What Life at Icahn Is Like as a Med Student, Parent, and More
How this non-traditional medical student transitioned into medicine as a second career [Show summary] Efrat Bruck is an M4 at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, as well as a parent and MCAT video creator for Khan Academy with a nontraditional path to medicine. She shares how the program has given her the flexibility and support to balance these responsibilities and thrive in medical school. Listen to the show >> A career-switcher's journey from teacher to medical student [Show notes] What's it like to attend Mount Sinai's Icahn School of Medicine? And how does this M4 juggle the responsibilities of parenting, med school, serving on the Mount Sinai Student Admissions Committee, and being an MCAT video creator for Khan Academy? Efrat Bruck is a non-traditional medical school student who attended medical school as a mom and had a successful career as a teacher. Now, she’s an M4 at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York. Can you tell us a bit about your background outside of medicine? Where did you grow up? What do you like to do for fun? [1:45] I grew up in Brooklyn, New York in the neighborhood of Borough Park. My parents immigrated to the US about one year before I was born to seek medical treatment for one of my older brothers who has congenital kidney failure, and much of our childhood revolved around his medical situation. I think, by the time I was in high school, he had had three kidney transplants. My dad is a rabbi and a teacher in the community. My mom was mostly a stay-at-home mom, but also taught intermittently, so I come from a family of teachers. I'm one of 10 children. I have seven brothers and two sisters, and I am seventh, part of the younger crew. After high school, the expectation was to get out there in the real world and become financially independent, so I went to a one-year program that trained me to be a teacher, and then I got a job as a high school teacher. At the age of 18, I started teaching high school and started what would be an almost decade-long career in education that I really, really enjoyed. In my last year of college, I started working at Columbia University Medical Center in a research lab in nephrology. I had a really personal connection to nephrology because of my brother. I think my work at the lab was the springboard that eventually led me to go to medical school. When did you go to Columbia? [3:20] To backtrack, I went to college a few years after high school. Maybe three years into teaching, I went to Touro College in Brooklyn, New York. And then in my last semester of college, as part of one of the honors projects, I started working at a lab at Columbia, a lab in nephrology. The principal investigator was Dr. Jonathan Barasch. That was, as I said, the springboard for applying to medical school. You mentioned that because of your brother's situation, you were drawn to nephrology. When you went back to college, were you thinking of getting more of an education-oriented degree and staying in that field, and then you decided to make the switch? Is that how it worked? [3:49] I'll backtrack a little. I really always wanted to be a doctor from a pretty young age. I love the sciences. I think all of us, when we sort of look back at our school years, there were some classes that felt like a burden and some classes that maybe felt a little more natural, or you looked forward to it. That's how I felt about the sciences. I always looked forward to those classes, and I didn't feel that burden of studying, at least when I was a kid. It gets burdensome later on! But as a kid, I really loved it, and I was just fascinated by this link between science and medicine. I knew science existed and that somehow this translated into medicine, which I knew kept my brother alive all those years. So I was really fascinated from a young age, but as I said, it wasn't really on the radar for me right after high school to go to college.