My progression toward medical school – trials and tribulations
By Salina Sahawneh UA’26 and Jim Stellar
I met Salina in my office after she wrote me an email looking for volunteer work in a research laboratory. We decided to write this blog first. She is a junior-standing, biology major (with a minor in psychology), in the honors college with a 3.94 GPA. What we agreed is that she now needs medical experience to complement that academic record, and she is now looking to be a PCA at Albany Medical Hospital. She is also looking for a laboratory position with a scientist, probably a professor, to better understand the creation of research that impacts medicine.
All true! I am also willing to look at a gap year after college. Although I am looking towards a career in medicine, I would love to get involved in research. Contrary to my major, I am more interested in research involving my minor. Perhaps I will even use psychology in my career. Right now, I am not sure what exactly I want to end up doing. Currently I am interested in dermatology, as well as pediatrics, but as my undergraduate education progresses, I have considered psychiatry as well!
This is all natural when one is starting out and I think it helps to look ahead to what older people have become after this search process and are now committed to something. For example, I am committed to behavioral neuroscience after being an undergraduate biology major like Salina. I also took a bunch of psychology courses as college electives and went to graduate school in a psychology department to study neuroscience.
So, Salina, what do you think awaits you and how will you make this decision?
I am looking forward to having a mentor. This journey is hard. You really do not know what to expect, and I am glad you, Dr. Stellar, were willing to become my mentor. Having a mentor is important because they provide guidance, support, and perspective based on their own experiences. Although I came into your office looking forward to maybe joining a lab, I have found something of more value instead, a mentor! We meet every few weeks to discuss my developing undergraduate career and essentially find ways for me to have an experience to go along with my academics.
Dr. Stellar and I have a large age gap! He has encountered a wide range of challenges, failures, and successes. He also started out his undergraduate career wanting to go into medicine. Although his ultimate career path has changed, he is still determined to help students figure out where both their heart and minds belong.
Professorial mentoring of undergraduate students is a very interesting topic to me just now in general as well as more specifically in the area of psychology graduate school and your area of premedical studies. You mention above, and appropriately so, the age gap between us. I have some ideas about how you and I managed to bridge that gap, but you go first and say what you think.
Let me first ask you about what qualities do you think a mentor should have in general and maybe what a student should do in general?
I think that in general a mentor needs to show the student respect despite the age difference, otherwise the mentor is just transferring information. What a mentor and mentee need to do is connect as people despite what separates them. That connection should be not only on an information content level, but also on a human level. That does not depend on age. Now your turn. What do you think a student should do in a mentor-mentee interaction?
I think a student needs to be willing to learn with a positive and humble attitude. A student needs to be open to feedback, as well as comfortable with constructive criticism. I also believe that a student should show their mentor respect and patience. This is a process, and it will take time to grow! It is a team sport.
One of our conversations now is about whether the best course for Salina is to apply, as suggested, in UAlbany’s early admissions pathway program to Albany Medical school (the local institution), or to take a more classical alternative and do the application to medical school in the normal course of time. This is exactly where we need to have the “team sport” idea with the mentor and the mentee able to have an honest, open, trusting conversation.
So how does a mentor-mentee relationship get to that point? It has to be organic after the two people come together. It does not likely work if the university assigns a faculty member and student to work together. They have to discover each other themselves and find whatever it is that allows people to connect.
In this blog series that connection is referred to as a limbic-cortical interaction (the classic emotional-cognitive interaction). Both are important and we see that in many decisions people make. For example, in 2002 Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel prize in economics for his research that later became his famous 2011 Thinking Fast and Slow book. In it he pointed out that thinking slow was deliberative, thoughtful, calculating, and cognitive. Thinking fast was fast, immediate, and emotional. Thinking slow might involve doing research on a company’s value proposition before buying the stock. Think fast might be FOMO (fear of missing out) when all of your friends buy that stock. Of course that is how stock bubbles get formed.
Back to the mentor-mentee relationship, it has to have both elements. It needs a plan, like how Salina approaches medical school applications. And it has to have a value judgement to know when a plan is valid. We two will work on it together.
