My child wants to be a doctor [PODCAST]

Listen and followApple PodcastsSpotifyYouTubeMore apps · Browse all episodes

“As a family physician, guest lecturer at a local medical school, and creator of a pre-med curriculum for young learners, I’m often asked by parents how to support their child who wants to be a doctor.

The most important point to remember is that you don’t need to have any science background or be a professional of any sort to support your child. We all want to help our children follow their dreams! Most parents know as little about supporting a budding physician as I do about how to help my son, who wants to dance professionally. That’s OK! I do the same thing as you: I look for answers online. And I’m here to give you some ideas. If you know anything about dancing classical ballet professionally, you’re welcome to help me in return!

So here is the advice I give parents who want to do their best for their child who wants to be a doctor.”

Robin Dickinson is a family physician and creator, Dr. Robin’s School.

She shares her story and discusses her KevinMD article, “My child wants to be a doctor.”

Did you enjoy today’s episode?

Please click here to leave a review for The Podcast by KevinMD. Subscribe on your favorite podcast app to get notified when a new episode comes out!

Do you know someone who might enjoy this episode? Share this episode to anyone who wants to hear health care stories filled with information, insight, and inspiration.

Hosted by Kevin Pho, MD, The Podcast by KevinMD shares the stories of the many who intersect with our health care system but are rarely heard from.

Transcript

Kevin Pho: Hi, and welcome to the show, where we share the stories of the many who intersect with our health care system but are rarely heard from. My name is Kevin Pho, founder and editor of KevinMD. Today on the show, we have Robin Dickinson. She is a family physician, and she wrote the KevinMD article “My child wants to be a doctor.” Robin, welcome to the show.

Robin Dickinson: Thank you so much. I’m so honored to be here.

Kevin Pho: We’ll get into the article in a little bit, but first off, can you share your story and journey to where you are today?

Robin Dickinson: Certainly. I grew up in what I call a normal community. I mean, most of my friends’ parents were house painters, child care workers, just kind of normal people, and to me, that’s what’s normal. What wasn’t normal was becoming a physician. I was really lucky because my mom is college-educated, and she always pushed me. I mean, I expected to go to college someday, which was not what my friends were expecting, necessarily. So I aspired in kind of a different direction, and it changed how I lived my life and how I studied. But at the same time, there wasn’t the economic support behind that expectation, which was very challenging.

So in high school, I was just planning on going to community college and then somehow, from there, becoming a physician. It was my high school chemistry teacher who kept saying, “You should go to this university. You should go to that university. You can go anywhere you want.” And I graduated valedictorian from my high school, but I couldn’t go anywhere I wanted. I mean, I couldn’t afford to fly out for interviews, I couldn’t afford application fees, I couldn’t afford all this stuff that you do in order to go to those places. And really, my family needed me too. I’m the oldest of six kids, and I wanted to be at home with them, helping. My mom was stressed taking care of everybody, so I didn’t want to just take off. So it was all these competing things: I want to be a doctor, I want to be there for my family, I don’t have the money, I don’t have the opportunities. How do I make this happen?

It was actually my high school chemistry teacher who took me to visit the university I ended up attending. She introduced me to the head of the biology department, and she took me to the financial aid office. She was the connector that I needed. I think that’s one of the things we don’t recognize about students from lower socioeconomic status: It’s not just about the money. It’s about the connections, and it’s about the opportunities.

Now that I’m a physician, I look at my children, and I see they’re 9 and 12, and they’re already on track to have a certain kind of life. We’re missing the boat with students from lower socioeconomic status if we’re not giving them opportunities from a fairly young age and supporting them in a lot of different ways, whether it’s making it more financially accessible to be able to be in that pipeline toward medicine, or also giving them the connections and the opportunities that may not be coming to them naturally.

Kevin Pho: Tell me a story, or share an anecdote. What are some of those unique challenges that are applicable to people who don’t have the economic means to go into medical school? As you know, medical school certainly is a daunting financial challenge for those with economic means, so I can’t even imagine people with less economic means. So paint a picture of some of the unique challenges that they face during their medical education journey.

Robin Dickinson: Oh, for sure. I actually have a small group of people, we have kind of a club we call “Physicians with personal experience in poverty.” It’s a small group. About five percent of medical students come from the lowest 20 percent of income, so it’s not a lot, but that’s one in 20. You probably know at least 20 medical students, and probably one of them comes from poverty.

It sets up this whole different set of problems. When you’re in college, you have to choose between a job to pay for college or research that is going to help with your application. For me, I chose a job, and so during all my breaks, I was working as many hours as I possibly could, because I tried to limit my hours during classes to keep my grades up. So it’s trying to make those decisions.

