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Student and Faculty Profiles

Meet Jennifer...

Class: 2009
Hometown: New Canaan, Connecticut
Undergrad: Cornell University
Major: Natural Resources
Program: M.D.

After completing my first semester at Duke Law School, I began to realize that I was on a path to become the wrong type of doctor. I went to law school hoping to satisfy my passion in science and medicine by finding an area of law that intersected these two fields, but I started to realize that this was not enough. At Duke, I made the best of my experience. I was elected as the new co-president of the Health Law Society and was accepted by the Duke Law and Technology Journal. Before making the decision to leave law school, I wanted to see if I would like the practice of law. Working as a litigation law clerk in a New York law firm with a large biosciences department, I only confirmed that being a lawyer did not fit who I was.

I am not an adversarial person who likes to solve legal disputes. Rather, I have always been more of a healer with a passion to use medicine and science to help people heal both their bodies and minds. Law school and my law firm experience triggered the realization that I would regret pursuing my long-time desire to become a physician – a profession with goals, objectives and values more aligned with the type of person I am, and what I always imagined myself doing when I was younger.

Importantly, such a desire to pursue a career in medicine did not formalize in law school. In May of 2003, I graduated Cornell University with a B.S. in Cornell's Natural Resources program with a focus in applied ecology. I arrived at Cornell after I decided to transfer there from Brown University, where I was pre-med and a candidate for a B.S. in human biology. Yet, when I transferred to Cornell, at that point in my life, I also decided to delay pursuing a medical degree. Underlying all my interests has always been a health, science, and environment motive: understanding at one level how our environment works and heals, and at another level understanding how our bodies work and heal. Consequently, when I transferred to Cornell from Brown, I moved away from human biology and my desire to pursue medicine to the ecology level.

Since I decided to take a leave of absence from law school, my goal to become a doctor with a holistic/integrated approach to patient care and medicine has been my only priority. Luckily, in the fall of 2004, I was accepted into University of Connecticut’s post-baccalaureate program to finish my pre-medical school requirements, and learned in the summer of 2005 that I was an official member of the University of Connecticut’s Medical School Class of 2009.

Applying to UConn’s post-baccalaureate program in hopes of attending the University of Connecticut School of Medicine was, like most of my life’s decisions so far, deliberate. I did not choose to attend UConn’s medical school just because I was born and raised in Connecticut, and, thus would benefit from in-state tuition. Rather I chose UConn’s medical school because of the school’s teaching philosophy and Student Continuity Practice curriculum.

UConn’s Student Continuity Practice curriculum pairs you with a primary care physician at an internal, family, or pediatric medicine site for the first three years of medical school, where you interact with patients. By the end of the first year, medical students are capable of taking a full medical history and conducting a physical exam.

Going to my internal medicine site is often the highlight of my week. Each time I go, I am not only reminded why this profession is so rewarding, but am able to apply basic science Iearn in class – something that most medical students don't do until their third year. Such moments are vivid learning experiences where basic science and medicine is associated with real patients. The learning becomes dynamic between the patient, my preceptor and me, and a disease and its symptoms is not just  something to read about in a book and memorize. Rather, for me, the disease becomes humanized and subsequently becomes difficult to ever forget.

This apprentice-like learning makes UConn a very attractive medical school. I cannot emphasize how much more I retain and learn going off-campus and how these opportunities enhance the traditional first two years of medical school. Instead of getting bogged down with a strict regimen of lecture and labs with no patient exposure so that you may actually forget the purpose of medical school, UConn and its curriculum guarantees that each of its students remembers daily that they are physicians in training.