Dr. Sera Kim majored in Biochemistry at Brown University and is a recent graduate of Emory School of Medicine. Currently, she is doing an internship at WellStar and is preparing for a residency at the University of California San Francisco in Radiology.
We had a chance to sit down with Dr. Kim and ask her a few questions about her pre-health journey.
Can you briefly give an overview of what your path to the medical field has been?
In freshman year of college, I wasn’t really sure about going into medicine because there are a lot of healthcare workers in my family and I didn’t necessarily want to do what they were doing. Though I was still interested in science, I tried to explore some other career paths, but did it pretty half-heartedly. It wasn’t until sophomore year of college when I decided I wanted to pursue medicine and started to take pre-med classes.
I wanted to originally apply straight [into medical school] without taking a gap year, but ultimately I decided to apply in my senior year and take a gap year. During that time, I was in Korea doing research and some internships in Singapore, just to do something outside of medicine (for fun!).
I went to medical school at Emory. I didn’t really think about what specialties to do in college, but as of now I have decided to do radiology. Now I’m going to do my residency in California, starting in July. Residency will be four more years, followed by a fellowship.
What impactful events led you into medicine? Did you have any mentors that guided you along this path?
In my experience, when people go to doctors’ offices, they feel very free and safe to talk about their most concerning things. That made me feel very close to people. It’s awesome that just knowing a disease process can be reassuring to patients who are concerned about whatever they are experiencing. Even if the disease is not outright treatable, just talking to someone who is knowledgeable can be reassuring. I like that, and it drew me in.
I was mostly influenced by my parents because both of them are doctors. Although they never really pressured me [to go into the field], they really helped shape my outlook. When my dad runs into patients in the streets, they are very grateful and happy about how their surgeries turned out. It made me see how much of a difference you can make in this field.
Could you talk about your application process into medical school and what you might do differently if you were to do it again?
I couldn’t decide if I wanted to do medicine for a long time—and because I didn’t know, I didn’t do any of the extracurriculars like shadowing or volunteering. I think I should have exposed myself more early on to gather more information about the field. There are so many different paths that I didn’t know about--I only knew about doctors. I didn’t know about nurse practitioners, PA’s, nurses, dieticians, or speech therapists—I didn’t really look into these things. That’s something I wish I could have done early on.
How and why did you decide to take a gap year?
Our Pre-Health advisor [at Brown] tended to advise most people to take a gap year. I also felt like I was rushing a lot of things. I hadn’t shadowed many doctors until my senior year, and didn’t have much clinical volunteering until my junior and senior year, so in taking a gap year I wanted to build up that part of my application.
I’m really glad I took the gap year. Medicine can be so tunnel vision and all-consuming while you’re in medical school for four years. Taking a gap year and being with my family and spending time outside of medicine helped me to be more grounded when I got to medical school.
Do you have any advice you could give students in deciding whether or not to take a gap year?
In the end, if you feel confident in your application, you can apply if you want to. If you want to just take a break, I think that is a perfectly good reason. For me, my gap year was really good for my mental health. I felt really rushed and crammed with all the pre-med stuff in college, so removing myself from that was good for me. But I’ve also seen my friends who didn’t take a gap year go through medical school and do perfectly fine. There’s no right answer—you should just do whatever you want.
What has been the most difficult part of your pre-health career?
The most difficult thing was overcoming the pressure I put on myself and feeling like there was so much to do in research and volunteering and shadowing. I think the amount of stress I felt was unnecessary, but very common. I didn’t know at the time, but you aren’t alone if you feel stressed. It’s important to have a couple of friends who you can talk to about it, instead of just pushing through it.
Why have you chosen to pursue radiology?
I think radiology suited my personality the best. I’m very introverted, and I like to be focused, analytical, and interpreting data. In radiology you interpret X-rays, cat scans, MRIs, ultrasounds, and all types of imaging modalities, and diagnose all kinds of diseases from head to toe. So you can see someone who has brain cancer, to someone who has a broken bone. I really like the variety.
Also, once you specialize in certain areas, it can become very repetitive at times, but in radiology, there’s some room for diversity. As a radiologist, during the whole day, you’re constantly making decisions, and I felt like in other aspects of medicine, once you make a diagnosis and give treatments, you’re not making those decisions all the time and it’s not as interesting.
What are your plans for the future?
I’m really excited to be a radiologist! In medicine, there are two kinds of people—some people do academic medicine, where they practice and are professors in an academic system. Most people do private practice—those are the doctors that you normally think of. A big part of academic medicine is doing research, and I’m not really sure that that’s something I want to do for life.
In the back of my mind, I want to have some sort of way to get involved in free clinics with radiologists. I want to be able to deliver care to people who don’t have as much access. There are free clinics, but I haven’t heard much about radiology clinics-- I don’t know what system is in place for those patients to get imaging work done (I’m sure there is, I just don’t know about it yet). I want to somehow be involved in that.
Is there any last advice you’d like to share to undergraduates thinking about going into the medical field?
I really encourage people going into the medical field. When I was applying and talked to people in healthcare, they discouraged me, trying to inform me that it was going to be difficult. But I feel very happy that I’m in this field, and as much as me and my friends in medicine like to complain about how the hours and training are long and stressful, I still think it’s interesting. You spend most of your time trying to learn medicine, and ultimately all of that time and work is to help people, and you don’t even realize it. The better you do your job, the better you help other people, and I feel like that’s very unique. That’s why I don’t mind the long training. Plus, you don’t have to do philanthropy on the side—it’s automatically built in!