Tomorrow’s topflight physicians

Medical student leaders put their ideals into action

By Susan Gaines

In the world of medicine—populated by bright, dedicated people—the bar for leadership is high. Yet every year a few students at the University of Minnesota Medical School exceed that bar, capturing the attention of their teachers, mentors, and peers.

These students have not only accumulated numerous academic achievements, honors, and degrees, but perhaps more important, they each possess that immeasurable extra something—a combination of characteristics and virtues that makes for the best doctors.

Whether in research, patient care, or community initiatives, the students featured here have demonstrated leadership in ways that matter to the future of medicine, says Medical School Dean Deborah Powell, M.D. "These four medical students stand out as leaders. They all express their own individual passion and commitment," she says. "And they all have exemplified, at this early stage in their careers, a strong desire to improve the field of medicine."

These future physicians instinctively understand that one cannot have optimism without realism, compassion without intellect, tenacity without flexibility. In these students, the science of medicine takes flight on the heart of it.

Tara Frerks:
Healing with compassion

Since she was a 9th-grader helping to lead bible and sports camps on the Grand Portage Reservation in northern Minnesota, Tara Frerks has consciously made choices based on how they affect others.

She also was developing leadership traits as captain of her basketball and volleyball teams throughout high school and college at Bethel University in Arden Hills. "In sports, discipline and sacrifice are key elements to creating a team," Frerks says. "Among teammates, there's an interdependence, a selflessness—a recognition that each of us is part of something bigger."

That sense of teamwork is a quality that "is sorely needed for the future of health care," says Gwen Halaas, M.D., director of the University's Rural Physician Associate Program (RPAP), which Frerks participated in as a third-year medical student at the University.

"Tara's got this thing about her, a balance of qualities: her maturity, confidence, and compassionate approach to medicine," says Halaas. "She understands the art of medicine, and more than that, she understands the heart of medicine."

While sports taught her a lot about teamwork, it was Frerks's hospice work, which she began as a junior in college, that started "a whole revolution" in her life. Caring for dying people and their families "confirmed that people can be healed in an emotional, relational way even when they're dying," says Frerks, who completed her first two years of medical school on the Duluth campus.

Frerks offers an anonymous quote to explain her revelation: "The experience of being valued is the beginning of healing."

That message resonated with Frerks when she was asked to change a patient's dressing as an RPAP student in a small practice in Brainerd. Upon meeting the patient and her husband, Frerks quickly recognized the couple's mental distress. She learned that they felt disregarded—as though the patient had been passed from one doctor to another following several unexpected medical complications.

Frerks, who spent two hours with the couple, coauthored a story about the encounter that has been accepted for publication in the national journal Family Medicine.

"I think they felt they were finally cared for," Frerks says of the couple. "They were listened to; their story was heard and valued."

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