Inside UMass Chan: How Wellness, Community, and Leadership Shape Future Physicians [Episode 611]
In this inspiring episode of Admissions Straight Talk, host Dr. Valerie Wherley sits down with Dr. Tracy Kedian, professor of family medicine and associate dean of admissions at UMass Chan Medical School. Together, they explore how UMass Chan fosters not only academic excellence but also personal growth, leadership, and wellness among its medical students.
Dr. Kedian discusses how programs such as WIN (“what I need”) Week and the Vista Curriculum create a supportive environment where students learn to lead with compassion and resilience. She also highlights the school’s emphasis on community engagement—from the Worcester campus to the Population-based Urban and Rural Community Health (PURCH) track in Springfield—and the critical importance of understanding the diverse communities physicians serve.
Listeners will gain insight into how UMass Chan’s holistic approach prepares future doctors to thrive in medicine while maintaining their well-being and purpose. Whether you’re an aspiring physician or advising premed students, this episode offers an authentic look at a medical school that truly “walks the talk” of student support and community-driven medicine.
Table of Contents
Episode Transcript
And I’d like to welcome Dr. Kedian to the podcast. I’m well, thank you so much for your time. And today we are talking about the UMass Chan Medical School.
Hi, how are you?
I wanted to highlight three interesting things I found in my research prep to talk to you. The first was that 23 of your students from last year’s class came from post-bac programs.
The second was student and healthcare provider wellness is highly prioritized, which I personally love. This is evidenced by the WIN Week. WIN is an acronym, W-I-N. It stands for “what I need” and is an opportunity for students to rest and focus on health. And it appears at the end of each foundational block.
And the third thing I wanted to highlight is 43% of your graduating class matched into residencies in primary care and related specialties, including internal medicine, family medicine, and pediatrics. What would you like to follow up on in all of those pieces of data? And what does it say about your school?
I’m glad that you chose those data to highlight. I’ll start with the primary care. We are the only public medical school in Massachusetts. So we’re a small state, but with four medical schools. And ours was founded with the intention of workforce development for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. So with a goal to develop particularly primary care physicians, but the physician workforce in general.
I believe we’ve really maintained our connections with our roots in that sense. We are incredibly dialed into our Worcester community, which is an incredibly diverse city. And I know we’re going to talk more about that in the future. But our students come with a particularly activist mindset. They want to be close to the places where their patients live and work. They want to understand their patients’ life experiences and cultural background.
And I do think that that has permeated the culture here at UMass Chan Medical School. We do have a lot of students that go into primary care, and we are usually recognized as some of the highest quality primary care training in the region. However, I think it’s really important to recognize that students from UMass Chan go into literally every discipline. So we’re accepting in the range of 225, 230 students a year and they go into subspecialties in highly academic settings. They go into primary care in rural and community settings. So there’s an opportunity for a student to really achieve whatever type of future they’re looking for here. With regards to post-bac programs, we consider the type of experience that you as a student bring with you as an applicant, as a real asset.
So if you majored in something that was non-science and graduated and decided, you know, really, my future now is to be a physician and I’m going to take these extra courses or I’m going to do a complete turnaround and do a post-bac program, we value not only the decision-making that you’ve done, but all of the undergraduate experience that you bring with you. Maybe you’re a writer, maybe you’re a linguist, maybe you’re a musician, of which we have many here at UMass Chan.
So that’s only going to add to what students are bringing to the table. And I can’t remember the third item that you were highlighting. Our WIN Week, yes, of course. I think our focus in our new Vista Curriculum on student and provider wellness has been very popular. There’s no doubt about it, medical school is incredibly challenging.
It’s got all the level of difficulty of your higher-end science undergraduate disciplines, but the volume is just so much higher. You’re spending a lot of time learning in the classroom, in the laboratory, in the simulation settings, and it just moves very quickly. So one of the things that people need in order to really feel successful at that high pace is the ability to rest, rejuvenate. So the WIN Week, it’s changed.
