As you reflect on your time at CI MED, what stands out now?

Two things:

1. CI MED students have a broader industry skill set than I see in my residency class. Though of course my residency class is excellently set up for exceptional pediatric care, there are only two of us (out of 39) with computer programming and circuitry experience. At CI MED, I was able to implement code for processing national data sets and ask roommates for debugging help. Other classmates had mechanical modeling experience that translated into bone strengthening studies.

2. My medical school class got along exceptionally well with each other. We had six of us living right next to each other that made daily community life lovely with studying, board games, and camaraderie in difficult life events and hosting celebrations, including a Barbie themed party.

What components or aspects of the curriculum prepared you for contributing during residency and clinical practice?

Being familiar with a variety of research techniques and software allows me to network more engagingly with several members of hospital staff. I anticipate that my experience in REDCap and Python programming and maybe even signal processing will help me with my current idea for my quality improvement project. Residency workrooms are often noisy and not conducive to efficient, accurate work, so I hope to measure average sound intensity in the room before-and-after implementation of a silent, shared, electronic checklist for tasks to reduce distractions.

Indirectly, patients are often intrigued by my engineering background, and I feel it gives me a foot-in-the-door for synergistic relationships with patient families that have STEM backgrounds.

Did you have a mentor or professor at CI MED who influenced your career decisions? What did you learn from them?

Yep, a few! Professor Brad Sutton is an inspirational example of a research powerhouse. I was able to help him a bit with some process improvement for machine-learning segmentation of brain images, but I ultimately learned that the radiology lifestyle would not work for me. He still exemplified efficient but compassionate management of multiple projects.

Dr. Kristine Carpenter showed excellent adaptiveness and collegiality both in incorporating new medical advances and student curriculum feedback. This partnership kept us engaged in the iterative process of clinical education.

Dr. Feiteng Su demonstrated remarkable commitment to patients and giving real-time student feedback that I would love to emulate.

CI MED just received full LCME accreditation. What does that mean to you?

It is mostly confirmation of what many of us already knew: University of Illinois was excellently positioned to grow this new kind of medical school, and the result seems sustainable. I am glad that the mission will continue.

What are you most proud of during your time at CI MED?

This is perhaps hubris, but I am very proud to have served as student government president while at CI MED. The trust I gained from my peers allowed me to apply their leverage towards several critical decisions, such as aiding in selection of CI MED leadership, iteratively fairer evaluations of students, and two unforgettable “Med Gala” celebrations.