Kylene DeSmith doesn’t remember much about the kidney cancer for which she was treated when she was 4 years old, but she does remember how the experience affected her parents.
“Kids are so fun and resilient, and I enjoy the challenge of making their experience better,” she says. “Little things, like bringing them a sticker or playing with them while you do your exam, can make such a big difference. And I really like the education aspect with families. Families are so concerned about their kids, and walking with them through the diagnosis and really explaining what’s going on can make them feel empowered, like, ‘I'm doing everything right.’”
Learning and creating new bonds
After earning a pre-med degree from Tufts University in Massachusetts, close to her home state of New Hampshire, DeSmith spent two years as a childhood clinical cancer researcher at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, where she had undergone treatment as a child.
“I really wanted to work there after I graduated, because it's really meaningful,” she says. “It was a great two years. It was really hard, but I learned a lot. The clinical research was so interesting; it was a whole different world that I didn't know anything about.”
DeSmith volunteered last summer at Roundup River Ranch, a camp for kids with medical conditions.
After that experience, it was off to Colorado and CU medical school, which DeSmith calls “the best four years of my life.”
“I loved medical school,” she says. “I think CU did a really good job of recruiting students and being very particular about who they accepted and the type of community they wanted to build. It was super-collaborative — we all studied together and shared resources during first year, when we were grinding and trying to just get through. But we would play basketball on Fridays or play volleyball or do things together as a class, which was really fun.”
At CU, DeSmith is a member of the first class to spend all four years of medical school under a new curriculum that has students training in hospitals a full year earlier than the previous curriculum and changes the learning model from a traditional block rotation system to a longitudinal integrated clerkship model that allows students to develop meaningful, longer-term relationships with patients, preceptors and fellow students.
“Going into clinicals our second year, we had preceptors who said, ‘You guys are better than people who have been in the classroom for two years,’” she remembers. “And when I got to my sub-internship, it was a similar experience — the preceptors said, ‘Wow, you guys are at intern level.’ Being in clinicals that much longer, and getting that longitudinal exposure with preceptors, really helped us build relationships with them, versus being on a specific specialty for four weeks and then moving on.”
Things are getting real
The benefit of all that education and training hit home for DeSmith during her fourth year as a medical student, when she began to understand what it feels like to be a real doctor.
“That was the most rewarding part, when we were owning our patients and getting to see all of our hard work pay off,” she says. “Presenting on them in the morning, being the first contact for the parents, first contact for the nurse, and realizing, ‘Wow, I know some things. I can actually do this.’”
DeSmith with one of her mentors, medicine-pediatrics resident and CU School of Medicine alumnus Troy Kinkaid, MD.
As she prepares for her residency, DeSmith is beginning to leave behind the imposter syndrome that plagued her throughout her medical school experience.
