A lil about Mik
Hey everybody! My name is Mik and I am a rising OMS-II here at UNECOM. I am originally from Haverhill, MA but I have been up in Maine for about 5 years now. I went to UNE for undergrad where I was a member of the swim team, president of UNE's chapter of the Planned Parenthood organization, Generation Action, and got my bachelor’s degree in the humanities. Before medical school, I was a swim team coach and a volunteer for Planned Parenthood, which is where my passion for sexual health/education started. I am currently president of Medical Students for Choice and secretary for the Medical Student Pride Alliance. I hope to become a pediatrician and be able to teach sex education in schools in the future.
Creating Spaces: Developing an LGBTQ+
Inclusive Sex Ed Workshop
By Mikayla Sargent, COM '25
The ability to create space for other humans, to make them feel seen and validated, is why I chose to go into medicine. The more I interact with people in the context of being a medical student, the more I realize how meaningful it is to create space for someone. More than just asking “open-ended” versions of the questions we memorized for taking a history or making eye contact while speaking, it is building rapport and creating a safe space for someone who may not have any other safe space.
Creating space can be indirect: hanging posters of diverse examples of patients in the waiting room; having the staff at the front desk of your clinic ask patients their preferred name. It can be as simple as wearing a pronoun pin or having a pride flag in your office. If people can see themselves represented in medical situations, they will get more out of a medical encounter. Wanting to create a space that I lacked growing up, I, with the help of UNE COM’s rising OMS-III, Cassia Araujo-Lane, and soon-to-be OB/GYN, Annika Treyball, from Tufts Medical School, developed an inclusive sex education workshop which we presented to LGBTQ+ teens in Bridgton, Maine.
We presented this workshop at a retreat hosted by the Campfire Institute, an organization that strives to provide equitable access to nature. The workshop was held on the second day of their retreat: “OUT,” which is specifically for LGBTQ+ teens ages 12-17. We started the workshop with a conversation on consent and I was amazed at how articulately and