“Part of being a medical student is being able to adapt quickly to new settings and uncomfortable situations. The pandemic was disruptive initially, but students seem to have adapted pretty well – with a huge amount of help and hard work from the administration.”
Samuel Broida, 2021 MD candidate, Emory School of Medicine, is from Cleveland, Ohio, and moved to Atlanta to attend Emory College, where he played lacrosse and majored in physics/neuroscience. Sam worked as a medical scribe and researcher for a few years after graduation and decided to attend Emory School of Medicine because “it is a great school with wonderful faculty, a huge network of hospitals and facilities and has so many opportunities beyond the mandatory part of the curriculum.”
Sam has a deep interest in global health and was able to travel on international medical trips to Honduras, Puerto Rico and Peru prior to and during medical school. Through his membership in the Emory Global Perioperative Alliance, Sam also presented From Political Unrest to Pandemic: The Emory Global Perioperative Alliance Prevails during an Emory Department of Surgery Grand Rounds. “Atlanta has huge immigrant and refugee populations, which made for some awesome volunteer opportunities – I even got to start the Physicians for Human Rights/Asylum Clinic, a specialized clinic for asylum seekers, with a classmate,” says Sam.
Sam plans on pursuing research in artificial intelligence within orthopedics, and worked at the Cognitive Optimization and Relational (CORE) Robotics Lab at Georgia Tech throughout medical school and intensely during his Discovery Phase. His specialty is orthopedic surgery, with plans to pursue orthopedic oncology, which requires a five-year orthopedic surgery residency followed by a shorter fellowship with orthopedic oncology. “I'd be happy to match anywhere,” says Sam. “My wife and I have family in a few cities – Cleveland, Seattle, Baltimore, Palo Alto – so it would be nice to end up in a city where we know people. A couple of programs in random locations did sneak up pretty high on my list because of the quality of training.” Sam matched in orthopedic surgery at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minneapolis.
Finishing medical school during a pandemic, he says, was just another challenge he and his classmates faced head-on. “Part of being a medical student is being able to adapt quickly to new settings and uncomfortable situations. The pandemic was disruptive initially, but students seem to have adapted pretty well – with a huge amount of help and hard work from the administration,” says Sam.
“Match Day is a celebration of hard work and excitement for the future. I've made a lot of lasting memories with lifelong friends I've gained during medical school. I've got plenty of good stories, mostly about gaffes or stupid things I managed to do while on clinical rotations. My advice to anyone entering medical school: jump at opportunities and don't be too hard on yourself.”