FEATURE points out, is that he had many opportunities to try different things. And he apparently was very accomplished in several: he was a peer tutor in math, chemistry, physics – and, in a very different field, Latin as well. When Claire Hirschmann says she took “a pretty nontraditional route” to medical school, she’s not exaggerating. Originally from Washington, she was an English major at Yale University. In addition to being captain of the Yale women’s Ultimate Frisbee
Wilderness First Responder
team, she became leader of Yale’s Freshman Outdoor Orientation Trip program and taught sections on preventing substance abuse as a Yale community health educator. “I totally fell in love with teaching,” she says, particularly history and literature. But it was not precisely the kind of teaching familiar to most of us, where the class meets in a room. Hirschmann preferred a full immersion. With The Traveling School, a study-abroad program for high-school girls, she led students to South America and to South Africa, where the educational process involved interviewing people who had lived through South Africa’s apartheid and even restaging battles to further engage the students. Back in the United States, she earned a master’s degree at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, focusing on school leadership and development. The next step was founding – with two other visionary women – The Field Academy, a traveling high-school program in Portland, Maine, that combines academics and place-based education. To explore what it means to be an American citizen, for example, Hirschmann brought students to Appalachia to see what it means to be a coal miner, what it means to be in a union, what happens when the top of a mountain is blown off to expose seams of coal. What may have been only cerebral to students, Hirschmann says, suddenly became real to them. Hirschmann’s decision to apply to medical school, however, did not come out of the blue. Her father is a physician, her mother a former nurse practitioner. Hirschmann was a volunteer with the Portland Trauma Intervention Program, on call with the police and fire departments and local emergency
room. Sometimes she dealt with the patients themselves, more often with their families. She learned how to ask supportive questions and serve as a go-between for the families. In many cases, she says, “there was no way to make it better, but you could make it potentially less bad.” When she enrolled in a post-baccalaureate program at Goucher College, she was also a volunteer with the University of Maryland Shock Trauma Center. She is certified as a Wilderness First Responder as well, which has led her to think about the fields of disaster relief medicine and adolescent medicine, which would also make use of her teaching experience. The cello has played a major role in the life of Jee Yoon (“Gina”) Chang. She began lessons in second grade; performed during orchestra tours of Europe; gave private lessons on the instrument to underserved students; and became principal cellist for the orchestra at Washington University in St. Louis. Cello and Chang seemed a very natural fit, but it could have been much different! When she was first presented with a choice between violin and cello, she remembered that a friend of hers who played violin had to stand – and Chang thought playing sitting down made more sense. Despite all the demands during college, she learned how to budget her time and balance responsibilities, and she says playing the cello was calming and steadying. At Washington University, Chang’s major was biology. She especially enjoyed a lab in neurophysiology, very hands-on,
CLASS OF 2019 STATISTICS
53%
Male
47%
Female
15%
85%
PA Residents
Non PA Residents
23%
Underrepresented in Medicine
28%
32%
15%
36%
Including: Black, Mexican American, Puerto Rican, American Indian, Native Hawaiian, Other Hispanic
Non-Science Majors
For Combined Degree
Asian
Post-Baccalaureate Studies FALL 2015
29