My medical school, thankfully, was very understanding of that. They were really seeming to look for that diversity. Telling my personal story was part of my application, and they didn’t penalize me for not knowing doctors. I tried so hard to find doctors to shadow, but I didn’t have any connections, and they didn’t penalize me for that. I volunteered at a hospital, but I was carrying binders around, and they let that be good enough. I was working, and I was doing volunteer work, but I didn’t have time to do a big research project because I needed the money to pay for my tuition and fees and gas and food and all that stuff, and they appreciated that. But I’ve heard stories from so many other students who are having to choose, and maybe you’re going hungry instead of working in order to do something that they’ve been told is important for their application. That’s just not OK. That shouldn’t be happening.

And once people are in medical school, you don’t have that kind of foundation and support that you might otherwise have. So people will maybe not be eating as much as they could, and they might not have reliable transportation. So many of my friends in medical school got their cars from their parents when they were in college or when they graduated. I paid for my car. I paid, and we held it together with duct tape and baling wire, literally, duct tape and baling wire, until the moment I signed for my first job after residency and could get a car loan and upgrade to something that was not held together with duct tape and baling wire. So it’s something you don’t think about, all these little details that just make it so much harder. You don’t have the brain space to do everything, but you’re having to.

Kevin Pho: Can you share how your lived experience that you just described, how has that influenced you as a physician today?

Robin Dickinson: Having experienced living in a lower socioeconomic status, having experienced not having opportunities, for me, I was definitely buffered some from it because of my family, who really tried to make sure that I saw beyond that. But so many of my friends were so stuck in survival that it’s really hard to see beyond that. I think it really changes how I work with my patients, because if you’ve never experienced that, it’s really easy to say, “Well, why don’t you just do this? Why don’t they just do that? It will be really easy to just do this.”

What you don’t understand is that poverty comes with all the problems together. It’s not like you don’t have money but you do have stable housing, food accessibility, a good social network, good connections, and a job that you love. If you don’t have money, you probably have a pretty lousy job. I mean, it may be that you really like the people you’re with, but it’s going to be physically demanding, underpaid, and underappreciated much of the time. If you have food insecurity, you have housing insecurity. Even if you have a place to live, maybe you can’t repair the toilet, and you’re currently pooping in a bucket. Maybe you can’t afford to repair the stove, and so you’re cooking on a little burner on your counter.

So there are all these complexities of just trying to survive that, I think, if someone’s never lived that experience or had very, very close connections in that community, it’s so easy to just minimize it and think that people should just get over it and do what they’re supposed to do. It’s just not that simple. Just daily life is so challenging.

Kevin Pho: All right, let’s transition now to the KevinMD article that you wrote. It’s titled “My child wants to be a doctor.” Now, for those who didn’t get a chance to read that article, can you just walk my audience through it and share the story of why you decided to write it?

Robin Dickinson: Between the different things that I do, I have a curriculum for kids, a pre-medical curriculum, and I also teach at a medical school. I’ve taken any kid who wants to shadow me. I will take them, because I was that kid who didn’t have a doctor to shadow. So I don’t care what their background is. I don’t care if they don’t know the right thing to wear, which I sure didn’t know. I was the only person who showed up to my medical school interview not in a suit. I felt very out of place, but it worked out.

With all that stuff, I keep getting all these questions about anything from my own experiences to what they should be doing. When you Google it or do any sort of internet search, what you get is a lot of different websites that are trying to make money off of you. So they’re increasing your anxiety. They’re saying you have to pay us this huge amount of money to get any advice at all, you have to jump through our hoops, you have to take our classes. It makes that barrier to entry even higher than it would be otherwise.

So I wanted to write something that said, “Here are things that you can do without having a lot of money.” And I didn’t want to package it as, “Oh, this is for the poor people,” because that’s obnoxious. I instead wanted to say, “This is for everybody,” anybody who’s in the situation. Of course, people who are from a higher socioeconomic status are going to be able to find people in their network to give that advice, but people like me wouldn’t have had that. So I wanted that available to everyone, to kind of level that playing field a bit.

Kevin Pho: Now, what are the biggest pieces of actionable advice that you can share with parents whose children are potentially interested in medicine?

Robin Dickinson: I think the biggest things are to support them no matter what, even if it’s something that seems impossible. For me, going to medical school really did seem impossible, and I did it anyway. It was people believing in me, my mom, my teachers, people who didn’t really look at all the barriers. They looked at the potential, and that really made a difference.

