ever done did. So I think people were really supportive for the most part for me, which I was grateful for.

Sam Lehn:

Yeah, I think I feel really similar to you in that and what you were saying, Mack really resonates with me in terms of needing those extra years to synthesize who I was as a person and what I really wanted to do with the rest of my life. I think it's so impressive to see some of the 21-, 22-year-olds here at Michigan and they really know what they want and they're really motivated, and I just remember getting out of college and having no clue who I wanted to be and I think I'm so grateful that I took those years to kind of explore different careers and see what really excited me about them.

I think there's just so much value in taking that extra time for yourself and learning about who you are as a person before jumping into this really arduous path. I think I've heard from students who go into medicine that they possibly question if medicine's really right for them. And I think I feel so fortunate that there really hasn't been a single moment at my time here where I've questioned going into medicine and I really attribute that to the extra years I had before going into it, exploring different paths, exploring what different careers could look like and really being sure that no, medicine is the place that I want to be.

Alexander Young:

Hearing you say that really makes me think about ... Yeah, I don't know, confronting my own fears coming into medicine. I think ever since high school I've been curious about it but I was always kind of scared. There's such a high-pressure environment, you're giving up so much optionality, so much freedom. There's a very clear linear path in medicine that you have to walk to get where you want to go. Not the case for most other careers. And I think in hindsight I was really scared and it took some growing up for me, it took some real soul-searching to realize it's okay, face your fears, figure out what you actually really want to do. Don't be scared of the possibilities of failure and give it a shot.

Rodriguez Roberts:

That is like, "Do it scared," comes to mind.

Alexander Young:

Do it scared. Absolutely.

Rodriguez Roberts:

Do it scared, yeah.

Alexander Young:

Absolutely.

Mackenzie Kay:

What you said, Sam really resonates with me. I agree there has not been a moment since I made the decision to pursue medicine where I've questioned and I wonder if that's been the case for you guys. Have you had a moment where you feel like you've questioned the decision or maybe missed the career that you had before? Do you miss your life before at all?

Rodriguez Roberts:

I don't think I've questioned my decision to come to medical school thankfully. I think that's again attributable one, to how fascinating I find the human body. Maybe two, the fact that we're all pre-clinical right now so I know there are going to be days where my resolve and my motivation is tested and that's going to be important to come back to my why I'm doing this. The one thing I might miss a little is having income from working, but that's just par for the course. I knew what I was getting myself into. But other than that, in terms of what my day-to-day looks like, how enthralled I am to be studying the human body and meeting all the fine people at Michigan medicine, yeah, I'm happy where I am.

Mackenzie Kay:

That's so real. I mean it's tough to compare yourself to your peers when you have friends who maybe at the same age are further along in their careers or maybe building families at this point and we're kind of starting from square one again as new learners and so that definitely is a bit of a scary experience. Alexander, how do you feel?

Alexander Young:

I get what y'all said. I think that the privilege of being a career changer is that we have tried out the other stuff. We've kind of decided it's not all that and I don't know. I look at our 21, 20-year-old classmates with a mixture of awe and sometimes even intimidation like, wow, you knew you wanted to do this when you were that old. I didn't know how to tie my shoes when I was that old. But again, just like y'all were saying, I don't really regret it for one iota, not one second. It's such a privilege and especially getting into my second year, I guess.

I'm in my M2 year, so I just started my clinical rotations. I've done a few and actually gotten to be in the real world of medicine instead of just staring at textbook for a few months now. And my god, it's a privilege. It is so cool to have just the opportunity to go in and hear real abnormal heart sounds, hear what's going on in people's lungs and get to work with real patients and it is just so much easier to get up in the morning for me than it was last year because you're working with real people again. And medicine is so special because you get to do that every single day. So I think yeah, this has been such a wonderful year and a half and don't regret it for a second.

Mackenzie Kay:

Good to hear that because definitely I think all of us in the dregs of M1 are definitely pushing through I think to next year and looking forward to it. I know I am. I'm super excited for M2 year. I guess open to anybody, what are some of the biggest challenges that you've experienced in this transition to medical school?

Rodriguez Roberts:

I think for me there were two things I was at least worried about at the outset. One was feeling like I wouldn't be able to relate to my peers. I guess, full disclosure, I'm 31 and the average age in Michigan I think is like 26 or something like that.

Mackenzie Kay:

24.

Rodriguez Roberts:

24, Okay. Thank you.

Mackenzie Kay:

Of our class is 24.

