May 2003 Reporter Home

Supreme Court Hears Arguments in Michigan Diversity Case

Budget Outlook Mixed for Medical Schools, Hospitals

Striking a 'Match': New Graduates Ready for Their Next Step

Gastric Bypass Surgery Offers New Hope for the Morbidly Obese

Innovations in Medical Education: Medical Scholars in the Making

A Word From the President: Setting Global Standards for Medical Education

Viewpoint: Guiding the 'IOM Generation'

A Day in the Life of a Medical Student

Reporter Archive

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Managing Editor Scott Harris sharris@aamc.org Staff Writer Elissa Fuchs efuchs@aamc.org

Striking a 'Match': New Graduates Ready For Their Next Step

Proud moment: Nebraska graduate LaKisha Williams (foreground), and her mother, Cassandra Williams Smith, learned that LaKisha will be doing her psychiatry residency at Louisiana State University.

A little over a month ago, medical students across the nation gathered anxiously in auditoriums and lecture halls, eyeing unopened envelopes containing the answers to where they would be spending the next few years of their lives. After finding out the institutions to which they had been assigned, and after the rush of Match Day subsided, some of these students talked to the AAMC Reporter about their "match," their thoughts on the medical profession, and their hopes for the future.

LaKisha Williams, 26, a medical student at the University of Nebraska, was one of the students who breathed a collective sigh of relief upon finding out that she had matched at her first-choice institution. "I didn't realize how exciting the day was going to be," says Williams, who will be doing her residency at Louisiana State University. She had not planned to attend the March 20 Match Day ceremony until her mother persuaded her to go.

"At the ceremony, they usually put all match letters on a table, and then call the students' names, one by one," Williams explains. "Students go up to the stage, get their letter, open it, and announce where they will be going for their residency." Because students find out about their match at the same time as the audience, Williams feared that if she did not get placed at the institution of her choice, her disappointment would show. Fortunately, that wasn't the case. "People told me afterward that they knew I had matched with my first choice because of the look on my face," she says.

Williams will do a residency in psychiatry, a field she decided to go into after doing a rotation in adolescent psychiatry at a clinic treating an underserved community. Having come from a single-parent home with a teenage parent - Lakisha's mother was 15 when she had her - she could identify with the teenagers she encountered during her rotation.

"Listening to a lot of the kids who came from single-family homes and [who were facing all kinds of problems] made me think about what along my past made me pursue the path that I have taken," says Williams, who decided to go into medicine because of the service aspect of the profession and to address healthcare disparities.

At a pipeline program she participated in during high school, she heard about the lack of minority physicians, and that greater numbers were needed to effectively serve the minority community. Hearing those facts reinforced her desire to become a doctor. "A big thing for me is giving back to the community," she says. "The community helped me be who I am."

Never too old

Another Nebraska student who overcame odds in her path to obtaining an M.D. was Colene Andersen, a 48-year-old mother of two. When she opened her Match envelope, she was elated to see that she had been matched with her first choice - right at home at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. "All my family is in this area, and family is really important to me," says Andersen. For her, pursuing her residency close to home "was almost a no-brainer."

Close to home: University of Nebraska College of Medicine graduate Colene Andersen, a mother of two, was matched with the UN Medical Center in Omaha.

Andersen always had wanted to pursue a college education but was not able to do it until recently. "I wanted to go back to school, but the opportunity and timing were never right," she explains. When her two children were grown, she decided to follow her dreams and enrolled at a four-year university in 1995. At the time, her daughter was also going to college, and a year later, her son graduated from high school and enrolled at another college. "We could fill out financial aid [forms] in our sleep. We became very good at it, since we all had debts," Andersen jokes.

Despite the economic burden, it was a great experience, she says. "When we went through finals week, we all went through it at the same time, so we knew just how stressed everybody else was," says Andersen, who plans to pursue a residency in internal medicine, and hopes to eventually work with the elderly. "I love geriatrics [and] enjoy working with that population tremendously," she says.

For those who wonder why Andersen has decided to put herself through the rigors of medical training at this time of her life, she says: "Part of the joy is the actual journey, and trying to overcome obstacles really makes you a stronger person." Many people have pointed out the fact that she will be over 50 by the time she finishes her residency, she says. "Well, I'm going to be 50 anyway; at least I hope I will! I would rather be 50 and have accomplished something that I really wanted, than to be the same age and still be saying, 'I wish I would have done it.'"