It’s morphed since it originally went into being and it’s only one of the pieces of the focus on wellness that we have here. So it is really wonderful for students to be able to take a couple of days off or to be able to say, know, I did, passed everything that I needed to pass, but I just, I want a little bit more training on this before I move on to the next thing so that they can get extra time in the lab or the simulation center.
Or if they didn’t get the grade that they needed to on their exam on Monday, they have an opportunity to do really focused studying, focused enrichment, and then retake the exam without having to delay their progress in medical education. So that in addition to, you know, there’s an excellent gym here. It’s free for students. Opportunities for students to participate in activities that really fill their cup. High-quality student health and really, really high-quality student counseling services. It’s students need to learn at this point in their career what they need to do to take care of themselves going forward in order to have a robust career.
Well, when I do the work that I do with my clients, I often talk about how are you conveying in your application that you have a healthy work-life balance? Because I think admissions committees are really looking for that. And so to match that with this concept of the WIN Week, I think is very healthy and positive.
But you mentioned the Vista Curriculum in a little bit of this in your prior answer. So let’s move on to that. Students are always looking for novel and innovative pieces of a curriculum that could attract them to a program. So what features of your Vista Curriculum are forward thinking and innovative?
Yeah, I agree that those are two really important features. I believe that most admissions deans would tell you that you can get an outstanding education at any accredited medical school in the United States. So look for methods, look for opportunities that really match your own needs. So many medical schools, if not most, do sort of curriculum, redos, reboots, revolutions every few years because science is changing incredibly quickly. And so our pedagogical or educational methods are changing. So it’s important to not just keep up, but to think forward and have your education to be part of the next step.
So how are we doing that? We incorporate a lot of technology. So we have a very expansive simulation center and students are using tech and simulation as methods to learn and to be tested from the very beginning of their curriculum. have, know, point of care ultrasound is really being used in most, if not all disciplines going forward. So our students are learning that from the first week of medical school. One of the areas of the Vista development that I’m particularly proud of is that students were involved in every part of the redesign and the ongoing assessment of the effectiveness of the curriculum and student satisfaction with the curriculum.
So there’s no need to sort of pause and bring in students and say, okay, what do you guys think about this next step going forward? Because the students were there when the curriculum and the various phases were designed. The focus on student wellness, as we mentioned, the pillars of the curriculum involving humanism in medicine, involving preclinical sciences, clinical sciences, and also involving health system sciences. Some of these concepts were not even concepts when I was a medical student. So students are learning about the science of how healthcare is delivered. And we have longitudinal concepts that are not separate modules, but they’re woven throughout all the aspects of the curriculum that include learning about the roots of and the remediation for health disparities, about the about social drivers of health and healthcare. And I’m always impressed at how already wise some of our students are coming into medical school regarding these concepts. When we talk to them about that in orientation or even during their interviews, they have quite rich ideas.
For sure. More and more often in some of the essays that I read, students are very eloquent in talking about the social determinants of health and lack of access to healthcare and barriers for people being able to get healthcare. And it’s really amazing because those are things that I did not think about. And it seems like it is in the forefront of their minds, which is very empowering and it gives me a lot of hope for sure. Two things I wanted to talk to you about are the two very interesting tracks offered at UMass Chan. And the first track I wanted to hear you expand on is the LEAD@Lahey track. In my research, I read that Lahey offers students at UMass, quote, “the ideal environment to study the art and science of medicine.” So can you talk a little bit more about that?
I’m happy to. I love that quote as well. So the UMass Chan Medical School is located in Worcester Mass, as we mentioned, but it has two regional campuses, each of which accepts 25 students per year. So small medical schools associated with but distant to our main campus. So the LEAD@Lahey campus is located in the B.I. Lahey system in sort of just northwest of Boston.