But also, if they don’t go to medical school, that’s great too. Don’t penalize them for it. Just unconditionally love them for what they’re doing. And then give them lots of opportunities, even if you don’t have the connections to an actual physician, maybe beyond the one who sees someone for a well-child check once a year. Go to the library, watch documentaries, get biographies. Try to get whatever information you can to start tasting that world, and then also learning human biology and doing what you can from home that’s affordable and that’s accessible.

Kevin Pho: So when you say doing things from home, are you talking about online courses in terms of learning human anatomy and biology?

Robin Dickinson: I mean, nowadays, the internet has so much free information. YouTube is a great resource. I think I mentioned Violin MD, which is one of my personal favorite YouTube channels for aspiring physicians, because she’s a resident through much of it. It’s obviously a channel, so it goes through time, and it really shows the inside of a hospital and talks about medical problems.

I have my own curriculum that I created, again, for children, because so many kids don’t have access to a good human biology curriculum. I was lucky, several times growing up, to be able to do a class at the nature and science museum, and it completely blew my mind what the human body does. That just is not accessible in a lot of kids’ books, especially ones that are affordable for families in lower socioeconomic status. There are some great DK books that are $32, but that could be three days of food for the family.

Kevin Pho: Now, of course, you talk to a lot of parents whose children are potentially interested in medicine. Share some of the most common questions that you receive from them.

Robin Dickinson: I think the biggest thing parents think about is how you prepare. What classes do you take? How do you become a smart enough, good enough person? I think that oftentimes we’ve missed the boat on that. We want well-rounded people. We want caring people. Certainly, you have to do well on tests, and you have to take certain classes, but that’s what everybody does. I think quite often, being able to be well-rounded not only makes you stand out on your applications but makes you a better provider once you’re actually out there being a physician, doing what you do.

Kevin Pho: We’re talking to Robin Dickinson. She is a family physician, and she wrote the KevinMD article “My child wants to be a doctor.” Robin, if you were to take this journey all over again, start from the beginning, knowing what you know now, is there anything that you would have done differently?

Robin Dickinson: Boy, that’s a tough one. I think I did the best I could with what I knew at the time. I think what I wish is that there had been more support and opportunities from the medical community, starting long before I was in medical school, starting when I was in elementary school. I knew I wanted to be a doctor when I was six. Many of the students who use my curriculum are six, seven, eight, nine years old, and within certain circles, that’s an age where you really encourage your children, and you pay for camps, and you connect them with doctors in your network. For children in other communities, that’s not an option.

And I wish that for me. I wish my doctor had said, “Yeah, come shadow me,” instead of saying, “Oh, we don’t take students in this clinic.” She was literally the only doctor I knew, and trying to make connections beyond that was impossible. Where do you get an in? I wish there was more effort from the medical community to reach out to those students of lower socioeconomic status, from elementary school, middle school, high school, and college.

And among medical students, be aware, as you’re interviewing, as you’re choosing who can be part of your class, that maybe they aren’t going to have the research. Maybe they aren’t going to have been published five times. Maybe they aren’t going to have done all the amazing things, because for them, getting through college and doing the things they did was amazing. They were starting from a different point, and they’re showing that they can make it through a lot, and really, they can do a lot more for themselves, maybe, than some of the students who’ve done very impressive things on paper but had a lot of support and a lot of funding behind it and a lot of family connections and so forth.

As you’re choosing, do what my medical school did: Don’t look at the fact that I was not wearing a suit and that I hadn’t done all the little fancy things that you’re supposed to do, and say, look at the fact that I could be a really good doctor, and choose that way. And then, once they’re there, support them, because there, it’s going to be harder. I’m really grateful my medical school did provide me a variety of different kinds of support in just figuring out the culture and figuring out how to survive and what to wear and all sorts of things. Provide that support for students who are coming from backgrounds where that’s not going to come naturally.

Kevin Pho: And my final question: What’s your take-home message that you want to leave with the KevinMD audience?

Robin Dickinson: Support students from all socioeconomic backgrounds, and let’s talk about diversity, including socioeconomic status, because that’s where we’re really going to start seeing more diversity in other areas as well, whether it’s ethnic, racial, or religious. That’s a basis for so many other kinds of diversity.

Kevin Pho: And how can people reach you?

Robin Dickinson: My curriculum website is Dr. Robin’s School. The address is docrobinschool.com, which is doc, Robin like the bird, school.com, and people can always contact me through that website.

Kevin Pho: Robin, thank you so much for sharing your time and insight, and thanks again for being on the show.

Robin Dickinson: Thank you so much.

Listen and followApple PodcastsSpotifyYouTubeMore apps · Browse all episodes