Rodriguez Roberts:

Got you, okay, okay. Yeah. So those seven years between me and the average is a lot of life experience. So I think I worried about being able to relate to people in med school, but thankfully I am able to say people in Michigan are humble, motivated, genuine, and it's made making friends really easy and relating to people something that I don't have to worry about at all. I think the other part that I was worried about was just adjusting to being back in the classroom. I had obviously taken those two physics courses since between college and now, but med school is definitely ... I mean you guys did post-bac so maybe you can tell me different than college, different than post-bac, the amount of material that you're expected to commit to memory is significant. So I was a little bit daunted about how I'd rise to that challenge, but again, I'll just go back to anchoring myself in how curious I am about health, the human body and that helping to make this process overall much less stressful than I thought it would be.

Mackenzie Kay:

Yeah, I can completely relate to that, especially the transition to M1 learning. I think our flipped classroom is definitely a huge adjustment. I've never been in a flipped classroom environment and I definitely think that is something that privileges our younger classmates who had school in the pandemic just because I never have had any classes where I had to remote learn or learn from my computer. And so that's been a huge adjustment, having to learn from remote lecture. That's been definitely a huge adjustment. And also just the volume of material is super tough, so I can definitely relate to those challenges.

Sam Lehn:

Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, so just some context for a lot of people who don't know about post-bacs in general. So from what I understand, and please correct me if I'm wrong, there are a few different paths that you can take. One is for the non-traditional students like me, like Mack, like Alexander, who really haven't taken a lot of the pre-medical courses, the biology, the chemistry, the organic chemistry, the physics. So we go through a very kind of regimented program that really trains us, I'd say not only on the science material itself, but also how to learn the science material. I think Goucher at least did a really good job in kind of gradually teaching me how to learn science and how to succeed in that kind of space. Coming from economics, I had a math background but I really didn't understand how you kind of retrained your brain to learn some of these more technical scientific components of it. So that's one of the types of post-bacs.

Another one is for students who want to retake some of the classes, so say they didn't do as well on biology as they would've liked. They can go into a post-bac and retake some of those classes. And then I guess Rodriguez, you took a post-bac that was very kind of-

Rodriguez Roberts:

Ad hoc.

Sam Lehn:

Ad hoc, you could take which courses you wanted. I know a lot of people do them at community colleges, which is really a great opportunity, especially if you're really concerned with the extra cost. I think that was a big barrier for me going in is medical school is always pronounced as being very expensive and it is, and I think for people who want to transition, you're also thinking about that extra year of learning, almost an extra year of undergraduate learning that you then also have to pay for. So I remember that being a big barrier for me as well trying to get into medicine. It's definitely worth it and worked out, but I know a lot of people who think about transitioning from different careers really are worried about that. I don't know if you guys had any experiences with that or if that was a big part of your thought process.

Alexander Young:

I would say that in your first year, the year y'all are in, it felt like a bigger change. It feels like less of a change now. I think medicine is fundamentally a service industry and so the more experience you have working with people in the real world and learning how to serve people and work for other people, the better you're going to do. And I see a lot of people coming straight through who I'm not sure have worked in a service industry before, worked in the "real world" before. A lot of people that I know in different medical schools around the country, and I think it's a much bigger change for them getting to the clinical space than it is for people who have a little bit more experience doing different things and working with people and getting feedback and getting sometimes harsh feedback and learning how to incorporate that into one's own practice. I think it's been super helpful. 

Mackenzie Kay:

Yeah. That's an example of a good way that being a non-traditional applicant can maybe give you some resilience in the process. Now I want to just chat about now how we find our prior careers maybe serving us in our lives in medical school. Are there any lessons or any things that we have taken with us in terms of skills or ways that we think about the world that you've brought with you from your prior career to your life here in medical school that you think have really served you well?

Rodriguez Roberts:

I know for me being in this first year, in my consulting work, there was something called 80-20, like the Pareto principle. Figuring out ways to get the most bang for your buck when it comes to information and figuring out how to prioritize which things require the most of my attention in one year has been an invaluable skill. So that's one thing. I would love to hear from you, Alex, a bit more about how you find M2 year and your experiences there, because I think a lot of what you're saying is true. The more time you spend in the real world, it relates to how you can interact with patients better and I just imagine that some of the time I've spent ... I know I've grabbed coffees on film sets and done very menial tasks that or might seem like menial tasks, but often times I think you've got to do everything with excellence.

So even when you're doing those menial tasks, how can you bring excellence to them? How can you make sure people feel cared for and seen and heard? That, I imagine, I'm going to need to bring the bear in my second year and years to come. But right now, I'd say the biggest thing is figuring out what information to prioritize.

