As the UT Southwestern Medical School class of 2019 looks ahead this week to Match Day, they are also looking back on their education and how it has shaped their future as physicians.

---

Transcript

- This is an institution that's known around the nation. UT Southwestern is just one of those places that people know about and have great things to say. I graduated high school a year early, did community college for three years and during that time I had family members get ill at the same time kind of with a similar thing. I saw the way the doctors interacted with our families, I saw the sense of comfort that they were able to provide. And that's when my interest was piqued, and then kind of the rest is history. Me and my husband we were really good friends in high school and middle school. We got married in 2012. Maddox was born in 2014. It's always been super important to me number one to do as well as possible in school and number two to still be there and still have that bond with my son. It hasn't been easy, but it's definitely been worth it. I don't think I could have done it without them. They have been a driving force for me. My husband has always been nothing but completely supportive. I just would constantly have to remind myself, okay this is what you came here for. You finally have this opportunity to become a physician, something that you dreamed about.

- I was drawn towards medicine because of this really relational aspect initially as well as this really strong scientific background being able to analyze things in a very I guess detective like mind set. So I started the violin around 2nd grade. Playing the violin for the past 14 years has instilled a lot of discipline that has been helpful as a medical student. It is a constant reminder of what keeps me grounded. I've been a part of UT Southwestern's premier acapella group, the Lymph-nodes. Every year there's a big multicultural show and I was able to participate in that in my first year and my fourth year. I got really involved performing in five dances my first year and then a couple my fourth year. It was with things like Bollywood, Bhangra and Ross, a lot of Indian dances. Medical school is really difficult and having those friends where you can hang out and goof off with or really share what's going on, what your struggles have been like, it has been a huge blessing. I think my biggest takeaway is constantly thinking about innovation because I think that coming in as the first year of a new curriculum, UT Southwestern being a huge research powerhouse and getting to see a lot of cutting-edge new treatments and things like that I've really taken away from Southwestern a sense of what it means to constantly be thinking about how we can do things better and where the future direction of medicine is going. - The thing that really got me involved in Medicine was my PE coach. In third grade, oddly enough, he took it upon himself for a reason to teach us like the bones and muscles of the body. My love for sport, with helping people and then I also found how my love for engineering was really realized in the musculoskeletal system in orthopedics. It is an amazing feeling to know that this is a fulfillment of what I thought about 20 something years ago. I've definitely been fortunate to have a lot of support along the way and probably the most important relationship that I formed during med school was my now wife. She is not in our class or associated with medicine at all, but out of her love of volunteerism and love for working with kids, she was volunteering at Scottish Rite Hospital. Gene and I were elected as the curriculum representatives for our class so we went to an 18 months pre-clinical and then added in some elective time and some research for us to be able to explore some other avenues during that pre-clinical time. I mean it 100% is unanimous that no one would wanna go back to the old curriculum. This provides a lot more freedom in discovering what's important to you, what your passions are in medicine. All the way from Parkland, Clements, the VA, Children's, it's a really unique set up and I think getting to be a part of that clinical training was truly excellent.