(I first wrote and posted this in August of 2010 on an old site of mine. Since this topic still occasionally comes up, I figure I'd repost it here.)
I'm going through my second year of medical school (M2) for the second time. I don't have to explain why very often, as my education is not relevant to most conversations, but in medical school it is far and away the most frequent topic of conversation. Consequently, I've found myself explaining the nontraditional, circuitous path I have thus far taken through medical school more frequently than I'd like. So, I thought I'd write it down in its clearest form here so that I will hopefully end up telling the story less often.
I was accepted to start medical school in the fall of 2006. I deferred one year to travel and do generally awesome, medical related stuff. Due to an unexpected surgery and other financial complications I ended up not doing this, but taking some graduate courses in Industrial/Manufacturing engineering at UK in the summer of '06, working at UK Hospital as a 'Lean Apprentice' (basically applying the efficiency techniques I'd learned in engineering grad school to hospital systems) for the '06-'07 school year, and then sold books door to door in the summer of '07. As a complete aside, selling books was one of the hardest and best things (including medical school) that I have ever done. I loved it & think all med students (and human beings for that matter) should sell books for a summer.
I started Med School in the fall of '07 and aside from school I started a mentoring program called Live On Purpose (which died after my first year), put together the coursework for and gave a lecture on Efficiency in Medical Systems to my fellow classmates, and competed in a national cross-disciplinary case study competition called Clarion. Finally, I helped found the Business of Healthcare Club.
During the summer of '08 I worked on a non-profit called Heal One started by COM 2011 student Aalap Majmudar and myself, as well as settled in as president of the University of Kentucky's
Entrepreneur Club. During the '08-'09 school year, in addition to working on the Business of Healthcare, and running the Entrepreneur Club and Heal One, I started what eventually became a business incubator downtown called
Awesome Inc. Needless to say this was more on my plate than was responsible for a med student with average intelligence as compared to his peers, so I did poorly enough (though not failing or getting a 'D' in any classes) to be asked by the Progress & Promotions Committee to retake my M2 year.
Near the end of my second year, with Awesome Inc in its physical form (on 348 E Main St.) I decided that I wanted to take a year off of medical school to get the incubator on its feet and to really spend most of my time growing Heal One, whose purpose was to be a knowledge hub for economically sustainable healthcare solutions & business models to fund them (i.e. studying places like Aravind Eye Hospital in India and the Acumen Fund).
I ended up not being able to focus at all on Heal One, as growing Awesome Inc turned out to be much more difficult than I had imagined (as all startups do). During the year and three months I spent growing Awesome Inc we launched many initiatives (i.e. a bootcamp for entrepreneurs called AwesomeCamp, a mobile phone conference series called
mobileX, an intern program called
Team Alpha) but all of them centered around our mission statement:
"Start and grow high tech, creative, and entrepreneurial companies in communities...in fun, cool ways."
I plan on applying the lessons I learned in starting this company to medicine some day and am of course always down to talk about business ideas (especially medically related ones), technology breakthroughs, and cool creative initiatives in general. I have other interests and there's of course more to me and my life than this story covers but for the sake of adequately answering the 'so, what are you doing here?' question, I think this is sufficient for now. Nice to meet you, UKCOM class of 2013 (and of course anyone else who's found their way here in other ways).
Here's to a rockin' 3 more years of medical school and the inevitable transformation of our minds and characters into something even better than they already are.