Sam Lehn:

Yeah, that really makes me think about my first year when I was working on the Hill, I worked for Senator Durbin of Illinois and my first job kind of entry job getting in the door at the office was answering phones and a lot of it was just the grueling work of figuring out what to say and how to say it and how to properly translate our policies and our beliefs to the people on the other side of the phone. And I think it really does bring out a lot of that, it's public service but it's also customer service and really learning how to properly package something that can be translated well to the person on the other end.

And I think there's so much value in being at the bottom of the totem pole in something and really seeing the ways in which your supervisors or your managers do a really good job in integrating you in the corporation or whatever organization or mission you're in, and then ways in which you can really have a big impact in that role being the kind of smaller piece of the pie of this larger project or machine or whatever that looks like. So I think there's so much value in taking those entry-level job skills that you develop early on in your career and applying them to a role like this in medicine.

Alexander Young:

I definitely hear what you're saying about having tough conversations like that, stuff like you're answering phones and made me think about for me as a special education, IEP meetings, were so often really challenging to run.

Mackenzie Kay:

What are those meetings?

Alexander Young:

So IEPs are individualized education plans and basically if a student qualifies for special education, they have to receive an IEP, basically outlining kind of what services beyond that of most students they need to be successful as a student. And every year you need to have a meeting kind of outlining your goals for the year for that student, exactly kind what their current level of performance is and what you're going to do to help them progress in the educational world. And a lot of times the goals I might have as a teacher are not the goals that their parents might have. They're not the goals that the student might have themselves. And learning how to, I think balance a lot of perspectives in a meeting and kind of hash out differences and figure out the best way forward for the next year for a student was a whole lot to take on when I was 21 years old and had no idea how to teach and was kind of in way over my head.

But the process of figuring that out I think is super helpful and it's not that different in many ways from the tough conversations you have with patients. I mean, patients come in with problems they need to get help with. We're providers, we're going to be trying to do our best to help them and those two might not always line up and trying to figure out where they overlap and figure out exactly what you can do together to be successful at the end of the day is what it's all about. So I think there are a lot of parallels there that the longer I go in medical school, the more I appreciated those experiences.

Mackenzie Kay:

Absolutely. Do you find that there's anything about your prior work that has influenced how you've gotten involved here at University of Michigan? Like any orgs, any volunteering that you felt inspired to get involved with?

Alexander Young:

I can start out here. I'm on a project right now looking at obstructive sleep apnea in children with cerebral palsy. And I had a few students with cerebral palsy that I worked with in my classroom, so it's a population that's near and dear to my heart. I loved working with them and it's so cool to be able to work on projects in a very different context that have a ton of potential to really improve quality of life for students that could have been in my classroom. Right off the bat, I mean that was something I looked for going into medical school and something that I found really quickly and thanks to the kindness of a lot of older medical students here, I have been able to jump into, which has been fantastic.

Sam Lehn:

I could also jump in I think, and I'm not trying to make this just answering your question, but I think that really connects with me a lot in terms of ... I originally went into policy because I was really concerned about socioeconomic change and I think it's been so great to be able to find different ways of applying that to the Ann Arbor community. So one of the roles I've taken on is I'm one of the co-directors student-run free clinic here. It's our clinic out in Washtenaw County, and it's just such a wonderful opportunity to be able to connect with different members of the community and find ways of integrating this new component of medicine that we're learning and apply it to this socioeconomic background that initially led me into my career in policy and eventually kind of pushed me into this career. So it's really been a great opportunity.

Rodriguez Roberts:

I think for me it's been Biorhythms. So here at University of Michigan there's this show, annual dance show that happens, well bi-annual dance show happens twice a year where the students choreograph and perform different dance routines from different cultures. I've been dancing salsa for the past 15 years and I choreographed the salsa routine this last show we had about last week ago, I think last weekend actually.

Sam Lehn:

It was incredible.

Mackenzie Kay:

It was amazing.

Rodriguez Roberts:

Thanks y'all. I guess as much as we're going to need to continue to encourage our patients to take care of their minds as well as their bodies, I think it's incumbent upon us as future providers to also take care of ourselves, and I think Biorhythms is an example of one way in which we can kind of care for ourselves in a way through self-expression, through movement. So that's something I've been happy to be engaged with at the med school, which ties into just something I've been doing for a decade and a half prior.

Mackenzie Kay:

You were amazing. I just want to say the dance that you choreographed and then also the salsa that you were leading was fabulous. It was so much fun to come and watch you perform and that was last weekend. I think what I'll say is it's quite amazing how these non-traditional backgrounds, you're bringing pieces of your backgrounds with you to your medical career and hopefully into your practice, and hopefully this will translate into how you take care of your patients and also take care of the communities that you plan on serving.

