"I'm very interested in working with underserved populations. My 'On Doctoring' course facilitator is Dr. Kenneth Borie, who works in family medicine at Gifford Medical Center. It's very inspiring to see him interact with patients and show concern not only about their medical health, but also about their overall well-being. I see him treat everyone with integrity and render good care, even in the face of limited resources. What I've been able to learn from him is humanism in medicine."

—Natacha Zamor, Geisel Year Two

"When I started my ob-gyn rotation, the clerkship director told me it can be frustrating because everyone is so busy and sometimes you'll feel useless, but you'll have more time to hold a patient's hand. I thought, 'Yeah, yeah, whatever.' But then I literally had that experience. A young woman came in with a placental abruption. She had nobody with her and was terrified. She grabbed my hand and didn't let go for two hours, right up to the decision to go to C-section. I scrubbed in, but as soon as the baby was out I broke scrubs and handed the baby to the mom. To be the one person who could be with her through the whole experience, that was one of my 'wows.'"

—Cara Haberman, Geisel Year Three

"At DHMC and now at the Dartmouth program in Orange County, California, I like that both places take patients regardless of their financial situation. That creates a real diversity right there that people often overlook. At Dartmouth, I saw one patient, a farmer who earned his income selling vegetables on the side of the road. He was 50 and hadn't been to a doctor since he was 10 because he couldn't afford it. He'd been living with diabetes for a long time, so educating him about his disease, giving him the help he needed, that felt particularly good."

—Nick Telischak, Geisel Year Three

"I remember one man who was being admitted to the psychiatry unit for the first time. He was scared and didn't know what to expect. One of the things that bothered him most was his teeth. He told me he kept getting infections but couldn't afford a dentist. So I called up the free clinic and arranged for him to be seen. Later, during rounds, I heard he mentioned me especially and how he realized that people do care about him, they do want to help him. As a student, I often feel like the patients are doing me a favor. You don't realize as a medical student that you really can have an impact, too."

—Rachel Kornik, Geisel Year Three

"I rotated at places across the country, spanning from Maine to California, and the Dartmouth name was always well respected. Especially once I went to these other institutions and clinical arenas, I saw how great life was at Dartmouth and how much I had learned. Plus, the collegial atmosphere of Dartmouth is unmatched in my experience, both in the basic science years and the clinical years."

—Thomas Kesman, Geisel Year Four (M.D.-M.B.A. program)

"I'm working on a project in neovascularization, a term generally referring to blood vessel growth. The goal of the project was to elucidate any potential interaction between two important growth factors. But I'm a curious guy, so instead of just looking at these two, I decided to see if one growth factor would also influence other growth factors, and it appears that potentially it does! The initial result I got was too weird, too crazy, and goes against our current understanding of growth factors, so I repeated the experiment at least twenty times to prove it to myself first. If what I saw was really true, the implications are significant."

—Loc Nguyen, Geisel Year Three