National Conference Student Chair Is Ready to Help Her Peers

“I chose medicine as a career when I really realized how much I love interacting with people and caring for people who are often forgotten or left on the side,” said Driscoll, a fourth-year student at the University of Texas Health Science Center San Antonio who recently matched at North Colorado Family Medicine Residency. “Physicians get to take care of everyone in their most vulnerable states. That’s what drew me to medicine.”

Driscoll didn’t have to look far for inspiration. She shadowed her own family physician, John Agaiby, M.D., as a high school student and later as an undergraduate student at Carroll University in Wisconsin.

“Something that I learned from him was how you can really get to know your patients and their entire situation,” she said. “He always knew the patient’s whole family and would give me that context before we’d walk in the exam room. He remembered and cared about their family. He did a lot of hard work to make sure that they were getting great care. He would round on patients when they were in the hospital.”

Driscoll said her experiences with Agaiby had her “primed for family medicine” entering medical school, although she considered emergency medicine and obstetrics, too.

“What really struck me about family medicine was the opportunity to really get involved in your community and meet the needs of every single patient who comes through your door, as well as all of the advocacy work that happens in family medicine,” said Driscoll, who served as a student representative to the Texas AFP’s Alamo chapter and was a regional coordinator for the AAFP’s FMIG Network.

Driscoll interviewed at a dozen residencies, looking for a program that could provide broad-scope training to prepare her for rural practice. She found her match at North Colorado, which has five family medicine training programs under one umbrella organization. Driscoll will train in Evans, Colo., at one of 10 clinics in North Colorado’s Sunrise program, which is a federally qualified health center.

She spent the spring in Ecuador completing a Spanish immersion program that will help prepare her to serve the FQHC’s large Spanish speaking population. Greeley, five miles north of Evans, is home to the state’s second-largest refugee settlement.

“I’ll be serving underserved patients, including some of Greeley’s refugee and migrant worker populations,” said Driscoll, who noted that the program has an advanced obstetrics track in the second and third years to equip residents for surgical obstetrics. “I am excited to have the privilege of serving this community. Although Greeley is a city, we serve patients from the surrounding rural and agricultural areas, and the broad-spectrum training provided there will certainly equip me to be a rural family medicine doc. This program fits all of the needs I was looking for.”

Driscoll hopes to play a role in helping other students find their paths in the specialty as the student chair of the National Conference of Family Medicine Residents and Medical Students, which will run July 27-29 in Kansas City, Mo.

“If this is your first big exposure to family medicine, it’s really a place where medical students can feel at home and feel confident in the choice to pursue family medicine, because there are so many like-minded people,” she said. “There are so many great mentors in one place who can really encourage you to move forward.”

National Conference features one of the nation’s largest residency fairs, with exhibitors from hundreds of family medicine programs.

“Having opportunities to meet with residents and program directors in person was so valuable going into the application season,” Driscoll said. “I really got to know people and be exposed to programs that maybe I wouldn’t have considered otherwise, so that was really beneficial.”

As chair, Driscoll will lead the Student Congress.

“It was really enlightening for me to spend so much time in the student Congress last year and see how the process works and how that can effect change at the AAFP,” she said. “I saw the work that students were doing to advocate for medical education and for their patients.”