Alexander Young:

Really quick, Mackenzie.

Mackenzie Kay:

Yeah?

Alexander Young:

I want to hear your answer to that question.

Sam Lehn:

Oh yes.

Mackenzie Kay:

How I've gotten involved?

Alexander Young:

How your previous work has impacted the avenues you pursue here?

Mackenzie Kay:

As I mentioned before, my prior background was in emergency services and I also did spend the last two years working in reproductive health services, and so when I came to campus I was pretty excited to explore my two passions and really try to parse out whether or not I wanted to pursue emergency medicine or OB. And so the ways that I got involved on campus were as through the emergency medicine interest group. I'm on the e-board there and then also through Prenatal Partners where I help coordinate partnerships between medical students and patients who are in the high-risk obstetric clinic at University of Michigan Medicine as a way to kind of understand the way that our Michigan Medicine clinics work and then also to try to set up social services and support for patients with high-risk pregnancies.

And so that was how I decided to get involved on campus was really to try to get involved with the departments, to try to get involved with understanding what social services surround Michigan Medicine so that when I actually go into my Clerkship year and then into M3 year and the Branches year, when patients ask, "Where can I find food? Where can I find support for housing?" I'll have a better idea of actually where those support resources come from. I'm not from the state of Michigan, I'm actually from California, and so I'm new to this community, and so I felt that through involvement with those organizations that I would have a better understanding of those things.

In addition, I got involved at the student-run clinic. I've done a couple shifts there, which has been super fun, so I'm also doing some ad hoc involvement there as well.

Alexander Young:

If I'm allowed to, I've got a follow-up question.

Mackenzie Kay:

You're allowed.

Alexander Young:

How has it been as a former healthcare professional as a paramedic?

Mackenzie Kay:

Yeah.

Alexander Young:

Then how has it been transitioning back to a student, going from being paid to do this work and having a very clearly defined role to being someone who can just volunteer your time in the way you see fit and have a totally different role, but caring for the exact same populations?

Mackenzie Kay:

Stay tuned for next episode because the next episode will be covering healthcare professionals who are switching from other careers to pursuing medical school. So we're going to have some people on, but at least in my experience, one thing transitioning from being a paramedic to emergency or from being a paramedic to medical school was definitely a big transition just because I didn't realize just how much more there was to know. It was two years of training and 1,500 hours to become a paramedic, so it was an intense amount of time, plus just a lot of continuous learning on the job, and so I felt like, yeah, when I came to medical school, I was like, how much more was there to know? And as it turns out, my knowledge was a sliver in terms of how much more there was to know. It was unbelievable in terms of the depth of what I needed to learn for taking care of patients, what I needed to learn for medications. Even in terms of what I thought I knew about the medications that I gave actually was problematized. It was quite amazing actually coming to medical school.

And so yeah, I've taken it to be a huge learning experience. I basically have decided to take off my paramedic hat and put on my student hat and just try to learn everything starting from square one as a way to try to make sure that I am getting all the information that I need to, but obviously not forgetting my past. I loved being a paramedic, I loved being able to see behind the curtain of the patients that I was serving by going into their homes, seeing people directly in the places where they were and serving them there. And I actually really got to know the patients that I was taking care of because I was in Cambridge, Massachusetts for seven years, so I got to see the same people all the time because that was a service area where I worked. And so I hope to as a physician, be involved in a community in the same way and put a shingle up and really stay with a community and get to know them just as well as I did in Cambridge. I look forward to that.

Alexander Young:

I had a physician back home tell me that, "Medical school is like a four-year trip down the Dunning-Kruger curve." It sounds like you're saying something pretty similar.

Mackenzie Kay:

Yeah. Well, and today we had a lecture on nutrition and we had one of the physicians, she's a gerontologist, and was talking about making a plug for house calls, and I was like, I love that. I want to do house calls. That sounds great, just because I found so much value in going into people's homes and seeing what their lives are like. I think you can learn so much about a person and their care in that way. But enough about me. I think I will wrap it up for today. We hope you enjoyed today's episode. I just want to say a huge thank you to Sam, Alexander and Rodriguez for their time today. Thanks for listening and we will see you soon.

If you loved today's conversation, share it with a friend. If you are a Michigan medical student and are interested in being a future guest, check out the class pages on Slack for open calls for episodes. UMich Med Mosaic is produced by the Michigan Medicine Department of Communication, in partnership with the University of Michigan Medical School. Find us and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. Thanks for listening, and we hope to see you soon.