And the original sort of emphasis or enrichment area of the track was going to be interprofessionalism and health system science to train the future leaders of future leaders in healthcare. So I believe the way the Lahey system, the B.I. Lahey system views themselves is they have a highly interprofessional set up where leadership is shared among many disciplines of healthcare and where they think very seriously and in a very thoughtful way about how to design the system that is going to result in the healthiest outcomes for their patients, what their patients need region by region, how to meet those needs. And when we first aligned with the Lahey system to create this educational track, they wanted to have sort of an educational microcosm for this design.
So it’s highly interprofessional. As I mentioned, it’s very focused on developing leadership skills. So each LEAD@Lahey student, we just started our second class. So this is a really new campus for us, but it’s incredibly successful, I can say, partly because it’s one of the most competitive areas of admissions for us. There’s quite a lot of students wanting to go in it, and they’re from very accomplished backgrounds. But each of these students is going to get training in health system science and leadership skills throughout the interprofessional spectrum. And they’re going to create a project that will have a deliverable before they graduate, which is leadership focused.
And is this something that applicants indicate on their primary application or secondary application?
Secondary application. So the initial AMCAS application is to the T.H. Chan School of Medicine at UMass Chan. And if they receive a secondary application, they are offered the opportunity to apply to the main campus program located in Worcester, our LEAD@Lahey program, or our other regional campus at Bay State Health.
Moving on to my next question. Can you talk about the population-based urban and rural community health track? I see it’s located at the regional campus in Springfield, but would like to hear more about this curricular emphasis.
Yeah, absolutely. So our PURCH program, so it is a mouthful of “Population-based Urban and Rural Community Health.” Our PURCH program is located in Springfield, Massachusetts, which is another small to medium sized city about an hour to the west of Worcester. And the emphasis here is to learn medicine through the lens of community medicine and the unique needs of underserved patients. So you’re going to have your pulmonology block and you’re going to do internal medicine with pulmonary focus, but you’re going to be learning about it through the lens of why do the children in this neighborhood have more asthma than the children in this neighborhood? Well, it’s because the factory is located in this neighborhood and so more of those children have parents who work there and they are dealing with greater levels of contamination. They’re learning, all the three campuses learn the same for medical education, but the lens of education is different. So again, our PURCH students are learning much of their medicine in the community setting, in the school-based health center, in the correctional health system, et cetera. And so are learning the particular social and communication and medical needs of underserved patients from the get-go. They do also have scholarly projects really in this field.
How many students are admitted in that track?
25 students, but we have put forward an application to increase the size to 30. So it’s possible that for the next year starting in 2026, we may have 30 students.
Amazing.
That’s wonderful, great. And I know interprofessional learning and cross-disciplinary learning really enhances the overall curriculum and professional outcomes. And I read about the Morningside Graduate School for Biomedical Sciences, which is at UMass, who states their mission is, quote, “to develop future leaders in all sectors of biomedicine, including research, education, policy, and entrepreneurship,” and had many impressive awards, including two Nobel Prizes. How does having this graduate program adjacent to the medical school benefit both students and faculty?
I am a firm believer in the fact that we co-locate on the UMass Chan campus with our Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences and our Graduate School of Nursing is one of our primary advantages to our future physicians and our future health professionals. There is much less of a separation between biomedical research, the practice of medicine, and the practice of nursing than there is in other institutions.
You’re going to go to some classes together with graduate nurses and you’re going to go to some classes together with future scientists, graduate students. The opportunities, as you can imagine, for our students to participate in research are particularly rich. The skills that it takes to work effectively in the member of a health professional team are just developed so much earlier when you are working with people from multiple disciplines at the same time and when you’re learning side by side with them. We have the nurses teach the medical students how to draw blood and how to put in IVs. It’s only one example, but I think our students are particularly strong in teamwork.
So, UMass Chan is located in Worcester, WUSS-ter. For anyone not familiar with the city, first of all, that is how you pronounce it. It is the second most populous city in New England, with the first being Boston. The city has a little over 200,000 residents and an incredible amount of diversity.
How will students at UMass Chan benefit from studying in Worcester and working with your local community?
