MS1 at Charles Drew University/UCLA Medical Education Program

Bronwyn Stone

Re-Applicant

non-traditional student

Third Career

TL;DR

Studied Molecular Environmental Science undergrad, with a focus in plant biology
After 4 years working in agriculture and environmental sciences, became interested in medicine via work at the Homeless Person’s Health Project and the Foundation for Working Families in Quito, Ecuador
Rejected from everywhere my first application cycle; one interview, one acceptance in the second cycle.

Undergrad

When I started undergrad, I was mostly interested in a liberal arts education: I wanted to study political science or geography, and had lofty ideas about changing the world. My first two years were full of classes like the History of Development and Underdevelopment, and I spent two summers learning to conduct stakeholder interviews in first Accra, Ghana, then Quito, Ecuador. After being discouraged in my classes by the sense that the problems of the world were intractable and nothing could be done to solve them, I became more interested in public health, and changed my major to molecular environmental biology, the broadest bio degree I could take. In my first upper division class, Biology of Algae, I unexpectedly fell in love with plants and pivoted again. I spent the next two years of undergrad working in an algal biofuel job and summers doing bench and bioinformatics research.

I hadn’t realized when I switched majors that the vast majority of students in my new major (molecular environmental biology) were planning to attend medical school. It was strange to be a non-premed in a premed major. I think I formed the idea that medicine was not for me from these early impressions - with a few notable exceptions, I did not think like the premed students I took classes with, and didn’t resonate with their drive. I was in love with plant science, in love with learning, and in love with life. I worked relentlessly, played relentlessly, and rarely had “down” time that wasn’t serving some purpose. I never stopped - I guess I thought that “doing” was always better than “not doing”, even with respect to health: I slept 6-8 hours a night, I exercised, ate well, and did yoga.

But it turns out that “not doing” was a very important part of health - this non-stop attitude caught up with me in my last year of school. I started to have stomach pain every time I ate, and would be so tired that many days I would fall asleep by 3pm. I lost 15 pounds off of a 150lb frame and saw many doctors who ordered many tests. In the end, I was diagnosed with Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS), most likely brought on by a mononucleosis infection and stress. IBS is a diagnosis of exclusion, meaning it’s not anything else we know: not life-threatening, but not comfortable. That last year of school was tough. I attended classes and took notes, but when it came time to study for finals, I had no memory of being in class or writing the notes. I used to ride my skateboard the 12 minute walk to school: I could not safely bike, and did not have the energy to walk all the way there. So I would coast down the blessedly flat road, taking regular breaks to rest. I learned a lot about myself in those times - how to slow down, how to walk a different path than my peers, how to honor myself for me rather than what I had accomplished. I found faith again, and patience.

Post-Graduation & Agriculture

I graduated with a huge smile on my face. I was incredibly proud, but feeling pretty broken. I needed to get out of town and out of the lab. After about a 3 month recovery period working part-time, I found a job in a vineyard in Sonoma County. I had studied plants in a lab for years and wanted to see what I could learn about plants in the real world. Alongside learning the ins and outs of how to recognize nutrient deficiencies or specific pests, I learned the particular humility of the farmer: there is very little you can control in agriculture, so you do your best to work with the system of weather, soil, and plants that you have. After one grape harvest in Sonoma County, I followed my little sister to New Zealand to work in a vineyard there. I pruned, leaf-plucked, and picked grapes alongside coworkers from Argentina, the Philippines, and France. I lived first with a Kiwi family, then with a group of Argentinians. Life was simple, but beautiful.

When I got back to the US, I started a business with an acquaintance from my Sonoma County days. We managed agricultural, wastewater, and recreational ponds. This for me was one of the hardest periods of my life, and one of my greatest joys. Everyday, we strove to see bodies of water in the context of the whole ecosystem: it was a blend of both the molecular, microbial level science I had learned in school and the broader environmental science I had learned in the vineyards. Now, though, there was the added layer of communicating with both clients and subcontractors: finding out priorities/budgets/interest levels and explaining my rationale. I was working harder than I had ever worked: long days in the field were bookended by drives making phone calls and evenings writing quotes and managing our marketing.

Maybe 5 months into starting the business, I had a serious concussion while surfing, my 5th in the last 10 years. A month later, my business partner’s legal troubles made it impossible to continue the business, and we folded. My housing situation became difficult to the point of being dangerous. I went from a high of feeling like I was finally where I needed to be to a low of having no idea where to go from here, or if I would ever feel physically/psychologically normal again. For those who haven’t experienced head trauma, it’s unlike any other illness I know, because you also damage all of your coping mechanisms/mental strategies to deal with adversity. To say I was in crisis would be an understatement. But rent had to be paid, so I freelanced for a few clients and worked in a warehouse making organic fertilizer while I contemplated my next move. Eventually, I got an internship with the Sonoma County Water Agency in water treatment, and tutored on the side to make ends meet. Through all of this, I regularly commuted an hour to San Francisco to have doctors worriedly comment about the slowness of my recovery from concussion.

