Episode 1 (.mp3) [20:38m]: Download (386)

An introduction to the hosts of the show, as well as some other general topics.

If you have questions for us, please send them to pritzkerquestions@gmail.com.

Episode 1 Transcript

Ben Ferguson: Hey folks, this is the Pritzker Podcast. I am Ben Ferguson, one of your hosts, and I’m here with Mary Bister. How are you doing, Mary?

Mary Bister: I’m good. How are you, Ben?

BF: Not too bad. I think with this first episode, as we talked about, we’re just going to do some brief introductions and then we’ll get into some of the meat of the podcast in later episodes. So, Mary, do you want to start off with just talking a little bit about your background before you came to Pritzker?

MB: Sure! I’m a non-traditional student. I graduated high school in 1991 and took kind of a convoluted path to medical school. I started out as an English major, did that for two years, decided that that’s not where my future lay so I took some time off to figure out what I wanted to do and accidentally fell into a job as a nursing assistant, which is where I first discovered that health care was interesting to me. From there, I went to nursing school, graduated from that and practiced nursing full time for three years while I was deciding what I wanted to do next. I looked at various other professions within health care–nurse practitioner, physician assistant–but I really decided that medical school was where I belonged. And so I went back to school, took the premedical prerequisites, wound up finishing the English degree that I’d started 10 years before, and I graduated in 2006 and started Pritzker that year. So I’m a rising second year right now and I’m really excited to be doing the podcasts and telling people all about our wonderful school.

BF: Very cool. Was there anything specifically that made you take the plunge into medicine above nursing or did you just feel like you needed a change of pace?

MB: I was really interested in science and the scientific basis of diagnosis and treatment and that’s not something you get very much of as a nurse, and even if you do learn about it, you can’t really put any of your learning into practice. So that’s probably the biggest thing that drew me into medicine.

BF: Awesome. And you said you majored in English previously–have you had a chance to keep up that interest in medical school?

MB: Absolutely, absolutely. I’m a voracious reader and so even on top of the voluminous reading that we are required to do, I’ve been able to keep up my fiction reading.

BF: Awesome.

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BF: I personally am slightly more traditional than you, I would say. I went to the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana and came straight to Pritzker after college. And when I was growing up, both of my parents were actually doctors–they still are doctors–and so they had a heavy influence on my decision to enter medicine. But earlier on, they actually had a little bit of a negative influence, not because of anything they did, but I just sort of wanted to do something different from my parents–I guess it was sort of a rebellious phase I had. But while I was applying to schools–and actually earlier than that when I was in high school and starting college–I started to get interested in science classes, and they were able to give me a perspective on medicine that I had not seen from volunteering in hospitals and performing research and stuff like that. So it was a great resource to have two parents as physicians to sort of lend their experiences to me and it really helped me throughout the application process. But I would say I decided on medicine earlier on in my career–actually during high school and a little bit into college.

MB: So what made you decide that you wanted to study medicine here at Pritzker?

BF: Well, my father actually works here. He was a medical student and resident and fellow here so I had a lot of knowledge about the school. I came to work with him a lot as a kid and just sort of sat in his office and played around while he rounded and stuff like that, so I had sort of walked the halls of the hospital a lot but didn’t necessarily know that much about it. But at the same time, I still had such a connection to the school–over and above any other school–that it sort of propelled it automatically to the top of my list, just by virtue of knowing more relatively about this school than any other school. And it sort of stayed at top of my list the whole time. I really liked what I was hearing about the academic reputation and stuff like that when I was applying, and then when I got here for the interview day, I really saw a different side of the school than I had anticipated. A lot of people associate with the University of Chicago and Pritzker a very academic environment and very academically intense environment. And while that is true to some extent, I think Pritzker is a little bit different–and you can probably touch on this, too–but Pritzker is a little bit different, I feel like, because it’s a little bit more social of an environment. It is still very, obviously, academically reputable, but there are a lot more fun-loving people here, I think, and that really influenced me heavily, too.

MB: Interesting. I had a very similar ending impression of Pritzker, but it started out close to the bottom of my list of schools, actually. The only reason I applied here was because it was in Chicago.

BF: For the proximity…

MB: For the proximity. I’m originally from Wisconsin and I liked the idea of staying close to the home so I applied to every school in Chicago, regardless of how interested I was or not in the school, and when I first was submitting my applications, I didn’t think that I’d be a very good fit here. You hear so much about Pritzker in research and the University of Chicago and research, research, research, and that’s not what my background was. And so I was concerned that, oh, maybe this is $65 or whatever down the drain for applying, especially with all the essays , which, you know, it was a significant chunk of time to complete the secondary so I was wondering, oh, is this really worth it, blah, blah, blah. And when I came here to do my interview, my impression was turned around 180. It was just absolutely astonishing how much I fell in love with the school.

