By Julia Sexton ’21, Health Professions Interest Career Peer Leader
Katherine Bullock graduated from UVM in 2019 and has recently been committed to Duke University’s Physician Assistant Program. At UVM, Katherine studied Nutrition and Food Sciences and minored in Microbiology. These fields of study coincided with many of her PA school prerequisite courses. During her first year at UVM, Katherine helped found the Pre-PA Club. As a Sophomore, she became more involved in the club through leadership opportunities, and by her Junior year, she became the President of the club. Along with being an active member of the Pre-PA Club, Katherine worked as a Licensed Nurse Assistant (LNA) at the Burlington Health & Rehab Center. She then moved on to work on the orthopedic and neurology floor at the UVM Medical Center.
Katherine decided to pursue a career as a PA because she wanted to be able to have a relationship and a positive impact on her patients. PAs have more contact with patients than other health professionals, allowing her to give more time to work with patients to find the best routes of care and teach patients about their therapies and treatment options. She is also excited about the prospect of being able to switch specialties throughout her career. PAs are trained to be adaptable to many specialties, allowing them to switch between different fields, such as primary care, orthopedics, cardiology, etc., without needing to go through residency or specialty training. In addition to this, the fast-track timeline of PA school was also appealing to her because she would be able to treat patients, start her career, and her life outside of work sooner.
After graduation, Katherine worked at a private gynecology office in order to get the 2,000 hours of clinical experience required for PA school admission. She decided to work in an office setting to expand the type of patient care hours she experienced prior to applying. Most applicants to PA school take time off between their undergraduate degrees and PA school. This gives them ample time to meet these requirements, save money for school, and get more life experience. Katherine noted that she was very appreciative of the time after graduation to learn more about herself as a healthcare worker and as a person. In addition to this, the average age of a PA student is about 26 years old, so there should not be a great deal of stress revolving around starting PA school right away.
During her application process, Katherine applied to around 8 schools. However, many applicants choose to apply to more. She primarily applied to schools on the east coast because she knew that she wanted to be closer to family and that she could see herself living on the east coast in the future. When choosing schools to apply to, she was interested in schools that provided interesting electives, a focus on primary care, and high passing rates for the first attempt on the PANCE (PA National Certifying Exam). She also wanted to attend a school that utilized cadaver labs and ensured early clinical experience. That being said, other schools put emphasis on other aspects of the field, such as research.
Katherine explained that the application process for PA school takes about a year. The Centralized Application Service for Physician Assistants (CASPA) opens at the end of April. Applicants should get their applications completed sooner rather than later to ensure a spot in their desired program. Katherine completed most of her applications by June and began to hear back from schools in August. Interviews took place during the fall. She found that patient care experience is one of the most important aspects of PA school admissions, and that clinical hour requirements should be met by the time of application or soon after. In addition to the clinical hour requirement, PA school applications include a personal statement on why you would like to be a PA and 3-5 letters of recommendation. It is important to take note during the application process that some schools start their programs in January and others in August.
After becoming a PA, Katherine hopes to go into family practice. She recommends that those who are applying to PA school read “The Ultimate Guide to Getting Into PA School” by Andrew J. Rodican. She found that it was very helpful in learning how to navigate the application process. She also believes that a career as a PA is perfect for those who are passionate about empowering patients and want to be able to have a direct impact on their health. She finds that being a PA is a great way to learn about medicine and get to know patients personally while making a positive difference.
By Julia Sexton ’21 (Health Professions Interest Group Peer Leader)
Megan Mitchell, a local Vermonter, graduated from UVM in 2016 and is currently in her second year of podiatry school. At UVM, Megan studied Biological Sciences and had a minor in Biochemistry. She worked in the Blood Lab at the UVM Medical Center and participated in Undergraduate Research within the Van Houten lab. During her time at UVM, she also was involved in MedVida and the Pre-Vet club, as she was considering a career in veterinary medicine at the time.
After graduation, Megan spent 6 months traveling. She lived in Fiji for 3 months where she taught first grade to local children, and then moved to Argentina where she worked in the pediatric oncology unit in a local hospital. After returning home to Vermont, she worked as a surgical technician in the operating room at the UVM Medical Center for three years, where she specialized in vascular surgeries. It was in this position where she found her passion for surgery and realized she wanted to pursue a career in medicine.
During her application process, she was conflicted between applying to medical school or podiatry school. She ultimately chose podiatry school because of the surgical focus within residency. Graduates of podiatry programs are required to go through a three-year surgical residency, followed by a fellowship. By choosing podiatry, she would be guaranteed a surgical residency after graduation, where in an MD program, she would have to compete to receive a spot in a general surgery residency program.
