Medical School

I graduated from the Stanford School of Medicine in June of 2021 and am currently a Pediatrics/Child Neurology resident physician working at Stanford Children’s. My Stanford profile can be found here. My full CV can be found on my LinkedIn profile.

Before med school, I was born and raised in Hawaii, went to a very small public high school (Waimea High School!) on Kauai, then attended Stanford University and got my Bachelor’s Degree in Human Biology with Honors.

During my junior and senior years as a Stanford undergrad, I remember grappling with whether I should pursue an MD and become a doctor, or an MPH and go down the health policy route. I spent two years working in the public health field in Kenya to try and answer this question. My first year in Kenya was spent in the small rural community of Chogoria, in Central Kenya, and a Global Public Health Fellow with Village HopeCore. I helped with their WASH (Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene) program, installing and monitoring clean drinking water and hand washing tanks in the entire school district; established school-to-community peer education courses through primary and secondary school health clubs; and helped launch HopeCore’s Mother-Child Health arm, raising over $10,000 to fund this effort, mostly through winning the IDEO Amplify Under-5 Challenge. My second year was spent in Nairobi, Kenya’s capitol city – full of all the Western amenities one could hope for but also home to some of the most crowded, poorest slums and informal settlements int he world – working with a social enterprise named Access Afya as a Communications and Monitoring & Evaluation Specialist. Access Afya’s goal is to provide high-quality medical care using a scalable lean clinic model throughout the urban slums.

I was so fortunate to be able to come back to the Bay Area, namely Stanford, for medical school. I don’t have to speak to Stanford Medicine’s incredibly amazing cadre of award-winning educators, professors, and physicians, its immensely broad research opportunities, or its (most of the time) beautiful weather and feel-good vibes. All of the above are true. Sometimes medical school feels like this…

But more often than not, it feels like this…

Positions I’ve held during my time in medical school include:

• Contributing Writer, Stanford Scope Blog’s “SMS Unplugged” section (2016-present)
• Surgery Interest Group Co-Leader (2017-2018)
• Surgical Skills Workshop Course TA (2017-2018)
• Intro to Surgery Lunch Seminar TA (2017-2018)
• Microbiology & Infectious Disease Course TA (2018-2019)
• Practice of Medicine, Emergency Medicine TA (2018-2019)

Between my second and third years of med school, thanks to the Stanford Medical Scholars Research Fellowship, I got to do a fully funded year of research on pediatric surgical outcomes. I will be starting clerkship rotations in May 2019 and (fingers crossed!) matching into Pediatrics in Spring of 2021.

It’s been really important for me to remember why I chose medicine and to ask for help when I need it. I’ve never been ashamed to speak volumes about how much therapy has done for me, and how I’ve been prescribed anti-depressants as well. I cannot say this enough to anyone – whether you’re a prospective, current, or past med student – sh*t gets really hard. It might not be school stuff; it might be dealing with patient issues, coming to terms with your own problems amidst grief and loss, or struggling through personal obstacles during all of this. There is help around you, and there are people who love and care for you. Reach out before giving up.

If you’re here because you’re a new medical student, or someone hoping to go to medical school one day, take five minutes and read my letter to incoming med students.

Above all else, I think it’s very important to find your people in med school – people who will celebrate with you on your great days and boost you up/bring you food and desserts on your bad ones, people who really understand you and forgive you for your flaws but think you’re incredible and wonderful and such a bada** nonetheless. These are my people 🙂