I moved around a lot growing up. Though I was born in Chicago, my family moved to Toronto, Canada, when I was in middle school. I’m Greek, and while we lived there, I attended a Greek school, which allowed me to embrace my culture, learn the language, and develop a connection with my heritage. I attended high school in Austin, Texas, and I stayed in Austin for my undergraduate degree at the University of Texas. After getting my degree in neurobiology, I took a year off to pursue two activities that were very important to me.
For the first two months of that year, I participated in a program called Ionian Village. I usually describe the program as a camp and pilgrimage for Greek Orthodox high school kids. As a staff member, I helped bring Greek American kids to Greece, allowing them to connect with their culture and heritage while seeing the historical sites, monuments, and monasteries that figure so prominently in their history. I was able to participate in the program previously as a student, and then after I graduated from college I was thrilled to go back as a staff member. That experience with Ionian Village helped me develop values that I need in medical school, like putting other people before myself, working with a team of people who maybe aren’t exactly like me, and importantly, working well under little sleep. I actually almost intentionally delayed medical school because I knew I wanted to contribute to the program so much, and I knew it wouldn’t coincide well with medical student life.
Speaking of working on little sleep, I was actually applying to medical school while I was in Greece, and since we only had one little desktop computer to share among all thirty staff members, I was writing my admissions essays at like 3 o’clock in the morning. I decided to write those essays from a first-person perspective (“I am here, at this camp, at 3am…”), and I think that made my application and interviews more interesting. When I returned to the United States, I came back to Austin and worked as a research assistant at Austin Retina Associates. My research partners would come to me with ideas, and I would do the background work for them, including writing and submitting the publications. Up until then, I hadn’t had a lot of exposure to medicine, but that experience allowed me to get several publications and attend several conferences, which was a good introduction.
I think my undergraduate degree in neurobiology gave me a strong foundation in science, and when I got to medical school, I thought I wanted to be an ophthalmologist. The subject seemed interesting, so I became the president of the Ophthalmology Student Interest Group and got really involved… until I shadowed an ophthalmologist and accidentally fell asleep. I just wasn’t personally interested in the clinical work, which was a real bummer for me, because I had thought that I already knew what I wanted to do. Still, going through third year was a really interesting time for me because it was like a great exploration that exposed me to lots of different fields in medicine. During my neurology rotation, I remembered how excited I had been in my “developmental neurobiology” or “neurobiology of disease” classes as an undergraduate. That interest had never “clicked” for me until I started seeing patients, but once I did, I was fascinated. At the end of the rotation, I realized, “this is what I want to do, this is where I want to be.” The pathology was interesting, the science was interesting, and I loved how neurologists were always asking questions and talking to the patients. In neurology, I found a lot of collaboration and leaning on one another. Scholarship was at the forefront of everyone’s mind as opposed to personal ambition, and I really appreciated that ethos.
But that wasn’t all that brought me to neurology. The earliest experience I had related to the field was actually back in high school. My AP biology teacher, Mr. Hamilton, took us on a field trip to San Antonio, and during that trip we got to visit an anatomy lab. In the lab, I held a human brain for the first time and thought, “this is the coolest thing I have ever seen in my life.” Seeing my amazement, Mr. Hamilton talked to me about going into medicine as a career. No one had ever been there to talk to me about that before, but he told me, “you can go to medical school, and this is how you do it: take these tests, get these grades.” He was a very dedicated teacher, and though Mr. Hamilton is not a permanent presence in my life, in that one moment he nudged me in the direction of medicine and made a huge difference in my life; I will always be grateful for that influence. It was a full circle moment when I came to San Antonio for medical school and ultimately decided to specialize in neurology.
In medicine, you often cannot cure the patient, and in neurology especially, you almost never cure the patient. That said, you can always help them, and you can always be their doctor. That’s not just a “personal statement” line; I truly believe it. Neurologists subscribe so hard to that belief, and I think it’s inspiring. As a doctor, I hope to continue in that tradition as I begin residency this coming year.
Veritas is one of the things I really love about UTHSCSA. I know other schools have similar programs, but I appreciate the intentional way it involves students in mentorship for their entire course in medical school, and I think that is really important. I leaned heavily on my Veritas Peer Advisors: it was hard for me to understand how to study to be a doctor at the beginning of medical school. It can be difficult to be vulnerable to your peers, but it’s a little easier to be vulnerable to someone you can look up to who has been through it. When I had a chance to be a VPA, I wanted to do that for other students, and this year I had a chance to be a mentor in medicine as a 4th year student while working on the “Beyond the Stats” project to help other medical students learn about all the different specialties in medicine. In addition to the formal structure of Veritas, the mindset of looking for that vertical chain of mentorship is just as valuable in an organic setting and is something I hope to continue in the future.
Story: Will Young, Photos: Claire Schenken