Megan chose to matriculate at the New York College of Podiatric Medicine, which has recently been acquired by Touro College in New York City. She chose this program because it had a vascular specialty within their podiatric program, which was of interest to her because of her vascular focus as a surgical technician. During the first two years of podiatry school at Touro College, the courses are very science heavy, reinforcing the knowledge necessary to go into patient care. The third year involves internships around the city and the fourth year involves one-month long externships anywhere around the country, typically in locations you may consider completing your residency. After the four years of podiatry school, new D.P.M.s will complete a three-year surgical residency, followed by a one-year fellowship. For Megan, she finds that the most challenging part of podiatry school is the day to day studying. However, she finds it rewarding when she is learning something that reminds her of her motivation and excitement for the field. She loves learning new information that will be applicable to her career as a podiatrist. After graduation, Megan is considering specializing in cosmetics or reconstruction.
Advice to UVM students?
Megan advises that UVM students who are interested in podiatry shadow podiatrists to learn more about the profession. She also recommends talking to lots of people about the field. However, she knows firsthand that it is okay to not know exactly what you want to do as a profession after your undergraduate degree. She recommends if you are unsure, to not get discouraged and to also not pick a graduate program just to pick something. It is acceptable to get some more life experience before finding your passion. She says, “Everything will fall into place.”
Marissa is in her first year of medical school at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson in New Jersey. She took two gap years after graduating from UVM to work for WIC. While in undergrad, she was actively involved in Feel Good. Read more about her experiences with applying to medical school, deciding to go into healthcare, switching majors, gap years, and community service. Some takeaway advice is, “Follow what brings you joy, because this path to healthcare is not easy to go down. This idea of humanity and connection is at the crux of life, so making sure to find things in this life that bring you joy outside of academics is so important to keep you grounded.”
Starting Medical School (during a pandemic):
The first year has been interesting but has academically been good. Socially, it has been extremely difficult to start a new program without the ability to create a support system. Before I started, I thought academics were going to be the hardest thing about medical school, but that has completely flipped and been an interesting challenge. Overall, it’s been ok, but that transition has been hard. I feel lucky with the pandemic. I was working when the pandemic started, and we went remote. My work picked up during the pandemic because there was a greater need. We didn’t have any demanding financial situation, though we are government funded – so it was interesting to see if we would still have funding. As a first-year medical student, we don’t have a ton of clinical experiences, so it was easier in that way to put our platform online.
Future Interest:
It would be naïve to say that I know what type of doctor I want to be, but I know what interests me. The primary care aspect of medicine is what I’m drawn to most, though I haven’t had much exposure beyond that, so I may find I’m interested in something else in the future. What I really am looking forward to, that I have been exploring in my first year, is an intersection between medicine and advocacy. I came into medical school knowing this interest, but not fully knowing what it meant or even if it existed. To be specific, reproductive care is interesting to me because there is so much policy and politics around that topic that affects care in so many ways. Sexual health also has a lot of policy, healthcare for people incarcerated or for people who are in detention centers also centers around these social issues. This intersection is important to me, though I am still carving out my interest. That part of medicine is the most exciting to me, and I’ve seen a lot of that in primary care, but it doesn’t necessarily only exist there. For right now, that’s what I’m exploring.
Gap Years and WIC:
I studied nutrition in undergrad, and I was mostly always planning to take at least one year after graduation. I was studying abroad, so I knew that it wasn’t going to realistically work with timing to apply for medical school while still in undergrad. The pre health advisor, Cara Calvelli, advised me to take two years and I saw how that could be beneficial. During this time, I worked for the WIC program. It stands for Women, Infants, and Children. It is a federally funded state program under the USDA. WIC is a nutrition program that provides nutrition counseling to families, specifically pregnant women and children under 5. There is a lot of prenatal support and health-based education being given to people. There is a lot of advocacy around nutrition policy and access to healthcare coordination. I worked there for 2 years in the Boston area. Though WIC exists everywhere, I chose to move to Boston for social reasons and I knew I wanted to be in an urban setting.
