In an unlikely intersection, pageantry has the potential to play a pivotal role in accentuating career progression in academic medicine. Through meticulously crafting one’s professional demeanor and image, physicians can hone their interpersonal and networking skills and bolster their professional credibility. Drs. Wada and Nelson share how their participation in pageants over the years has served as an influential catalyst for success, both in medical school admissions and academic promotion.

Pageantry, traditionally seen as competitions emphasizing physical beauty, has evolved, spotlighting participants’ intelligence, talents, and commitment to community service. It offers a unique platform for skill acquisition, personal branding, and community engagement, all crucial for a burgeoning career in medicine. Through pageants, contestants develop effective communication skills, poise, and confidence, especially when under pressure, underpinning a physician’s successful interaction with peers, patients, and the broader community.

In the two years prior to applying and interviewing for medical school, the future Dr. Wada minimized her educational debt by earning thousands in scholarships through the Miss America Scholarship Foundation while also building confidence and networking with several future colleagues. Through countless public appearances, speeches, and interviews, she was easily able to communicate how and why she deserved a coveted spot in the incoming medical school class. Now, nearly 20 years later, she serves as an associate allergy/immunology fellowship program director. Dr. Wada shares, “When I am helping a mentee hone their personal statement or prepare for their upcoming residency or fellowship interviews, the best advice I can give is for the applicant to be authentic and unforgettable in the best way possible.” It turns out the questions asked within both types of interviews are quite similar.

Public engagement and community outreach are a mainstay of pageantry. During her years as Dr. California and, most recently, Dr. America, Dr. Nelson used her title as a platform to promote pediatric safety and health efforts to a plethora of audiences at a local, state, and national level. By utilizing her skill set as a board-certified pediatrician and lactation consultant, member of the American Academy of Pediatrics, and ambassador for Safe Kids Central California, Dr. Nelson has pivoted from solely a clinician role to a national spokeswoman in the areas of childhood safety and pediatric complex care, utilizing interpersonal skills in pageantry as a launch pad for communicative success in both the medical and general realms. Communication, transparency, and broad knowledge of relevant current events and statistics are vital components of both pageantry and medicine. Dr. Nelson’s message of “Stay Safe, Be Well” has been nationally syndicated in articles and media reports featured in local and national news, including the AAP, CNN, New York Times, USA Today, and more.

Despite its merits, pageantry faces criticism, primarily centered around superficiality and perpetuating certain beauty standards. Critics will argue that pageants engender an environment where physical appearance is overly emphasized, but few realize that the interview accounts for around 50 percent of the total score in many pageant systems. In recent years, the most well-known pageant programs have updated their criteria, and new, more inclusive opportunities have popped up as well, including the Dr. America/Dr. World system, in which both Drs. Wada and Nelson participate.

Harnessing the unlikely synergy between pageantry and medicine, physicians can carve an unconventional, yet effective, path for career advancement. Engaging in pageants fosters not only personal growth, but also skill enhancement, imperative for success in the medical field. As evidenced by individuals like Drs. Wada and Nelson, this approach, despite its challenges, presents an alternative and fun route for career development, inspiring aspiring physicians to consider pageantry as a viable tool for professional and personal empowerment.

Kara Wada is a quadruple board-certified pediatric and adult allergy and immunology, lifestyle, and functional medicine physician, a Sjögren’s disease specialist, and a Sjögren’s patient herself. She spent nine years on faculty at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, where she served as associate program director of the allergy and immunology fellowship and led the Mast Cell Center of Excellence.

In 2025, she left academic medicine to build the kind of practice she could not find as a patient: the Immune Confident Institute, a national direct-care immunology practice licensed in 27 states. She treats the patients the health care system sends ping-ponging between specialists, people with complex, chronic, multisystem disease including mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS), dysautonomia, Sjögren’s disease, immune dysfunction, and the seronegative and “in-between” diagnoses that do not fit neatly into a single specialty.

Her premise is simple: These patients are not the problem. Fragmented care is. Medicine has become exceptionally good at looking through microscopes while losing sight of the telescope, the bigger picture of the person in front of us. Her work challenges a health care culture that demands compliance when it should assume competence, and aims to make strategic, compassionate immune-directed care the standard, and the exam room a place where patients are finally seen, heard, and believed.

Most of her reach is built outside the exam room. Her YouTube channel drew roughly two million views this past year, and more than 100,000 people follow her work across platforms, including a Sjögren’s community of about 6,600. She founded and hosts the Virtual Sjögren’s Summit, now in its sixth year and drawing some 4,300 registrants worldwide. She appears regularly on national television and in the health press, including Prevention, SELF, Good Housekeeping, WebMD, Medscape, and MedPage Today, and she writes for KevinMD on the diagnoses that live in the shadows and the medical gaslighting that surrounds them.

A TEDx speaker and sought-after keynote, Wada speaks to clinician and patient audiences about complex immune disease, the experience of being disbelieved, and what changes when the physician is also the patient. She is also an unlikely pageant titleholder, having served as Dr. Ohio America 2022 and Dr. Midwest America 2023, and has written about how pageantry sharpened skills medicine rewards but rarely teaches.

She earned her medical degree with honors from the University of Illinois College of Medicine at Peoria and completed internal medicine-pediatrics residency, allergy and immunology fellowship, and clinician educator fellowship at The Ohio State University and Nationwide Children’s Hospital. She lives in Columbus, Ohio, with her medical school sweetheart turned husband, Akira, and their three children.

Hailey Nelson is a pediatrician.