Who am I?

I am an MD-PhD currently a PGY-1 in the Internal Medicine Physician-Scientist Development Program at the University of Chicago. I did my MD and PhD training at the University of Chicago as well. I spent 4 years in the Biophysics Program working for Aaron Dinner, a computational chemist/biologist. My PhD focused on developing statistical methods for analyzing transcriptome-wide (or proteome-wide, etc.) sparsely sampled (2-4 hours/timepoint over 48 hours) data. The particular questions I was addressing were 1) what genes have rhythmic expression and 2) how can we rigorously compare the rhythmicity of these genes' expression between different conditions (high-fat diet vs. normal diet). In the meantime I also clarified some statistical misconceptions in the field of rhythm detection. After my PhD I returned to second year of medical school; at UChicago we have the option of breaking from medical school after the first year for our PhD.

Along with science, I’m interested in advocacy and public health. What opportunities does Pritzker have for that?

There is a very strong social justice and advocacy bent among the students and faculty at UChicago and the Pritzker School of Medicine. Our location on the South Side of Chicago puts us in a unique position to engage with the community and confront its challenges (as well as overcome some of the inequity and exploitation that the University historically had a part in).

One of the first year classes that I felt was the most unique and formative for me was Health Care Disparities, which is designed to bring in different physicians and professors to present their advocacy, how they came into it, and the challenges they face. There is also a small group part of the class that focuses on laying the groundwork for how to start an advocacy project.

In addition to Health Care Disparities being part of the curriculum, the administration at UChicago is also extremely receptive to student interests in advocacy. In my first year at a Q&A I asked the administration (President of the Hospital, Dean of the Biological Sciences, and Dean of the Medical School) why we weren’t participating in the Healthcare Equality Index, which assesses how LGBTQ friendly medical institutions are. They had never heard of it, but were happy to hear me out and put me in touch with the administrators necessary so that we could complete the survey. We completed the survey that year, but did poorly. To their credit, they continued completing the survey, and after several years of work, we are now Gold Leaders on the Healthcare Equality Index!

This is a personal anecdote, but there are many more examples. Pritzker students have started a new free clinic in the past year (to accompany the other 4 we operate), there are several nutrition/health programs operated by Pritzker students at the UChicago Charter schools, and we run a food pantry at the Children’s Hospital.

How did you know an MD/PhD program was right for you, and how did you know Pritzker, specifically, was the right program for you?

Hindsight is 20/20 of course, but I think an important part of it is understanding if you think you’d enjoy the training. They are completely orthogonal ways of thinking and behaving, cultivating very different parts of your mind. The PhD is deliberate and slow, with lots of time to suck the marrow out of problems. The MD is much more of a rush, grabbing a cursory knowledge and understanding of a lot, which you will then whittle away at as you subspecialize.

Not many people are actually cut out for research. You fail more often than you succeed, again and again. You work long hours mostly in your own head. You have lots of interaction with friends and colleagues and time to go to the pub or café to work through problems, but at the end of the day you are the one forging ahead. Even then, you don’t know if it’s actually right, even as you write it up and try to publish it. Days, weeks, maybe months will pass without you feeling like you have made any forward progress, but when you look back over a year you see how amazingly far you have come.

Not many people are actually cut out for medicine. You have responsibilities and burdens placed on you that are reserved for few in society. You will be responsible to imbibe many volumes of information and devote yourself to maintaining that knowledge and honing it as you subspecialize. You will be around a lot of suffering, and a lot of death, but you will actually make a lot of it better. You will feel yourself growing day to day, and the work you do will actually be changing the lives of those around you.

Now, ideally you will get to do a mix of the two in your career, but you really have to be ok with each path separately to enjoy the MD-PhD. Neither degree is particularly necessary to be successful at the other (no more successful than 4 extra years of post-doc or 4 extra years of residency and fellowship would make you).

Any hot takes?

Avoid US News and World Reports. Their criteria are garbage, and I have no faith their rankings have any statistical distinctiveness or value. This being said, their top 30 schools for the past 2 years probably encompass a good starting set of schools. The minutia of the ordering is otherwise useless.