Feel Good Involvement:
I started volunteering with Feel Good my first semester at UVM making sandwiches. I started because the people at the Activities Fair were super nice, and I was intrigued. I came into freshman year as an Environmental Engineering major, and I had ambitions to work in the clean water industry. Clearly that has changed since then. Feel Good in college was a way of volunteering and doing this fundraising work that led to empowering communities globally. I learned a lot about what it meant to be connected to things outside of school. It opened my eyes to these issues happening around me globally, and what it meant to look at healthcare from a global perspective. Feel Good helped ingrain the idea of working with people and helped teach me what it meant to educate about nutrition and sustainable food sources. Once I started learning about that, I found what I was really interested in, and found what that meant for me and my career. I became really involved with the club; I was co-President one year. When I came back from Study Abroad, I started volunteering with their Board of Directors my senior year, and I then became the Vice Chair of the Board of Directors to help at a national level as an alum. I was involved in both the UVM chapter and the National level, that gave me a lot of leadership experience. I was working with like-minded people, and I learned a lot in the organizational sense about what it means to run a non-profit, which I didn’t have experience in before. Feel Good catalyzed this mindset shift for me, I learned so much about how global issues connect people. Feed Good involvement was both super fun and opened a whole new world for me that helped to lead me down the path that I’m on now. In the pre-health sense, I had a lot of dissonance. I didn’t do any research in undergrad, and a lot of my time was spent with Feel Good. I felt like sometimes I was wasting my time or that it was wrong, or that I should be doing something else more directly relevant. I didn’t really have much pre-health mentorship within Feel Good, most other people were going into nonprofit work. Sometimes I felt a bit out of place, but now I do not believe I wasted my time at all. At the time, I didn’t know if I should be doing research or shadowing; ultimately, I chose not to, but I thought about it a lot when I chose to devote hours of my time to Feel Good. Cara told me something that I tell people now, about how you tell a story about yourself as an applicant. My story was never about hard sciences or grades, they were important, but they didn’t sell my story. The theme of my application story was about Feel Good and what it led to. I was recently talking about this idea of telling a unique story to undergrads involved in Feel Good, and about doing things that bring you joy instead of what you feel you should be doing.
Dismas House Living:
One of the biggest things Feel Good did for me was open this idea of connection to community and global issues. Before joining Feel Good, I was super focused on academics, and my future. Then, through Feel Good, I realized this world of policy issues and how healthcare is connected to so many things. And how it’s possible to be a humanitarian and a doctor. I lived at the Dismas house in Burlington. It is a transitional house for people in downtown Burlington coming out of prison. It is an interesting model, not a formal halfway house, one difference is that community members, mostly students, are invited to live in the house, not as a volunteer but just as a student resident. One of my professors was a part of the board of directors for it and was a big advocate for this house. I became close with him, and he influenced me in my decision to live there. I ended up living there my senior year of college, which was a cool experience. There was no project or academic connection. I lived there with 8 other people, mostly men, but there was one other woman. Mostly men transitioning from previous incarceration. We shared a kitchen, living room, and bathroom, so it was very cozy. Part of the program was to have community members come in and cook dinner. When living there, you had to attend at least 2 meals a day, so the sense of community was promoted. It opened my eyes so much to walking in other people’s shoes and seeing what other people go through. I felt like I was in such a unique position. People transitioning out of prison have so many authoritative figures in their life that they are expected to report to. I was not an authority figure; I was just a person living there who happened to be a student. I learned so much about people’s lives before, during, and after prison. It was so influential in what I’m interested in now. It was such raw humanity to live there, and it really made me want to go into medicine. Doctors and healthcare professionals hold a powerful influence and a unique snapshot of people’s lives. One person had cancer while he was in prison and told me all about what it meant to be shackled in a hospital and how he was treated. He had to be guarded and chained to the bed. I learned so many things that I would have never known. When I was living there, the house next to us was the UVM Men’s Rowing team, so it was so interesting to compare those two worlds. There was such a stark contrast within the same Burlington community, and even the same street. There’s so much going on behind doors that you may not realize. That experience opened up a lot for me, and I would have never known this house existed if my professor didn’t tell me because it is so well integrated into the Burlington community. It just opened my eyes to things that other people are experiencing or carrying with them. When I think about what kind of doctor I want to be, keeping people’s humanity and experiences they endured in mind is so important. Living there was influential in thinking about what type of provider I want to be and how I was going to make the most of my gap years.
Pre-Med Decision:
I went through so many highs and lows when transitioning to a pre-med track. I’m happy to share the authentic version of how I got here. I realized engineering was not for me, I kept journals during that point in my life and I was considering medicine, I thought about nursing, I thought about a Master’s in Public Health, I was going to drop out and do Americorps – I really had no idea what I was going to do. Especially my second semester freshman year, I was all over the place, simultaneously I was applying to PEP and doubting that. I don’t know that there was ever a moment where I was sure of my track. At the end of senior year, after graduating UVM, I was considering taking the MCAT or enter a PA (Physician Assistant) program. Up until the day I was about to take the MCAT I was still deciding. I was worried I wasn’t performing as well as I should be academically. Most of my premed decision was continuing to take the classes in the hopes that I would figure it out and be able to apply to whichever program I wanted to. Early on, I decided I was interested in the healthcare field, but I wasn’t sure if that meant becoming an RD (Registered Dietician), or nursing or PA or MPH. I made the decision to just start taking the premed classes because that was the most demanding requirements, so in case if I did apply to medical school, I would have all the requirements. Choosing nutrition was part of the transition to healthcare. I didn’t have one moment where I decided. This is why, again, when you talk to a lot of different people it can be helpful, but to a certain degree, it could be overwhelming. Every decision felt like the end of the world because of all the pressure. Health care is a rigorous field, no matter which part you go into, you’re expected to know a lot.