BF: Well, great.

MB: Yeah. I loved every single person I met on my interview day. They really impressed me with how open they were to people with different backgrounds, how much fun everyone seemed to be having, how much they cared about people as individuals and not just numbers or test scores. But they really–I could tell that they had an idea in mind of the kind of people they thought would do well here and they were very careful to make sure that I knew that they thought I would fit in here and that this would be a good environment for me. And basically, they tried very hard to make me see that it would be a very good environment for me and they succeeded.

BF: Haha, luckily they did. Yeah, it seems like, for most people who see this side of the school, it really comes to fruition for them because they can take advantage of all the activities that go on in school and all the unique perspectives of the students that are coming in.

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BF: You mentioned research earlier and I should mention here, like you did, that I actually have finished my second year and I’m now a graduate student in Cancer Biology–I’m doing a MD/PhD–and you mentioned that when you were coming in, you were a little intimidated by the research attitude of the University of Chicago, and I honestly was, too. I actually didn’t come in as an MD/PhD student, but I later applied to the program that I’m in right now after sort of falling in love with the project that I worked on earlier in medical school. But during college, I really had some actually poor experiences with research. I was a member of three different labs at three different times and had a lot of projects going on, but never got a single piece of data and just had very monotonous, very tiresome experiences in research and came into medical school really hating pretty much everything about research. And I eventually participated in the Summer Research Program the summer after my first year, and, like I said, really fell in love with the project that I was working on and it really changed my attitude about the nature of research and the possibilities of research that I hadn’t seen before. So that’s where I am right now; I’ve really done a 180 in terms of my attitude toward research, clearly, because I’m actually pursuing it now as a career. And you’re doing research now. Do you want to talk about that a little bit?

MB: Sure. I’m also doing the Summer Research Program. This is the summer after my first year and I was excited to do the program, first of all, because you don’t get financial aid during this quarter of the year and so I needed some way to pay my bills and, secondly, because it offered a chance to do research that wasn’t basic science, which is the research I’d been exposed to in undergrad. So I managed to select a project that I thought was very interesting: I’m studying end-of-life decision making, and it involved interviewing patients and physicians and finding out more about their attitudes about different interventions that are used when people are close to death, and it’s been a lot of fun. It’s been challenging, I must admit, and I’m still trying to think about whether or not, you know, academic medicine and research is something I want to do with the rest of my career, but I at least feel much more qualified to make that decision having had this experience.

BF: Is that something that you got interested in as a nurse, in terms of that specific topic?

MB: Yes. Medical ethics is an area I’ve been very interested in and especially things surrounding end-of-life care, hospice care, palliative care, are issues that I think are really important considering the technological advances that have happened over the last 50 years. And so I was really pleased that I was able to bring that interest here and find other people who were working on the same issues, and it’s been really wonderful.

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BF: How has being a nurse before medical school either detracted from or contributed to your medical education here?

MB: It’s actually affected the education I think less than people would think. Nursing and medicine are very different beasts and, I mean, probably the biggest effect it had is that I was just already familiar with the vocabulary, which gave me a little bit of a leg up, but really not that much. It’s sort of the same as–no matter what your background, whether you were a biochemistry major or physiology major–you come in and that you blow right past anything you’ve learned in undergrad in the first week or two of classes. It’s really–the pace at which you learn new information is quite extraordinary. And so, any sort of background that you come in with helps you a little bit, but a couple of days and you’re in the same boat as everybody else.

BF: Yeah, I’m with you there. Like you mentioned, I majored in physiology in college and during our physiology segment of first year, I guess, it was probably a day and a half or two days, maybe, at the max, where the material’s starting to get novel again and that was pretty degrading. They always say, you know, you hear the horror stories about medical students and medical school going so fast and it really hits you pretty immediately, but I think that’s probably the case at any medical school.

MB: I agree. I think that’s true everywhere and it’s just sort of the nature of the beast. But I have to say that as intimidating as that sounds, it’s really amazing that it is doable. It’s really–it’s possible. You’ll figure out things about yourself that you never knew and do things that you never thought you could accomplish.

BF: Exactly. And you realize that you have so much support, too, from all the professors and the staff here, as well as your fellow classmates when you have group study sessions.

MB: Absolutely. People who may know a little bit more about one area are very, very free to help others because there’s no competition. It’s pass/fail. There’s no, sort of, I’m going to hoard my little bit of knowledge over here. Everybody really works together as a team to learn the information.

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BF: So, in addition to being a voracious reader and having this English background, do you pursue any other interests outside of medical school in addition to that?

