GA's Club Med

The idea for Club Med began with my friend Claudia M. ‘15, who wanted to start a club for students interested in a career in the medical field. After meeting with our club advisor, Ms. Dann, she sent out an invitation to students who would be interested in developing the club. With the organizational help of Ms. Dann and Ms. Durkin, Club Med launched its first panel during the spring of 2014.

Akosua and her cofounders introduce Club Med's guests.

The goal of this panel was to provide a mixture of stories from individuals in various stages of the medical careers, and featured GA parents, GA alums in the workforce and alums in medical school. The mixture of intellectual conversation and interesting anecdotes proved to be success!

This March, Club Med held its first event of the 2015, which was an intimate conversation with Dr. Carmen Guerra. Dr. Guerra shared her inspiring story of immigrating from Honduras, and the explained the difficulties that she faced while navigating through her educational career. She was gracious enough to give a presentation on her work in innovative cancer research. I speak for all the students in attendance when I say that we were left speechless after her presentation, whether it was because of her inspirational journey and motivational advice, or because of the new insights we received about advances in cancer research.

In April, we hosted a panel that was geared towards presenting students with a range of perspectives from practicing medical professionals. To organize this panel, we sat down and chose the individuals we wanted to feature, and sent those individuals email invitations.

The panelists at April's Club Med event.

After the panelists were confirmed, it was up to Claudia, Michelle K. '16, and me to spread the word to the school via emails, morning meeting announcements, and face to face invitations. We had a great turnout for the panel, which was preceded by a dinner that we were graciously afforded by Mr. Schellhas.

This panel featured a veterinarian, a psychologist, a psychiatrist, an ophthalmologist, and two laboratory researchers. We dedicated a portion of our time to hear from the panelists about their day to day experiences at work, and about any particularly memorable moments in their careers. Because I’m not sure about what area in medicine I would want to specialize in, I appreciated the insight that they provided.

Apart from the fascinating stories about their day to day experiences, the panelists also shared advice for us as we move forward in our journeys to follow in their footsteps. A prominent piece of advice from the panelists was to “work hard, play hard”. One of the reasons I enjoyed this panel discussion was because of the honesty that the panelists spoke with. A few voiced that they regretted letting their work overshadow their personal experiences, and advised us to find a balance between working to achieve our goals and spending time to relax and enjoy time with family and friends. Another noteworthy piece of advice came from GA parent Dr. Averbuch, cancer researcher. He told us about the importance of failure and that recovering from failure is a vital part of his work. He shared with us a story about a failed drug that he’d spent tremendous time and effort on. But after evaluating their methodologies and examining their shortcomings, his team was able to tweak the drug that is now being used for another purpose. Another theme of our panel was innovations in the medical field, as best explained by Dr. Ho, an ophthalmologist who talked about his work to create a “bionic eye” for a woman suffering from a form of blindness.

Students listen intently about various fields of medicine.

Moving forward, I am very excited to see where we can take Club Med, and hope to invite more professionals to inform and inspire students. It is very exciting to help expose my classmates with an array of opportunities for the future and foster relationships between students and medical professionals. I also hope that the other members of the student body look forward to growing their love of medicine as we work to grow Club Med.

~ Akosua A. ‘17