Cameron Hedden is a 4th year student here at Emory, is on the Med and/or MD/PhD path, and majored in NBB with a minor in Spanish.
We had a chance to sit down with Cameron and ask him a few questions about his pre-health journey.
1.
What have been
impactful events that have led you to this pre-health track?
Healthcare has always been a field that I was interested in pursuing. When I was a kid, I was sick often and found myself in different doctors’ offices, clinics, and hospitals. I guess that environment just felt normal in a sense, so it always seemed like a career path that just made sense. In high school, my school had different career tracks that students would pick so that they could take classes focused on certain career paths and I picked biomedical science. So, I did four years in different classes and had shadowing opportunities in the community. It just always kind of felt like the right path for me.
Coming into college I
thought that I would want to do pre-medicine exclusively and I knew I needed to
get into research just to have a leg up on the application cycle and have that
on my resume, but I found myself really actually interested in the research
process and wanted to be more involved in that. So now that I’ve been involved
in research, I’m kind of thinking more of a split between clinical medicine and
research – a combination of both. The research experience I’ve had at Emory
really prompted that. It started just having classes that had heavy independent
research components built into them, then I was a TA for a course at Oxford
that I enjoyed research even more in. Now I’m working in a lab at CHOA that has
sparked that interest more in research.
2.
If you could start
over, what would you change?
Honestly, I wouldn’t have
changed much, but I really liked the fact that I tried to space my science out
because there are like 8 lab sciences you have to take (2 biology, 2 physics,
and 4 chemistry). If you’re going straight into medical school after undergrad,
there are going to be semester where you have to double up and take multiple at
once. There wasn’t a single semester where I had more than one lab science
together and I think that was a good call. Having a lab science course every
semester of college has definitely been challenging, but I think it’s really
allowed me to spread my time and energy across the different classes I needed
to do better in them.
If there was anything I
could change in undergrad it would be to study abroad. Study abroad was
definitely an opportunity that was attractive coming in, but by the time it was
really feasible and made sense to do so, A) it was really expensive and B)
COVID started to come to light. It didn’t really work out for me personally,
but if I could do it all over again, I probably would have studied abroad the
last semester of my sophomore year or the first semester of my junior year.
3.
Did you have a specific
mentor that inspired you to get to where you are now?
At Oxford, Dr. Fankhauser
was my main mentor that I had there. I took a BIO141 class with her and then
did an internship course with her for the journal that she started when she was
in graduate school. I think that Dr. Fankhauser was a revolutionary professor
for a lot of different reasons. Her classes were super challenging, but I think
that the reason so many people tried to get into them was because she brought
the material down to a level where the students could really understand why it
was important and it felt like they should care about it. She was our
professor, but she also connected with us on a level that made us feel like we
weren’t just her students and could communicate on the same wavelength. She
treated us like we were fellow scientists and I really appreciated that.
4.
What challenges did
you face and how did you overcome them?
A big challenge that a lot
of pre-meds face is the imposter syndrome of ‘am I good enough to do this?’. Constantly
along the way there are challenges that come up where you feel like you’re not
good enough to do it or you get a bad grade on a test and you doubt whether or
not this was the right path for you to do. At the end of the day, it’s
realizing that we knew from the beginning that this was not going to be easy,
but we chose to do it anyway because we are really passionate about it. What
gets me through and pushes me to keep striving towards this path that I’m on is
that I know medicine is just going to be a way that I can use what I’m talented
in to help people and I can’t see myself doing anything else.
5.
What is the best
advice you could give someone pursuing the same track as you?
My advice would be to
give yourself grace because especially at a school like Emory, I think students
come in with this mindset that they’re going to soar through everything and do
so well, but in reality, the content we are learning is hard and it’s supposed
to be hard. Medicine should be hard, it’s an important field with a lot of
details you need to learn. Students coming in need to realize that it’s not
always going to be easy, but that doesn’t mean that you’re not good or not
qualified. You have to be patient with yourself. Part of the learning process
requires you to work by trial and error so give yourself some room to fail and
come back from that. There are so many opportunities in college, and you should
enjoy college along the way.
6.
What made you choose
to join Teach for America for your gap year?
Teach for America places successful college students in classrooms in underserved/ underprivileged school districts in the United States. The thing that resonated with me the most about the mission for Teach for America was that while talent is equally distributed, opportunity is not. In my high school experience, I went to a school that was underperforming and that was arguably underserved for a lot of different reasons, but I did really well there because I had the resources that allowed it. I saw firsthand how some of my peers didn’t have access to the same resources and therefore they weren’t able to do as well. This also comes back to this idea about healthcare when you think about education and the health outcomes that are associated with people that have different levels of educations. For example, there are studies that show that people that graduate from high school in the US live on average 10 years longer than the people who don’t. When we think about it form that sense, education is a really important piece of the puzzle when we think about health outcomes and the people in the US.
So, I want
to be a pediatrician and get into the medical field and working with young
people and education is a great steppingstone to get to that place. I think
that being an educator and working with student on a daily basis will really
give me a different insight when I am in a clinic practice and working with
kids who are that age. For me, TFA really just seemed like a great fit because
I’m passionate about science, I’ve taken a lot of science courses, I enjoy the
content, and I think my skillset allows me to share that with others. Getting
to work with young people and getting to spread/ teach science checks a lot of
the boxes for me. My goal is to incorporate a research component into my
classes because I will be teaching high school science, so I really want to
show students the importance of research and good ethical meaningful research
while I’m doing TFA.