Medicine Versus Education

In my water treatment job, I really missed being with people. I had a mentor tell me once to “follow my envy”, and I was regularly jealous of two groups of people in our department: the public health inspectors, and the educational liaisons. Being a teacher sounded interesting; I was already doing a lot of tutoring. Thinking about health made me consider studying medicine, but my brain immediately said, “that’s not possible.” I had disliked the attitude of the pre-meds at my school, I did not have their mettle, plus I was already 27 years old, concussed, and medicine required way too much school. I resolved to forget about it, and went on with my day-to-day concerns.

Around this time, two things happened simultaneously. Not able to leave the idea of medicine alone, I had reached out to friends of friends who were in medical school and they advised me to try to find work as a scribe. A few weeks later, after an online application, quick interview and typing test, I landed a part-time scribe job in primary care. At the same time, my tutoring gig led to a local high school asking me to teach an intensive 30-day block of 9th and 10th grade science. I began both jobs on the same day - teaching all morning, then driving furiously, eating lunch and changing into scrubs on the way to the doctor’s office for my afternoon scribe shifts. I would class prep in the evenings after work to wake up and do it all over again.

In short, I loved teaching, loved the connections I made with my students, and especially the one-on-one interactions we would have before/after class and during lunch period. With respect to medicine, I was pretty disheartened by what I saw in primary care. Not only was there a “turn ‘em and burn ‘em” mentality, but I saw how limited the tools my doctor had were: she could prescribe medication and make referrals, and that was about it. I especially noted how poorly this worked for the most vulnerable patients we saw.

It was also during this period I began to realize how urgent it was that I begin to master my empathy. I would often take patients home with me mentally, and bring their pain right into my body. I played with a number of different ways to handle this, with pretty limited success at first. I asked every medical professional and healer I was exposed to what they did, and tried things on for size. It has been a slow process, and one that I continue to work with, but what has worked best for me is a form of meditation that allows me to feel protected but still available (I’ll add a quick note at the end of this case study for those interested*). I will also add that my basic self-care and self-love strategies have improved by necessity throughout this process.

FIRST APPLICATION CYCLE/THE COALESCENCE

After that 30-day intensive, I began splitting time: 2 days at the clinic, 3 days as a substitute teacher for middle and high school students. During this period, I applied to medical school for the first time. I had no idea what I was doing, was still pretty deep in the recovery from my concussion, and had a liberal arts application as my model. I received no interviews, and mentally decided that meant I was supposed to be a teacher, not a doctor. In retrospect, this rejection was the biggest blessing in disguise, because the next year ended up being pivotal in defining my path.

Eventually, I moved home to save money, continued teaching, and traded the scribe job for a volunteer position at Santa Cruz County’s Homeless Persons Health Project. I can remember within a week of being there realizing that this is medicine: beyond referrals and medications, we considered where a person was staying, their social circle, ability to access food, etc. The way medicine was practiced here meshed a lot better with my experience working on ponds: you had to consider not just the molecular/microbial makeup, not just the community-level issues, but also the motivations and priorities of each patient. In short, I loved this work. Around this time, a mentor explained that I wasn’t making a choice between medicine and teaching, just that medicine allowed me to do both of those things.

QUITO/SECOND APPLICATION CYCLE

Following up on contacts I had made back in undergrad, I moved back to Quito, Ecuador to work for a group of Ecuadorians who were starting a new foundation in the south of the city. My time was split between teaching English and working in the clinic with Dra. Giuliana. Aside from becoming my role model, my time with her really cemented my desire to study and practice medicine. I saw how things that went unnoticed or unsaid in my English classes could come out in that particular, very intimate space of a doctor’s appointment. I saw how my teaching skills really did transfer to medicine, and that being a doctor did not mean I had to live the life of my first experience in primary care.

So I applied again. After being at the foundation all day, I would write essays in the evenings. This time, I put my pride aside and looked for a lot more support. I read blogs, especially the Shemasian Consulting blog. I stayed off Student Doctor Network and other similar sites, which always left me feeling discouraged and rarely applied to me as a non-traditional applicant. I had a hard time believing everyone who said that being non-traditional was an edge; I felt like everyone knew some secret code that I didn’t, and I was on my own. I had a few friends/mentors who were not doctors to edit my essays, but always had to weigh their advice against the rigid formulas proposed by the resources online. I meticulously constructed my list of 22 schools, submitted 20 secondaries, and was in the end offered one interview at the UCLA/Charles Drew University Medical Education Program.

