What a Career in Medicine Means to This Columbia Medical Grad

Linda Abraham interviews Dr. David Edelman, a recent graduate of Columbia Medical School and co-founder and past co-chair of the COVID-19 Student Service Corps..

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A Columbia Med School student’s incredible response to COVID-19 [Show summary]

Dr. David Edelman, a recent graduate of Columbia Medical School, shares his perspective on pursuing a career in medicine during these exceptional times, as well as what led him to co-found the COVID-19 Student Service Corps.

The journey of a Columbia MD/MPH who is already acting on his commitment to health equity [Show notes]

What’s it like to attend Columbia Medical? Why did this newly minted doc also earn an MPH, and how did he co-found a student organization to help med students serve New York City during the pandemic? That’s what we’re going to find out.

Our guest today is Dr. David Edelman, co-founder and past co-chair of the COVID-19 Student Service Corps. Dr. Edelman earned his bachelor’s degree in biology and Spanish from Washington University in St. Louis in 2015. He then began his medical school studies at Columbia University’s Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons. While there, he also earned an MPH at Columbia Mailman School of Public Health. He is about to start his residency at Montefiore Medical Center in its Primary Care and Social Internal Medicine program.

Can you tell us about your background outside of medicine? [2:20]

I’m originally from a small suburb outside of Cleveland, Ohio. I grew up there, played a lot of sports growing up, and then left the nest to be an undergraduate in St. Louis at Washington University. I continued on with sports for a little bit there. I played football for a year, was on the club baseball team for a while, and then really found interests in Spanish language, which I studied abroad a little bit in Spain. I just loved being in a different place and being on my own and learning about language and culture and people, as well as global health and the intersections between health and equity in the United States and abroad.

I’ve gotten into running over the last five years. I love hiking. I have a dog who is here with me. Since I haven’t started residency, I’m able to spend a lot of time with my dog. I also host a weekly trivia question for friends and family as a way to stay in touch over the last few years, which has been really fun. Those are my little quirky things I like to do.

When did you decide to become a doctor? [3:40]

I think the first moment was in high school. I think it really speaks to how the teachers that you have really make a difference on what you do in life. I was in a biology class and the teacher I had in 10th grade, Mr. Grim, was just such a phenomenal inspiring person. It’s a cliche, but he made all the science come alive. And it’s not because we were dissecting animals or anything, but because he really connected everything that we were learning in such a fun, fundamental way to how we live and breathe and act as people. That got me interested in it.

The only physician in my family is my uncle. When I was telling him about how much I loved it, that class in 10th grade, he said, “Why don’t you come down to my hospital one night, and you can shadow in the emergency room?” That first ever experience in medicine was on a Friday night, downtown Cleveland, in a level one trauma center from 8:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m. I think even 11 years later, that was still the most jam-packed night of medicine I’ve ever had. I saw more in those six hours than I think I’ve seen in week-long periods ever since. It was a pretty cool intro, and from there I knew I wanted to do something in medicine, and that kept growing as I kept exploring more, and I saw myself in that role.

What were some of the more impactful experiences that you had as you explored medicine before medical school? [5:13]

There were a number of things. When I think of what led me to where I am now, and that includes going into a primary care residency program and integrating medicine and public health through social medicine, I think about these converging threads of my life. There was the medicine thread. But then there’s also the thread about meeting people and going to places. It started really early, this fascination with the fact that people spoke languages I didn’t understand. It was very concrete. We would use to sit on the ground when my grandfather came over to babysit, we would open up the board game instructions and compare the Spanish language instructions to the English ones, and I was so fascinated that there were these words and languages, and it grew from that concrete interest in different languages to really understanding that people experience life differently than I did.

That grew to learning more about the language and the culture, that grew to understanding the broad, broad view of how humanity really is so different all over the world. Then trying to see that, combined with medicine, brought me to some experiences in global health. Then I’m in St. Louis working at a place called Casa de Salud, which was a free/low-cost clinic for particularly underinsured or uninsured immigrants in the region. It really started to connect all these dots together and bring forth the idea of “I like medicine, I like helping people. I’ve seen medicine in different spaces. I also find it really important to learn about and learn from other people to be humble about oneself, putting those two together and seeing how I can make a difference and an impact in the world through a career that I love.”

