My journey to the medical profession but after an upcoming graduation
By Natalie Hearn UA’25 and Jim Stellar
Natalie was a student in my Fall Psychopharmacology class. In that class we got talking about what she was going to do when she graduates in the Spring of 2025. I found out that she had recently changed her career plans from Psychology to PreMed. This means she has to take the classic courses needed for a medical application and most that will now happen after her graduation. I volunteered, and she accepted, to work with her in this period at UAlbany and after graduation. That is what this blog is about.
To start us off, can you tell us what led you to make this decision?
In the spring of my junior year, I began considering my career plans more seriously. Planning to earn a degree in Psychology, I applied for a mentor through PUMP (Psychology Undergraduate Mentoring Program) at UAlbany to aid me in the application process for graduate school. My mentor mentioned that a friend of hers had changed her career path and enrolled in a Post-Baccalaureate Program to apply to medical school and pursue Psychiatry. After finding out that it was not too late to change my mind and realizing my interests weren’t solely based in the field of Psychology, I began to look more into medical school.
It is very interesting that a personal example of someone at our university opened your eyes to this possibility. Before we explore how that happened in the general context of this blog series on cognitive-emotional interaction in decision-making, first can you say what it is that attracts you to the field of medicine in the first place?
I was initially drawn to medicine when I witnessed first-hand how it could completely change the course of an individual’s life. While I was in high school, a close family member of mine received a life-threatening diagnosis that altered the lives of my entire family. Had medicine not been as developed as it now is, that family member would not have survived their diagnosis. My view of medicine was then modified during my time in your Psychopharmacology class. I discovered a fascination with the way in which different medicines interact with the brain and the body, and how these interactions may vary across individuals. Prescribing medicine for each new patient requires one to solve a puzzle of sorts using the information provided, in order to find the best treatment for each unique individual.
I notice (naturally) from your descriptions that both explanations seemed to involve being present in a situation(s). That seemed to complement your cognitive thinking, e.g. your plans. Is that true and if so can you comment on what it felt like to have that insight? Was it a flash like an epiphany or was it slow like a decision creeping up on you?
Following the conversation I had with my department PUMP mentor, I experienced a flash epiphany and an immense feeling of relief that graduate school was not my only option to continue my education. After I got over the initial shock of realizing I’d have to completely change my future plans, there was a period of reflection in which I slowly became more certain in my decision. Every experience following that reflection, like your class, only solidified my decision to switch career paths.
It is interesting that this “flash epiphany” occurred in the presence of your PUMP mentor. I am going to claim that this fits with my question about being present with the mentor. This kind of face-to-face interaction is real-world and human, which is precisely where emotions are communicated even non-verbally to go along with the intellectual planning content. Of course it was the plans, and more precisely the change of plans, that led to this validating sudden emotional epiphany. Without that it makes no sense.
I agree and it shows the value of mentoring. I may or may not have eventually figured this out on my own, but instead did it in the presence of that very nice PUMP mentor, who just had enough additional experience or insight to give me this opportunity.
That then brought us together in a different kind of mentoring and now you have agreed to let me help you execute this plan over the next year or so. By the way, working with you as a mentee also brings me an emotional epiphany that our work together is good for you, good for the world of your future patients, and good for the university…at least that is my positive take.
Having this conversation in mind, we now want to write together about what is likely going on in the brain that makes it a brain-natural operation to have mentoring of either the PUMP or professor type (or both). This has to do with the way that the neocortex does the planning and the symbolic and abstract logic underlying it. Then the neocortex gets input from the limbic system about the emotional validation of the plan or any change in plans. The communication is there between the limbic system and the neocortex, but it is not as good as the internal communication between the neocortex areas that process and put together the abstract plan in the first place. That is all logic. The gut (or the emotions) then simultaneously evaluates whether that plan makes sense and especially so if the plan changes or needs to change. This is what the blog series is about when we call it “cognitive-emotional integration.” It is why experience in the field is a necessary component to test the plan. Some of it comes from the classroom. Some of it comes from internships and other real-world experiences. The glue that holds these two components together is reflection which is the main job of mentoring and maybe the point of this post.