MB: Oh sure. I’m interested in music. I sing a little bit. My father has a garage band and I go home once in a while and sing with him. I like to listen to all sorts of different kinds of music and Chicago is a great place for getting out and listening to live music.

BF: Oh yeah, for sure.

MB: It’s really–I haven’t ever lived anywhere quite this large or varied in terms of the acts that you can see and the music venues that it has. I also just like to get out and explore the city and go to new neighborhoods, go to different restaurants, and see what’s happening in different parts of Chicago.

BF: Awesome. It’s a great town.

MB: It is. It’s fun.

BF: How has it been making the conversion from Madison to Chicago?

MB: It’s been great, actually. I’ve never lived anywhere this large. Madison is the biggest place I’d ever lived so it was a little bit of an adjustment period, but it’s really nice, especially–I live in Hyde Park, which most students do their first year–not all of us, but most students–and Hyde Park itself is like a little town in the middle of the big city. I mean, I’ll walk to the grocery store, I’ll see people I know from school. You run into people you know everywhere in Hyde Park so it’s kind of little safe home base from which you can explore the rest of the city.

BF: Yeah, it does feel a little suburban at times.

MB: It really kind of does.

BF: But you have access, as you said, to exploring the larger and more popular parts of the city as well–the hipper places, if you will.

MB: That’s right.

BF: Yeah.

MB: And what’s your perspective as somebody who doesn’t live in Hyde Park? How do you find living here in the city?

BF: I love Chicago. I grew up here. I grew up in the suburbs and have never really lived anywhere else outside of central Illinois, Champaign. But, like you said, I lived in the South Loop and I just think Chicago’s great. The South Loop, in particular, is especially convenient for getting down to Hyde Park and also being in close proximity to all the other great parts of the town. I can’t really speak to living in Hyde Park because I’ve never done it, but I think Hyde Park itself is a very nice place. But at the same time, I’m sort of the type of person that likes to physically remove myself from the academic life at times and sort of go home and put it all on the back burner.

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BF: Do you have a car?

MB: Oh, I don’t have a car. No.

BF: No?

MB: I’m getting by without one, which is inconvenient at times, but it’s definitely manageable.

BF: Yeah. And how do you get around?

MB: I take–I live just like a block and a half from the Metra Station so I take Metra a lot if I’m just going up to downtown. There’s the #6 bus. It goes pretty close to my house; that also goes downtown. I can take the #55 bus over to the L to either the Red Line or the Green Line if I need to get somewhere or that way and, of course, when all else fails, there are taxis.

BF: Not so cheap, but they’re there.

MB: They’re there.

MB: And if you get a group together, they’re not that bad.

BF: Yeah, exactly.

MB: Yeah.

BF: I don’t have a car either, actually. I had one for about the first two and a half years of med school or, well, during my time here at least. But I actually sold my car a few months ago and I’ve just recently bought a bike. And I take the Metra as well and sometimes take the L down and the buses as well so… Chicago is a big place but it’s definitely doable without a car. It is a slight hassle but it’s definitely much cheaper, given the gas prices in Chicago these days.

MB: Oh, hugely cheaper plus street parking in Hyde Park, while in many places it’s perfectly fine, depending on where you live it can be a real hassle, especially when it snows in the winter.

BF: Oh yeah.

MB: And to find a place that has off-street parking, it can be kind of exorbitant so…

BF: Right. Exactly. And parking in the garages isn’t that cheap either. I was parking during first year in one of the garages that’s about two or three blocks from the medical school building and, it was running about $80 a month.

MB: Hmm, yeah.

BF: No small feat.

MB: No, not small at all, and I mean, I guess, it just really all depends on your personal preference, living in Hyde Park or outside Hyde Park, having a car, not having a car, depends on where you want to spend your money and your time.

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BF: So, Mary, in the next episode, we’ll be talking about the application itself with our very own Joni Huff and David Owen as guest participants of the podcast. And then in Episode 3 we’re planning to talk about the interview day. Is that correct?

MB: That’s correct! Yes, everything you need to know.

BF: Yeah. I’m not sure if we’ll have any guest speakers for that, but we’ll try to get someone good.

MB: Yeah, yeah, maybe we can get Dr. Waggoner…he might be a good person to get.

BF: That could work. And we always encourage you to email us your questions that you have for us. After all, this is a very informative podcast (or in theory it’s supposed to be!). And it will largely be driven by the questions that are submitted to us. So be sure to get your questions in if you’re curious about anything about Pritzker, and we’ll be happy to consider them. So, this has been Episode 1: Introductions of the Pritzker Podcast, with your hosts Ben Ferguson and Mary Bister. See you, Mary.

MB: See you, Ben. Thanks for listening, everyone.

BF: Bye bye!

MB: Bye!