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Student Profiles

Name: Shikha Jain
Age: 24
Hometown: Kalamazoo, Michigan

Highlights of Pre-Med Career:

Why Medicine?

Modest one-room shanties bordered the path that led to a South African hospital in Cape Town. On the first day that I walked into Somerset Hospital, I was nervous and unsure of what to expect. Countless questions and concerns raced through my head: How would I communicate with the patients? Was I ready to take on this immense responsibility? Would these primarily impoverished patients and their families trust an American volunteer to help with their children? An hour later while helping Baby Mandisa learn how to walk again, and comforting a concerned mother in broken English and Xhosa, these questions were replaced with a feeling of belonging, excitement and accomplishment.

Many of the experiences in my life that have shaped my desire to enter into the medical field are unconventional. As a child, years of excitedly following my father on his rounds led me to a volunteer position in the Department of Admissions. Quickly my dreams of reading charts and having an immediate, direct impact on a patient's life was replaced with the reality that I was in charge of admitting and transporting often cranky patients who frequently blamed me if their physician was running late. And I would be unable to have more than 30 seconds of contact with a given patient. This exposure to medicine was initially unsettling, as I had hoped to rocket straight from my desk in Admitting to the bedside of an ailing patient where I was needed. However, after a few days, I began to realize that many of these patients were short-tempered because they were nervous and often times just needed a friendly face that would comfort them by simply listening. I made it my goal to do as much as I possibly could in those 30 seconds to put the patient at ease.

My time In South Africa also helped me to enrich and expand my understanding of the impact societal values and transitions have on the evolution of health care. I realized how easy it was to erroneously judge a country's attempt at dealing with poverty and oppression using American standards and experience. This realization tied in with my development of the most effective way of communicating with members of a community that housed a great deal of resentment and mistrust due to the forced assimilation of western medicine into their traditions. It was important that patients understood what was being done, and that if they had any questions they should always ask. I realized most of these patients had many reasons to not trust the physicians, and it was my responsibility to make sure a new trust was formed.

I saw a parallel phenomenon in the underprivileged areas of Philadelphia during my year of graduate work. I worked with the Street Side Health Care Project providing free medical care and a syringe exchange for many who could not afford health care. I met many current and former drug users who had renounced conventional medicine due to monetary constraints and bad experiences. I used the insight I had gained in South Africa to try to understand why these people felt abandoned or disillusioned and communicate with them in an unthreatening manner.

These experiences across the globe exemplify not only the evolution of my dedication to enter the medical field, but also typify a decisive impact on expanding my perspectives.

Why CHM?

One of the main reasons I chose to attend CHM is its proximity to my family. I have not lived in the same state as my parents in more than five years, and as we are extremely close, I missed the comfort of having them within an hour's drive. I knew to expect a different level and type of stress in medical school, and I knew that for these first two years, I needed a strong base to plant my feet and grow and develop. Another very important reason I chose MSU CHM is because of its focus on patient care. It is extremely important to remember that while in your office the individual is 'the patient' he or she is also a mother/father/sister/brother/daughter/son. Each patient has dreams, emotions, problems, passions, his or her own life and the second we forget this the quality of our patient care declines. I chose CHM because through the curriculum the program acknowledged that this idea is intrinsic to pursuing a career in medicine. The classes, faculty and overarching theme that is constantly discussed is the importance of the quality of patient care, and this drew me to the CHM MSU program.

About Year I

Being involved in the American Medical Students Association (AMSA) has had a major impact on the development of my thoughts and ideas in the past year. I have always been aware of the obscene number of uninsured individuals in this country, and in order to fix this one of my goals has always been to open a free clinic to provide health care for the uninsured. However through my IPPR class at CHM and numerous AMSA events and conferences, I have learned that opening another clinic would be analogous to putting a band-aid on an amputated limb. In the current health care system, free clinics are a 'quick fix' to a much larger problem. In a country as rich as ours, there should be no reason that a mother is forced to chose between an insulin shot or food for her baby. I have realized that in order to fix this problem, our health care system needs to be revamped, and one of my goals is to be one of those people creating this new system that leaves no individual without health care. Not only are there over 45 million people in this country that are uninsured, including uncompensated care delivered by private providers, private sources appear to account for just over 81 percent ($28.1 billion) of all uncompensated care. The insured and uninsured are being penalized by the system currently in place. Both CHM and AMSA have helped me to realize that a better health care system is not only a possibility, it is a necessity.

Year I Challenge

I will admit, it was difficult for me to move back to Michigan after living in Chicago and Philadelphia for the past five years. I was not sure how I would adjust to living in a college town after living in big cities. Since I had completed my undergraduate degree in Chicago and a year of graduate school in Philadelphia, it was odd for me to be surrounded by people from Michigan. Living in two different cities in five years, and then moving to a college town was a bit of a culture shock. While I was glad to be back, I was surprised as to how different college life at a school like MSU was. However, I learned through the months that as long as I have a few good friends, who I can have a good time with and who are willing to listen to me complain every now and again, I can have fun anywhere.

About CHM Professors and Classmates

The professors at CHM are extremely accessible and easy to communicate with. They are very open to feedback and will go out of their way to provide as much assistance to the students as possible. The neuroscience department does an especially amazing job of teaching while keeping the students engaged by actually doing neurological exams on student volunteers and directly demonstrating the clinical applications of what we learn in the classroom.