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Show Summary

Would you like to hear insight based on decades of experience, both advising applicants to a variety of healthcare programs and working in admissions offices for, again, many different healthcare programs? Well, today’s episode is the ticket for you. Dr. Emil Chuck, Director of Advising Services for the Health Professional Student Association is our guest. He discusses the admissions process for healthcare programs. He shares his recommendation for networking, shadowing, and journaling as ways for applicants to gain insight into the healthcare field and develop critical thinking skills. He advises applicants to consider the mission and values of each school they apply to and to choose schools that align with their own goals and values. Dr. Chuck also emphasizes the importance of submitting applications early and being mindful of deadlines. He provides information about the Health Professional Student Association (HPSA) and Student Doctor Network (SDN) resources for applicants.

Show Notes

Welcome to the 561st episode of Admissions Straight Talk. Thanks for joining me. Do you know how to get accepted to medical school? Accepted does, and we share that knowledge and insight in our free guide, Med School Admissions: What You Need to Know to Get Accepted. Download your free copy at accepted.com/561download. 

I’m thrilled to introduce our guest, Dr. Emil Chuck. He is the Director of Advising Services for the Health Professional Student Association, which among other services and assets host the Student Doctor Network, a major resource for applicants to and students in the healthcare fields. Dr. Chuck earned his Bachelor’s of Science in Engineering in Biomedical Engineering from Duke University and his PhD in Cell Biology from Case Western Reserve University.

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He began his career in research, but then moved into higher ed and admissions. Serving at different times student advisor and test prep teacher for Kaplan Test Prep, founding health Professionals Student Advisor for 5 years at George Mason University, Director of Admissions at Case Western’s School of Dental Medicine, admissions consultant for the ADEA, Director of Admissions and Recruitment at Rosalind Franklin University, and for the last two years as Director of Advising Services at the Health Professional Student Association or HPSA. On SDN’s forums he is known as the prolific, helpful, and extremely knowledgeable Mr.Smile12. In addition, he has also served in numerous volunteer roles for professional organizations.

Dr. Chuck, welcome to Admissions Straight Talk. [2:29 ]

Linda, it’s a great pleasure to be part of your podcast and thank you so much for inviting me.

Can you tell us a little bit about yourself? Let’s start with some really easy questions: your background, where you grew up, and how on earth you got interested in admissions from biomedical engineering. [2:39 ]

I guess the stuff that’s not on LinkedIn certainly is the earlier background about me. I’m proud to say that I’m a first-generation student. My parents immigrated from Hong Kong a couple of years before I was born. And so of all the places in the entire world where I guess in the United States where I would be born and raised for about 17 of my years before going to Duke was Shreveport, Louisiana, that’s northwest Louisiana, not anywhere near New Orleans to just make sure people know. And basically I grew up in that city, that little small town in northwest Louisiana and now apparently the home district to our current speaker of the house. It’s a little bit of a trivia note. I don’t know him. That’s one of the little known facts in terms of how it shaped my worldview one way or another. 

Obviously at the period of time when I was growing up, I was involved in a lot of research type projects and did science fairs, was involved in medical research at the medical school over there at LSU Shreveport before moving on to ultimately apply to all the various schools that I tried to for undergrad and ultimately wound up at Duke. So biomedical engineering wound up being the field that I was really most interested in. And had I kind of gotten an idea ahead of time how really tough it was to do biomedical engineering and wanted to become a physician or become a doctor, I would’ve probably thought a little bit, had a little bit more of a pause before going, but I think in retrospect it really fit who I was at the time.

I was much more of a math and science problem solver type person and knew very well some of my strengths at that time. Memorization is not one of the things that I did very well in. Biology courses weren’t so great compared to my math, science and engineering courses. It was to no surprise of mine that obviously I didn’t get into medical school, but I did get a lot of background in biomedical research, including back then during the summers when I was at Duke, I would be spending my summer doing research at the National Institutes of Health. So there’s a great summer research program there. If you happen to be even a high school student, a community college student as well as an undergrad, and obviously now post-bac programs and so forth, they have a very robust program for people who are really interested in research to spend time there.

That’s where I really learned a lot more about being a “physician scientist.” I know we’ll probably date ourselves a little bit here. This was still sort of at the cusp of the dawn of the internet. There really wasn’t much known about applying MD/PhD. So I was fortunate enough that they did have some programming at the time where they featured MDs and MD/PhDs, doing research. I kind of got in my mind the idea that I should apply to medical school so I can do research like they do it NIH, and no one really sort of steered me as much as I probably should have to really consider the true just straight up PhD application. A lot of things have, as I said, I’ve learned a lot since then. I do reflect a little bit more on my own personal journey on getting into medical school on the PhD side.

Now as a PhD student, I wound up working in a research project in biomedical engineering, but working in the department of Pediatrics and pediatric cardiology at Rainbow Babies and Children’s Hospital in Cleveland at University Hospitals of Cleveland. I basically wound up going to grand rounds. I would be talking to residents, I would be going to seven o’clock grand rounds in the mornings as if I were a resident. I really got a sense sort of skipped the med school side and just kind of got a sense of what clinical feigning was all about. So I think that kind of satisfied my itch for wanting to go to medical school and I didn’t have to pay med