Time Travel,
Medicine and Everything in Between
by Emma Rose Vincent, M2
The summer after the first year of medical school carries a special kind of weight. Those eight short weeks can feel as if they will make or break your residency application. As the first medical student in my family, I quickly learned that students are expected to spend the summer carefully curating an experience that is both meaningful and distinctive, something that will stand out on a CV and make interviewers pause.
As I absorbed this unwritten rule, I became convinced that my summer needed to be special. It needed to be different.
So, naturally, I decided to time travel.
That wasn’ t exactly the plan, of course. When I chose to spend my summer in Ethiopia, I knew I would encounter new people, new culture, a new healthcare system and a language I had never spoken. What I didn’ t expect was to discover that Ethiopia was also living in the year 2018.
Ethiopia follows its own calendar, one that is roughly seven to eight years behind the Gregorian calendar used by most of the world. Stepping off the plane, I hadn’ t just traveled halfway across the globe; according to the date on the calendar, I had traveled back in time.
The decision to travel to Soddo was not one I made lightly. I had wanted to participate in medical mission work since I decided to attend medical school. When the opportunity arose to spend my summer as an intern at Soddo Christian Hospital, it felt like an unusually perfect fit. It offered me the chance to step outside the classroom and experience medicine in a setting vastly different from my own. It required me to think about what it means to provide meaningful care when resources, infrastructure and access look very different from what I had always known.
As an intern, I spent four weeks rotating through pediatrics, OB- GYN, orthopedic surgery and general surgery. My days began with morning rounds followed by time in the operating room. Each day included opportunities for learning beyond the clinical setting, such as journal club, surgery conference, Bible study and chapel. Much of my time was spent in the operating room, where I observed procedures that are uncommon in the U. S. because of differences in available technology, resources and clinical practice.
In many ways, Ethiopia was the perfect classroom after finishing
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