Medical School Application Process:
There’s so much I could say about my application process. I feel like I have an arsenal of advice for younger students. If I had to say one sentence of advice it would be to feel solid in the things that will keep you grounded and in your support system. It is an extremely long process and there’s a lot of waiting around and sending application materials into the abyss, not knowing if they got there or when you’re going to hear back, so there’s not always a clear timeline. I remember I was doing this running race with my coworkers and we were training together, and it was so therapeutic. Especially at that time because I was right in the middle of the application process. I had been so anxious because there was no timeline, and it was unsettling to send in my application and they say, “We’ll get back to you in 1-10 months”, and you don’t really have any control beyond that. You don’t want to waste a year of your life waiting, because it can easily turn into that if you let it, so actively fighting against that, for me, was really important. More specifically, I could talk about how much Cara and the Health Professions office helped me for days, and that is not an advertisement. I wouldn’t be here in this program if I didn’t lean into her advice. It is important to decide who you are going to take advice from, because people are going to tell you all sorts of different things. Especially in the health care track, there are so many different opinions, and the field is changing so much. Mentors that are your parents’ friend or people you have shadowed have had such a different experience from what we are going to have, so just make sure to keep that in perspective. Take advice with a grain of salt and make sure to find people that you trust. It can get really clouded with different people’s opinions, especially when taking advice found online. There are a lot of forums in the premed space, it can be helpful to hear different people’s experiences, but also you must be able to draw firm boundaries of what advice you will take without finding yourself knee deep in all these opinions from the internet.
I reached out to alum Cade Beaulieu through UVM Connect to learn more about his job at Nike and career journey. He was willing and able to talk the following day and we had a great conversation about his experiences.
Cade graduated in 2005 with a degree in Studio Art. Prior to his position as a Design Director, he held other roles at Nike. His team is considered the fastest product engine at Nike, meaning that they can create products and put them in the market in about seven months. He works with a trend and consumer focused team of product graphic designers and developers.
I asked Cade what his favorite aspects of his current role and field of work was and he emphasized that being a people manager has been very fulfilling. He emphasized the importance of relationships and explained that if there was one thing he wished he knew when he started his career, it is the value of relationships. You can be the single most talented person in any room but if you cannot establish the right relationship with the right people then your career will be underwhelming.
When asking if he had any suggestions on what UVM students can do to prepare for a similar career and the world of work, he explained the importance of being passionate. If you are passionate about what you are creating, then it is easier for you to authenticate those things with other people. This also ties into the importance of relationships. In Cade’s field specifically, you need to become really good at being yourself when it comes to the type of work that you do. Instead of trying to mold yourself to a creative role, it is best to embrace the way your personal authenticity.
Finally, if Cade could change one thing about the current world we live in, it would be the balance between work and life. During our discussion, we both agreed that this is beginning to happen. People tend to make work their life and the pandemic is starting to shift this mind set. It is important to remember that a job does not define us.
The Career Center is thrilled to introduce Nick Celedón. Nick is a seasoned pre-health advisor, and we are fortunate that he has joined our team part-time as the co-coordinator of the Health Professions Interest Group. Nick is available for virtual appointments through Handshake (choose the appointment type labelled “Pre-Health Foundations”). Contact him at: nicholas.celedon@uvm.edu
ABOUT:
Are you from Vermont? No, I still consider myself a native Texan.
College: Texas Christian University (TCU)
Degrees: B.S. in Movement Science and M.Ed. in Education with an emphasis in Urban Education
How did you begin working as a pre-health advisor?
In my last year of college, becoming a physical therapist for a professional sports team was no longer appealing. After graduating from TCU, I began working with middle and high school kids from under-resourced communities. This experience led to me pursuing a graduate degree and after some soul searching, I came across a position advising pre-health students. Not knowing what pre-health advising entailed, I figured this position would allow me to tap into my experiences as a former pre-physical therapy student. College students also seemed to be the next gradual step in my career. This also allowed me to work with underrepresented students, who I could relate to as a Mexican-American male.
What do you enjoy about working in higher education?
I love working with students. I’m really just a big kid at heart! Interacting with college students not only keeps me young but allows me to stay in tune with what is happening in the world from the perspective of a younger generation. Most importantly, it allows me to be of service to underrepresented students and this has the potential to make a larger impact on society.
Fun fact?
Love traveling and have visited over 25 countries.
Top 3 tips for pre-health students:
Be diligent – activities, coursework, interacting/engaging with professors is not easy, but you have to take ownership of your pre-health journey
Mental health is real! Take time for yourself and know that one exam or one class does not define you.
Learn to be reflective.
Advising Philosophy?
Pre-health can be a rollercoaster and I was fortunate enough to be a part of the ride!
