Medical school was a difficult adjustment for me. Coming from a blue-collar background and lacking a medical pedigree, I did not relate to most of my classmates, and I made very few friends.
That changed when I met J., a second-generation physician-to-be without the competitive guile or sense of entitlement implicit in most of the medical students I had met. With a generous personality undoubtedly sculpted by the experience of motherhood, she came across to me as someone who generally cared for others. I could tell that she opted for this career with pure intentions in mind. She modeled what I had thought this calling was about, and she reaffirmed my decision to become a physician. I don’t know if I would have made it beyond the early stages of medical school had fate not placed us in the same training group.
Frustrated with the mission of my school’s specialty-centric approach to treating disease, I opted to complete my clinical clerkships at the other major city in the state where I became part of the first class of a new community-based medical curriculum. This was a unique curriculum in which supervised medical students managed a cohort of uninsured patients with chronic disease using cost-effective medications and largely donated diagnostic services. Emphasis was placed on public health, social factors contributing to disease, and lifestyle associations with diabetes and hypertension.
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