SOL: Stanzas of Life

I started medical school last June at Rocky Vista University College of Osteopathic Medicine, RVUCOM! I am incredibly grateful for this opportunity and honored to be a student doctor pursing my dream of caring for the next patient.

Medical school has been a whirlwind of emotions, humbling patient encounters, and insightful discussions regarding medical ethics. After graduating undergrad, I had a very idealistic vision of medicine. Naive and unexperienced, I started as a Phase 1/2 solid tumor Clinical Research Coordinator (CRC). As a Phase 1 CRC, I worked with clinical research projects in compliance with the Code of Federal Regulations. My role was to provide technical support to Principal Investigators, analyze protocol specific requirements and implement quality assurance measures to ensure physician, patient and clinician compliance, and abstract medical information from various sources in the patient medical record. This rewarding job led to my further promotion as a Project Manager. I helped to oversee a national cancer screening trial as an Operations manager for 4 primary care clinics and 2 oncology centers across metropolitan Detroit. My experience helped solidify my choice of pursing medicine as a career.

Our dynamic healthcare system has many flaws. Through medical school training, I have established fruitful connections with my fellow colleagues and discussed several of the pitfalls of our current fee-for-service care model.

While the milestone of becoming accepted as a medical student is in my rear view mirror, there are many more hurdles to face and overcome. I feel that one of the greatest challenges of life is deciding which milestone to prioritize next. We all have to decide what will be our next steppingstone and ride along for where it will take us next.

My next step will be one of the hardest periods of my medical education: board exams. I have slowly started the preparation phase and looking forward to completing this next step in my medical journey!

Onward and Upward! Remember to be grateful for where you are in life and each day I encourage you all to get 1% better! Thanks for following and listening to my story; your story matters too! 🙂