So I have been located in Worcester for quite some time. I was a medical student and a resident at UMass. And so I have seen the development in richness an so urban societal development in Worcester for a long time. I do not believe there is any better place to learn clinical medicine, not only because of the quality of our UMass Chan system and the safety net hospital system of UMass Memorial Healthcare, which is our clinical partner, but because of the neighborhoods and the residents of Worcester. So I like to share the statistic that there are over 90 languages spoken in the Worcester public school system. In a city of 200,000 people, I think there are many larger cities in the United States that don’t have that breadth of diversity. So you are going to work with patients literally from all over the world. So not only are you going to see illnesses and conditions that are not as common in the United States and develop some degree of expertise with them, but you are going to talk to patients, no matter who you are or where you’re coming from, you’re going to talk to patients with different life experience than you have. You are going to become experts in triadic interviews involving medical interpreters. You’re going to become an expert in approaching every patient visit with the cultural humility that’s required when you’re talking to someone who has a different background, different life experience than you. And it’s just a wonderful opportunity for our students who do, again, come in with this community engagement and service mindset to really connect with their community.
That’s wonderful. And the final question today is one that I am asking deans and program directors, a similar question to everyone. So if you would be so gracious, I would like you to please finish this sentence. A competitive application to UMass Chan Medical School…
This is, of course, a question asked by everyone. What do we need to do to be a competitive applicant? I think the most important message for me to communicate to your listeners is that we accept a large and diverse class. So you can be the community public service, clinical care, bilingual, trilingual, community-engaged person who is anxious to go into primary care, and you can be a biomedical engineer, entrepreneurial, device development, bench lab research student who wants to come in and learn how to bring an innovative product to market. So because we look to this breadth of students, what we want you to do in your application is to tell us your story and tell it well.
So talk about who you are and how you got there, what your passions and your goals are, because there are so many ways to be passionate about healthcare. And show us how your experiences connect with your passions. Show us how you had this experience that caused you to make this decision that caused you to move into this area. And so that I could read your application and know that you wanted to take care of patients and you wanted to major in biology and then you wound up going this biomedical engineer path. We particularly value experiences of leadership. We put a higher premium on a smaller number of more intense and larger numbers of hours experiences, particularly where you were put in a leadership position. Because that means the work that you were doing was recognized by someone who was working with you as exceptional and said, “I want you to be in charge of design of other people of where this project is going to go.” So we do ask applicants to talk about their experiences in leadership. And I believe it’s particularly influential in the application process.
I think that’s really good advice. And what I’ve heard you say today has probably given hope to medical school applicants who are post-bac students, who have had a nonlinear trajectory to getting to medical school, who have been at this for some time and are very hard workers, and maybe who have felt, well, you know, my application is not traditional, and so maybe I don’t have a shot.
And I think I’m hearing you say, if they tell a really good story and they have a compelling reason to want to practice medicine and they’ve put in the time and hard work and have been recognized, they absolutely could be given an opportunity.
I couldn’t agree more. I don’t know if you found this to be true, but I believe the concept of the traditional versus nontraditional applicant is dated enough to no longer be useful. Most of the deans that I work with and sit on panels with, we don’t think of applications in that term anymore. There’s no medical school that wants to restrict themselves to people who went straight from high school to a four-year college and took their MCAT in senior year and are applying.
The majority of matriculants into medical school have had at least one gap year. And I was reflecting this morning, are we putting just recent college grads at a disadvantage because someone who’s taken two gap years has now done 2,000 hours of research. They’ve published a paper. They have developed an expertise in seeing patients.
We try not to do that and we have some pretty clear guidelines that helps us to interpret each applicant in their context of how long they have been out of college or not. But you don’t want a medical workforce that comes from the same fairly restrictive pathway.
Agreed. Well, I really appreciate your time and your insight, and both in the background of the UMass Chan Medical School, and also your thoughts about what it takes to be a competitive applicant.
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