Hometown: Brighton, CO
Undergraduate Institution: Carleton College
What did you do during your gap year(s)? I took four years off before coming to Pritzker. I spent a year teaching English in Buenos Aires, then went on a solo backpacking trip around South America for 4 months. After that I moved to Chicago and worked as a Community Health Educator at a federally qualified health center called Erie Family Health Center. I love to talk about nontraditional paths to medicine and what it’s like to return to full-time schooling after taking a long time off, so don’t hesitate to reach out with questions!
Extracurricular activities at Pritzker: Wellness Committee, Peer Mentorship at Pritzker, Pritzker Book Club, Med Students 4 Choice, and Feed1st.
Scholarship & Discovery Track: Healthcare Delivery Improvement Sciences
Research experience(s) at UChicago:
Prior to coming to Pritzker all my exposure to research had been in basic science labs, which aren’t for me. This made me nervous about Pritzker’s research requirements, but very quickly I learned how much more there is to research than lab work. I’ve had the opportunity to work with numerous mentors on a wide variety of projects in my time here! For SRP I designed a survey to research intimate partner violence screening practices of family medicine physicians, as well as prevalence of IPV among these physicians, under the mentorship of Sonia Oyola, MD. During my preclinical years, I administered surveys to patients at a Planned Parenthood in Chicago for a project investigating a relationship between locus of control and reproductive healthcare access under the mentorship of Julie Chor, MD, MPH. More recently as part of Scholarship and Discovery, I have been analyzing outcomes of the COVID outpatient management program at our hospital under the mentorship of Moira McNulty, MD. The opportunities for research and mentorship are vast at Pritzker!
Why did you choose to attend Pritzker?
My Pritzker interview day made it clear how right Pritzker was for me. The day started with a Multicultural Affairs breakfast and student panel, and I was impressed by how kind, smart, and vulnerable the panelists were. It felt monumental to hear each student through the course of the panel reveal how important social justice was to them and the myriad ways they were involved in advocacy and service to the community. I’ll never forget the first talk of the morning in which one of our beloved faculty described Pritzker’s mission and emphasized clearly that if we weren’t interested in social justice and addressing healthcare disparities, Pritzker wasn’t the school for us. Not a single other school I interviewed at centered diversity and social justice and demonstrated how central those are to the core of their mission like Pritzker did, and this has remained true in all my time here. I’d also be remiss if I didn’t mention the incredible Pritzker community. Pritzker students were the happiest students I met on the interview trail, the ones with the most work-life balance and the clearest desire to see their classmates succeed rather than compete with them. I really wanted to be a part of this community, and I’m so happy that I am! Medical school is hard and it’s not always fun but I am always incredibly grateful that I made the choice to call Pritzker home.
What have been your most meaningful clinical experiences as a Pritzker student?
Being on the wards is an immense, unique privilege. I am constantly struck by how lucky I am that patients allow me to participate in their care. The clinical experiences that I’ve had that have been the most formative have all involved connecting with patients in exceedingly vulnerable moments. I’ll never forget the C-section in which I saw a couple meet their very first child after a devastatingly large number of miscarriages. That pure, unadulterated joy is something I reflect back on during hard moments on the wards. I’ll also never forget a patient who consented for me to perform a (supervised) procedure on her. She stoically tolerated a procedure that tends to be uncomfortable, and when I congratulated her for her strength at the end she congratulated me on my successful completion of the procedure. I nearly cried right there in the exam room, overcome with gratitude for our incredible patients who have the generosity to allow us to learn from them and the kindness to be proud of us when we do.
How would you describe your classmates?
My classmates are truly phenomenal. Pritzker is a special place, bringing together people who are different in so many ways but all fundamentally similar in their intense compassion, generosity, and drive to combat social injustice. I am constantly learning from them, whether that means learning how to brew beer, bake macarons, read histology slides, navigate the supply rooms, or deliver an excellent patient presentation. Our community is really a family.