What was the hardest part of the medical school application process for you? [7:09]

The irony is that the residency process is a breeze compared to the medical school process. The hardest part, I think, is the marathon. If you know early you want to go to medical school, that process starts even before junior year or whatever the typical time is. That process is starting throughout all of college. There’s this pressure. At the time, I considered certain things checkboxes, which really should have been more passion projects. Then there’s the looming MCAT. Even when you’re done with all that and you think you’re ready, and you’ve submitted the application, there’s a whole season of secondaries. It kept piling on. Honestly, the part that felt the worst at the time was the waiting, which just is ridiculous because of all the work that had to go into it, but it’s so true because it just kept getting drawn out. I think that the hardest part was trying to keep a positive mindset at all times, or at least have a frame that I could go back into, and being able to separate from the whole process and step back and really take an internal look at myself and enjoy life outside of that process.

How did you maintain that positive frame of mind? [8:27]

I think it was finding things that made me whole, which is an almost cliché thing to say now, but it’s something that I hold true even today. Things like going to play pickup basketball with friends, going outside, going on hikes, going on walks, trying to get out. Really just trying to get distance from what the day-to-day was. I think it’s easy to fall into that trap of always talking about the same things, med school or tests, whatever else is going on in college related to premed, but I think being able to step outside of that is really important.

What did you like best about your experience at Columbia Medical School? [9:07]

I love the people. The people who are at Columbia are just tremendous. There is this incredibly diverse group from all walks of life, with all kinds of experiences. I went straight through from college to medical school, and it was very intimidating for me being 22 years old and meeting someone (now one of my good friends) who at the time was 35 and had worked 15 years in global health. I thought at the time, “This is what I want to do in life, and you’ve already done it.” That was really tough, but I learned so much from him, and I learned so much from all my other peers who were Olympic athletes and who worked in finance and who had jobs for 10 years or were journalists, all these different things. It opened my eyes even far more than what I did in college. Doing things outside of medicine makes you better in medicine. The patients I want to care for in the future … to care well for them, I have to do things that are away from actually caring for them.

What do you think could be improved at Columbia Medical School? [10:18]

All institutions are reckoning with their role in structures of racism and looking to strive for better equity. I think Columbia is such a strong, well-regarded institution that there’s a lot of power for them to develop intimate community partnerships that build among the communities in which they’re located. Columbia, the undergraduate school, is located in Morningside Heights, which is just north of the Upper West side in Manhattan. It’s very close to Harlem, and the medical school is located in Washington Heights, which is a predominantly Dominican neighborhood. Being near Harlem on the Morningside campus and being near Washington Heights in the medical campus, there are a lot of communities that are being gentrified, but also that have been there a long time and have many needs. I think that any institution that’s situated in these areas should look to see how they can support, but really to make it a priority. Not to say that Columbia hasn’t, but I think now as we reckon with how our institutions sit idly by and contribute to and perpetuate a lot of some structures of injustice, we can use our collective strength and money and power to improve and create a more equitable region and life for so many people.

LISTEN: Harvard Med Student Finds Volunteer Opportunities Despite COVID-19 >>

It’s a failure of all institutions of higher ed. I think one thing that was really beautiful coming out of the COVID work that we did was strengthening community partnerships that hadn’t existed across the medical center and existed in silos. One of the things about the medical center in Washington Heights is that the school of public health, the medical school, the dental school, and the nursing school are all there. But all of them exist in their own little bubbles, and having gone both to the medical school and the public health school, I really saw how these worlds did and did not interact. Some schools had stronger community partnerships with some community based organizations than others did. I think that our response broke down these barriers and fairly rapidly said, “How do we improve this, because this is a problem? The thing to improve for my institution, where I came from, for really all institutions, is, “How do we work with community partners and build better communities in the places where we’re situated now?”

Why did you want an MPH in addition to the MD? [13:05]

Going into the medical school application process, I knew that my interests in health and in medicine were more about access to care, what I would now call social determinants of health and health equity in social justice. I saw that public health was really the avenue where this was happening. When I was applying, I looked at a lot of schools that had strong public health schools. At Columbia, they ask you a question in their secondary, “Is there anything else you want to know?” And I wrote, “I want to go to Mailman and do my MPH while I’m there.” I knew it was something that I wanted to do because I knew that my practice of medicine in the future was not going to be medicine alone. It was going to be medicine and public health medicine, and community-based health partnerships, health equity, social determinants, research, all of that.

