Sydney Harvey: A Changing Experience BACK

Published by AFAR

This is Sydney Harvey's second entry. Read her first MSTAR Diary to learn how she began her MSTAR experience.

I can’t believe it’s been 4 weeks since the summer began, and I am midway through the MSTAR experience. I’ve learned so much in four weeks, yet I’m left with a sense of amazement in how much more there is to know. The mentoring I’ve received has been fantastic.

In the lab, I have been given increasing amounts of responsibility. In the first week, my mentor was a little uneasy about totally handing off his experiment to a young med student he didn’t know very well. Four weeks later, he is giving me directions and letting me do the experiments basically on my own. In a week he will be attending a conference in Paris, leaving his “precious proteins” from human subjects in my hands until his return. Knowing that he trusts me to work independently gives me a great sense of accomplishment. The next week in the lab will be full of questions and brainstorming as I prepare to start writing my research paper and drawing up a presentation which I will be giving to the students, fellows and researchers in the neuroscience department. Things are starting to really come together for me on the research front.

The clinical experience has continued to be an exciting process. My clinical mentor has exposed me to many different sites including nursing homes and assisted living; as we see patients, words I learned in first year take on new meaning. I intellectually recognized the terms “purpura,” “ectropion” and “lipoma,” but when I saw them on patients it was very different. Though the words did not leap to my tongue when I was asked to identify them, after seeing these phenomena in person I will never forget what they look like.

This summer has also been full of firsts; my first one-on-one patient interview, the first time I heard a heart murmur, my first time consoling a dementia patient (she was convinced she owed me money). In the beginning I was terrified to help write notes or review medications; what if I messed something up? What if I was wrong? I realized quickly that it was okay to be wrong, and it was okay to try new things on my own. My mentor was always there to make sure things were going well. Yesterday I was given the task of getting updates and reviewing the labs on nursing home patients, and I suddenly felt like this medicine thing is something I can do. The patients are amazing, the cases are interesting, and there is always more to learn.

I went into this summer with an idea of what I wanted to do as a career and what I thought geriatrics would be like. I wasn’t exactly wrong about either of these things; I’m still strongly drawn to academic psychiatry, and geriatrics is as complex and interesting as I thought it would be. I wasn’t aware of how much the MSTAR would make me ponder where I would practice, what I would do in academic medicine, and what kinds of patients I want to see. The geriatric population is intensely diverse and rich in history. These patients have so much wisdom to offer, so much life to share. It’s a privilege to take care of them.

 

"Diary of an MSTAR Student" follows scholars in the 2011 Medical Student Training in Aging Research (MSTAR) Program, highlighting their summer experiences. As they continue their path of research, training and clinical practice, read their daily thoughts at www.afar.org/mstarblog. New diary entries are posted every day, so check back soon.