I flew home for the interview and was able to practice once with a doctor friend that my mom knew from her nursing job. On the appointed Saturday, I went to Drew, nervous and a bit uncomfortable in my suit, wired after a night of hardly sleeping. But I took deep breaths and reminded myself that I had written my application with as much honesty as possible. All I had to do was speak from my heart and the rest would be apparent. As soon as I sat down in the main room with the other applicants, I could see everyone else was as nervous as I was, and I didn’t feel so alone or out of place. After so many years out of school and in a variety of professions, it was exciting and invigorating to be in a room with so many people who shared my passions. There was none of the petty competitiveness I felt in undergrad; it seemed like both the staff and other interviewees couldn’t help but be supportive and encouraging. I left feeling more excited about studying medicine than I had ever been, and more confident that this was where I was meant to be.

Almost 4 months later, back in Quito, I got a phone call telling me I was accepted to Charles R. Drew. That night, I celebrated with my friends, who were all Venezuelan immigrants. I remember distinctly that my friend Oleidi said:

“This is faith, B: you did not lay around waiting for God to open the door, you got up and walked to it and had faith that it would be unlocked when you got there.”

This wisdom has applied to every step of my medical journey since then.

STARTING MED SCHOOL

Now I’m here, in Los Angeles, trying to finish this essay before my Pulmonology lecture starts. I moved home from Quito abruptly and earlier than planned at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. I started medical school at CDU/UCLA on Zoom, in a hybrid program (with clinical skills and anatomy in person) that went all online after Thanksgiving break.

It has been challenging learning how to be in school again. I realized pretty quickly that the ways I studied in undergraduate are not relevant in this curriculum and in the online learning environment. I question the wisdom of not doing a post-bacc: for example, the last time I took physics was 8 years ago, and even studying for the MCAT was 3 years ago. I am learning to have patience with myself, and the golden rule of not comparing myself to other people. I am adjusting to only needing to pass with a 70%. I have learned to use new study tools and strategies, with much guidance and many bumps in the road.

I am so grateful for the Drew program: it has facilitated making friends in a difficult time, and provided an extra layer of support/mentorship.

It is also strange to see friends and family who were never proud when I taught high school or worked in agriculture now reach out to tell me how proud they are. Or they want to hear about the nitty-gritty science of medicine, but not the social determinants or mission-driven reason I am studying it. Keeping in touch with old mentors has been difficult, but I have stumbled upon some incredible new mentors. Older students during orientation kept saying that we would find mentors, and I didn’t understand how until it happened. It just took me reaching out to many, many different people that I found interesting, and eventually had a strong connection that has stuck. I am so grateful for them, as well as my classmates.

Lots to learn, and I hope that this case study was useful.

Meditation Technique

With respect to my technique for not taking patients’ pain into my body:

First, I want to make the disclaimer that this is just what works for me; it’s not going to work for everyone, but feel free to try it out. Also, I recommend using something like Insight Timer (a free app) that will sound a bell or something similar in whatever time interval you want. Using a basic timer or watch also works!

Second, this is not foolproof, and for me is best when supported by exercise, journaling, and talking to others. But I really feel like more than practices/techniques, being kind to myself and loving myself at every step of the process is what counts. Whether or not I am “successful” at managing my empathy, being gentle with myself is the first step.

Basically, I sit/stand/lay down comfortably, and focus on different parts of my body for 2 minutes each (i.e. throat, between my eyebrows, heart, etc). What “focus” means is up to you: you can imagine light, vibration, empty space, or just try to feel what’s there. Once I feel connected to my body, I will focus on the top of my head and imagine myself spreading out, diffuse and expansive, taking up the whole room. After a few minutes there, I will shift my focus to my root, either my pelvis or lower belly, and imagine pulling myself and my energy in close, feeling dense and well-rooted. After a few minutes, I switch back. You can do this as many times as you want, and practice transitioning between the spread out/close in states quickly and slowly.

After doing this regularly for a while (for me more than a month), it became more natural. Before seeing a patient or if I found myself uncentered while seeing a patient, I would focus on my low belly briefly and imagine pulling myself, my life force, into that little ball at my root. When I do that, it feels like the essence of who I am is safe and cannot be affected by whatever happens. Yet, at the same time, I feel like I have the whole rest of my body and mind free and light to be present to that person. Then, at the end of the day, in a safe place, I will focus on the top of my head for a moment and stretch myself out, letting it all go.

MCAT

Sept 2017 - 518 (Chem/physics 128; CARS -132; Bio/Biochem - 129; Psych - 129)

Studied from Kaplan books and took 4 AAMCAS practice tests in realistic conditions
My 2 cents about this score: I am smart, I will not downplay that, but I want to emphasize that this score does not reflect my intelligence; this score reflects my privilege as a white woman from a wealthy family with educated parents and the bias inherent in the MCAT test.
I remember during my study period being so angry about the test’s bias, particularly the CARS section, which buoyed my own score greatly. This section in particular felt designed to disadvantage second language speakers and those who did not grow up reading books and being asked about them. My experience has made me pretty vocal about why these scores should not be considered in medical school admissions.
Also want to emphasize that this score is not everything: recall that even with this score, I was ultimately rejected from 21/22 schools I applied to.