Let’s turn to the organizations that you led while you were at Columbia. First, what is the Public Health Commute, and how did you become co-director of it? [14:10]

The friend I mentioned who I met the first week of medical school who was 15 years older than me, he was one of the people who helped start and run this project. He came to me midway through my public health year and said, “David, I would love to have you on board and help me out. This project is something you’re interested in. It’s about public health medicine,” and I said, “Sign me up. This sounds awesome.” It was started in 2017 by a medical student at the time who also had gone and gotten an MPH at the Mailman school. She did it after seeing that there was a real gap in public health education that was happening in medicine. She wanted to create something that would help students, particularly in their clinical rotations, understand some of the underlying social issues that led to patients presenting with illness.

This was particularly for students going to rotations, not at our home hospital in Washington Heights, but in places like Harlem or in Stanford, Connecticut, where we have a partner institution. She created these quick online syllabi, where students could go through and read about, “What are the patient populations? What is gun violence? What is racism? How does this affect health?” Introductory, even fundamental public health concepts that affect people’s health and why they come to the hospital.

She graduated and actually stayed at Columbia and handed this project down to Greg who then invited me to come along and expand it. Greg took this and ran with it on the clinical side, and I was overseeing the formation of everything preclinical. I built interactive modules that are online. It’s at publichealthcommute.com, and you can walk through a case, sometimes a couple cases, of patients that are presenting to some sort of clinical scenario and underlying public health concepts that are really guiding why they’re there and what’s happening. The idea was that each of these would be matched to what’s being taught in the medical school curriculum. For each block that a medical student goes through in the first year and a half, they have a public health thread that gets woven in between.

This was designed to be a proof-of-concept in a way, so we’re showing that they can be paired with each block and that students will engage and enjoy them, which they really have, and learn something from it about fundamental public health concepts. Then it will be more formally integrated into the curriculum as they start to look into how we bring public health into everything that we teach, which was my goal. And the “commute” name came from these rotations where people might have to take the train. “Learn something about health on your commute.”

How did you come to found the COVID-19 Student Service Corps? [17:02]

I think the first confirmed case of COVID in New York City was sometime around March 1st or 3rd. For the five years I was in Columbia, I worked at one of the student-run free clinics every Tuesday. The first Tuesday in March, we had clinic and it was little chaotic because we knew that there was a case of COVID, and all of these new guidelines were coming out about screening people. Our clinic was in the basement of a church in Harlem. It does not have good infection control processes by any measure, because it’s not a clinical space and that’s intentional. We were scrambling to figure out what we were going to do. In the next 24 to 48 hours after our clinic, we learned that all of the student-run free clinics at Columbia were going to be shut down for reasons related to patient safety, infection control, and student safety.

At the time there was a lot of emotion. There’s a number of students who volunteered at all of these clinics, and at least for the one that I was involved in, there was a lot of anger. “We should be able to say when we close and we’re willing to take risks and we should be able to do this.” Confusion like, “Why is this happening?” And also fear: “How are we going to take care of our patients, and how are we going to continue to care for these really vulnerable communities who wouldn’t seek out other sources for help?” I saw this as, maybe we can take this energy and do something about it and unite these five clinics. I and another student, Sarah, and one of our faculty started working together on a COVID task force for these five student-run free clinics, thinking that there would be about 10 students or so who’d be interested across them.

It turned out that close to 50 students signed up in the first week. We were really overwhelmed with this response, and so we were trying to figure out ways to change this, but what was happening at the same time was that classes that were in-person were canceled and changed to virtual, and then eventually students were pulled from clinical rotation. While all of this was accelerating with the task force, we didn’t even have a chance to start it because everything was accelerating around us. This early foundational work helped to set the stage for when students were finally pulled from clinical rotations the second weekend in March, and there were starting to be discussions among a broader group of students and faculty at both the school of public health and the medical school of, “How do we involve students in this response?”

It grew from that, and we started to brainstorm: “What are the areas that we need student support? How can students actually support safely?” We spoke to people who worked in the hospital who were in communities and trying to figure out the issues that need to be managed now. The analogy or the metaphor people kept using was that we were building the plane while we were flying it. We, in three days, came up with the structure, the guiding principles, the whole organization, COVID-19 Student Service Corps, and released it to the two schools in a webinar and had 500 people who signed up in the first three to four hours. We had 1300 who were signed up in a week. There’s been close to 2000 people that have signed up to volunteer across the three months that it has existed.