No mountain high enough

Matt Brester, 31, another Nebraska graduate who was with Andersen on Match Day, lives by the same mantra. Despite having been diagnosed with thyroid cancer in the last year of his pre-medical studies, Brester has persisted in the pursuit of his medical education.

"Medical school had always been like a mountain I wanted to climb, so I decided that if this cancer was going to get me, I wanted everything to end on my way up the mountain," Brester says. "Just the thought of that gave me a lot of strength, and put me in the mindset that I didn't want the cancer to control my life."

From 1997 until 2001, Brester went through six procedures, including external beam radiation and radioiodine treatment. "I did everything over spring, summer, and Christmas breaks," he says. His cancer has spread to his lungs, and he recently underwent treatment at Johns Hopkins.

Having been on the other side of the stethoscope has given Brester a perspective that will prove to be invaluable in his practice, he believes. "It has really made me aware [that there is] more to treat than the physical nature of the illness," says Brester. "Unfortunately, sometimes physicians miss the emotional and mental scars that illnesses take on people." Dealing with his own illness has made him look at the whole patient and become sensitive to their emotional and psychological turmoil, he adds.

Brester plans to eventually subspecialize in either endocrinology or oncology. "I've enjoyed my oncology rotations based on the patients," he says. "The attitude and the appetite for life that they have even after getting diagnosed is just something special," says Brester, who is married with 1-year-old twins and has another child due in August.

Honoring a friend

Iowa bound: Jose Torres, graduating from the University of New Mexico School of Medicine, will head to the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics for his general surgery residency.

Besides the surprise awaiting every medical student before the opening of envelopes, Match Day held an additional surprise for Jose Torres, 30, a medical student graduating from the University of New Mexico School of Medicine. He was given the Outstanding Medical Student Research Award, which was renamed this year in honor of Bill Hays, an MD - Ph.D. student at New Mexico who died recently of gastrointestinal cancer. The surprise for Torres was not only due to the fact that he didn't expect this award, but also that he was a friend of Bill Hays.

Before going to medical school, Torres attended graduate school and studied biomedical sciences. "That's when I realized I missed dealing with people on a one-on-one level," he recalls. "And I also realized you didn't necessarily need a Ph.D. to do research, and that you can actually have an MD and do research at the same time."

Torres met Hays in graduate school. "He was an MD - Ph.D. student finishing up his Ph.D., and was working in the lab next to mine. He taught me several lab techniques, and gave me advice regarding medical school." When Hays finished his Ph.D., he went back to medical school and finished his MD He developed cancer after beginning his residency at the University of Minnesota, Torres recalls.

"He died about six to eight months after being diagnosed," he says. Hays' family went to the Match ceremony to personally deliver the award, and the presentation of the award was very emotional, according to Torres.

After he finishes his residency in general surgery at the University of Iowa, he intends to do a fellowship in surgical oncology, or in minimally invasive surgery. "I am thinking about going into academic medicine," says Torres, who comes from a family of educators.

Seeking a cure

Harry Hoar, 25, a student at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine who was matched with the Bay State Medical Center in Springfield, Mass., also was partly inspired to go into medicine after having his life touched by cancer.

"My grandmother died of cancer during my senior year in high school," he says. So during his undergraduate years, Hoar decided to get into the biology research field. "I thought that I was going to sit in the lab and find the cure for cancer, or at least work toward that. But I found lab work and basic bench research in college to be completely unfulfilling and frustrating."

It was difficult to conceptualize how the work he was doing in the lab would translate into something that would "help actual people," says Hoar. "I decided that was what was missing. I loved the science of it but missed the personal contact, the feeling of making an impact, and having formed relationships with people along the line."

So Hoar made a few phone calls, and got in touch with two physicians he knows to discuss his plan to go to medical school. "They laid out [the path to becoming a doctor] as this difficult process, not as lucrative as it used to be, and they expressed their many frustrations," says Hoar. "But their overall tone was positive; they said they enjoyed the relationships and the sense of making an impact on people."

Hoar's classmates elected him to be the medical student speaker at this month's commencement ceremony, and, perhaps not coincidentally, he plans to speak on "how to be a physician in the current setting of medical care - and still be a happy person."

By Suria Santana

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