A Post-Baccalaureate Program that ‘Checks all the Boxes’ for Medical School

Fast-forward to 2018: Khairallah is a new graduate of the Kirksville College of Osteopathic Medicine at A.T. Still University and a resident in family medicine at the McGaw Medical Center of Northwestern University.

Q: How did Dominican’s post-baccalaureate Bachelor of Medical Science prepare you for medical school?

To put it simply, when I was filling out medical school applications, there wasn’t a box I couldn’t check. Clinical experience? Dominican’s program offered that. You needed to have done research and presented at a forum? The program encouraged that. Teaching experience? We got that by serving as faculty assistants. Leadership experience? I founded and led Dominican’s branch of MEDLIFE, a nonprofit that improves access to health care through service trips in Latin America and Africa. Dominican is a place where no one is going to tell you, ‘No.’ It was always, ‘Yes, go for it,’ or, ‘We’ll help you make this happen.’

Q: Across all of its programs Dominican is known for tremendous rigor but in an environment of support. Was that your experience in the medical science program?

Absolutely. We were challenged and offered a level of responsibility that, in some respects, you wouldn’t expect to find until medical school. For instance, in our advanced anatomy courses, we were the ones performing the dissections on cadavers. When I got to medical school, I remember the first day of anatomy lab the professor asked if anyone had ever done a dissection. I was one of the few students able to raise their hand. At Dominican, the faculty are always there to offer help, but the students, too, really support one another.

Q: What did you take away from your international service experience with MEDLIFE?

I started the Dominican chapter of MEDLIFE and served as president. We made our first trip, to Riobamba, Ecuador, in 2012. None of us knew what to expect. One of the post-bacc faculty members, a cardiologist, traveled with us. We had taken his pathophysiology course, and all year long you’re learning about all these diseases from a book that you can recite backwards and forwards, but you still haven’t seen them in person. So the first day we examined this 10-year-old kid who we discovered had Marfan syndrome, a disorder of connective tissue we learned about in class. It had affected his heart and become life-threatening. The sad thing is his outlook was even worse because he lived on the outskirts of the city, and a lot of the better health care in this part of the world is privatized, so you need a lot of money to get access to it. So, doing this kind of service work, you knew right away you were going to see some stuff that would either convince you that medicine was for you or that was going to stop you from going into medicine altogether. For me, the experience drove me to keep going.

Q: What first drew you to medicine and what do you love about your job?

My father passed away from a stroke when I was 16, and other family members had health problems. So, I knew I wanted to go into medicine—in response, at least in part, to their experiences. Part of what I love about my work now is that you never know who will walk through the door. The beauty of family medicine is that it could be a newborn getting their first exam, an expectant mother, a 30-year-old with diabetes or a 98-year-old who’s insanely healthy. My goal now is to work in family medicine and then return to school to train in psychiatry. Ultimately, I’d like to work in an under-resourced community in Chicago and spread mental health awareness abroad, too.