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underrepresented community members, and she also helped out with UNE’s Health Professions Expo last spring.” In fact, the NYLF visit proved to be a very collaborative experience. The complexity of the curriculum made it necessary to attract help from various areas within COM including our faculty, staff, and students. Annie is emphatic that the event would never have been as successful without the blood, sweat, and tears of the student coordinator, Jenna Wozer, student hosts, Matt Smoot, John Kalliel, Justine Monthony, Gigi Green, Kendall Prowse, Sam Culver, Shelby Crowley, Jessica D’Annibale, Brian Hurley, Kelsey Hickey, Jaclyn Ward and Jennifer Darroch, Fellows Cameron Bubar and Breanna Glynn, third-year students, Danielle Sultan and Lauren Palitz, and well as faculty members, Drs. Frank Daly, Diana Goode and Hwyda Arafat. Annie was also grateful to have Jacob Wagner and Rachel Fahey provide support during the anatomy portion of the day. Annie states, “our student hosts proved to be invaluable... [and] truly served as mentors and teachers to our visiting students.”
Staying Receptive to Chaos
Second-year COM student, Jenna Wozer, the NYLF coordinator for the event, was eager for a chance to participate in the program. “I saw the opportunity, and when I looked at the website I was like, this is amazing…” Jenna says of her initial motivation for applying for the Coordinator position. “It seemed to me analogous to the pre-professional training dance programs that I would go to in the summers, and these are young adults who are passionate about something… and this is their way of really going for it and just diving into something that they care deeply about… So I kind of identified with that side of it,” she recounts with genuine enthusiasm. Like any event, regardless of all the planning and preparedness, the NYLF visit proved to be a fun challenge for the organizers. “Annie and I were just setting up and all of a sudden I get a call… we’re here,” Jenna says, explaining how the bus of students turned up an hour early on the first day. “I talked to them about what it means to see the health in a patient… even the most seemingly sick patient in front of you, there’s some health there, and so I actually talked them through the very real case of my grandmother who broke her hip when she was 84 years old… we talked about some of her other underlying comorbidities… we just talked through all that and they came up with most of it, so it was really cool to see them make that change in perspective.” Annie also felt the energy from problem-solving at the last minute. “I think that the NYLF group showing up early set a tone of excitement for our internal players. It kept us on our feet… Jenna and the hosts were able to take the ball and run with it when thrown like that… We were able to have even more programming and informal conversation as a result.”
"We were able to have even more programming and informal conversation as a result.”
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COM student, Gigi Green, instructs NYLF student during OMM demo
“Our student hosts proved to be invaluable... [and] truly served as mentors and teachers to our visiting students”