It’s been an incredible organization. It was about channeling that student anxiety about, “I came to a health profession school because I want to help, and in this moment in which help is most needed, I’m being pulled away from the only way I know I can help.” I wanted to, more than anything, be able to give them an opportunity to do something positive in such a difficult time.

I’ve wondered how medical students in their clinical rotations felt about being pulled from those rotations. Did you feel they were doing the right thing? What was your reaction? [20:45]

I think people understand multiple sides of it. For me, I wasn’t on a clinical rotation at the time. I was actually in my residency boot camp, which was supposed to involve a lot of in-person simulations and procedures and getting us ready for residency. But I was pulled out of the free clinic, and many of my friends were pulled out of their rotations. I think there were thoughts of frustration on both sides, thinking, “This is what I’m here for. I’m more trained than I’ll ever be as a medical student. They should let me be in the hospital,” to “Why am I still in the emergency department when there’s already cases? I should be pulled from my rotation. I shouldn’t be forced to be here,” to people understanding that their presence in the hospital meant more PPE was being used, to people saying, “I’m young and healthy. I should be someone who’s risking exposure.”

There were all these things swirling around, and I think that’s part of what’s made COVID so difficult. Then there’s also the clinical burden that many patients don’t do well. But I think it’s because people understand the different sides of it. There’s the medical side, the medical student side, and the public health side. The liability. There’s all kinds of issues; there is student safety. Even for our organization, it took us a long time before we could approve anything that was in-person, nonclinical-related, because there’s issues about, how do you make sure that someone’s not feeling coerced to do something in-person and that there’s appropriate safety precautions?

I’ve moved on from the organization. I know that at least the medical students are back and some of them are back in clinical work now, but building those systems to be able to track student health is new and novel in such an outbreak. There were a lot of moving, confusing, conflicting parts on behalf, I think, of many students.

One thing that’s interesting: I was very involved in a process that was very active in the COVID response. I felt very guilty because I wasn’t there. I’m trained to be someone, as a medical provider, who can be at the bedside. I knew that even if I was the least skilled person in the hospital, with the least amount of experience, I could at least provide some sort of emotional support for a provider or a patient if I was physically there. I harbored guilt over the fact that I couldn’t be there. I remembered expressing this to someone. We had some reflection groups, and I was expressing this to someone who is a primary care physician, and she said, “I have guilt too, because I’m working from home and I know friends who are in the tents, who are screening patients.” She said, “I spoke to my friend who was in the tent and they have guilt too, because they’re not in the ICU.” The ICU doctors are guilty too, because they could be exposing their loved ones.

There’s these pervasive feelings of deep, emotional agony that came about from this crisis. I think it’s going to take a long time to repair it, but I really think it speaks to the true reasons why all of us got in there and got into these professions is that we just want to help in any way possible. And to not be at our fullest, to not be able to save, to not be able to care for people in any capacity we can dream of may eat at us a little bit, and we have to approach them and own it and talk about it.

Is the CSSC mostly for med students, or is it for undergrads also? Is it for a variety of healthcare fields? How has it developed since it started? [24:52]

It started within the medical school, and the board that runs it is primarily in the medical school and the school of public health. It’s spread to the schools within the medical center. That included nursing, dental, medical, public health, occupational therapy, physical therapy, and social work. I did leave about a month ago, so I’m not as up to date, but it did spread to some of the undergraduate and graduate campuses outside the medical center.

Have other universities contacted you to copy the model? [25:42]

Absolutely. We started and we created this toolkit, which took those guiding principles that we came up with. We sent this toolkit out. I think it was sent out from our dean to every medical school, and we posted it on a website. I know the students were informally sending it around to other students we knew at different schools. To date there’s been, I believe, nine or 10 other schools, both undergraduate and graduate who have formed their own COVID-19 Student Service Corps and a number of others. I think we were contacted by 30 or 40 different schools all over the world, many of them asking to learn from it or how we talked through how we approached different problems. I think we created this not expecting that everyone would become a CSSC all over the country because everyone was responding at the same time, but if it could help some universities or organizations come together and organize the way that they responded, we thought it would be useful. One of my last things I did before I left my role was that I joined a call of CSSC student leaders from across the country. It gave me chills. It gives me chills now to think about it, to hear about all the incredible things that these students and organizations are doing in Arizona, in Washington, D.C., all of them.

What are some of the universities that have copied it? [27:16]

One of the first ones was University of Washington. Then the University of North Carolina as well. George Mason University and the University of Virginia were two undergraduate schools. There’s the University of Florida, and the college of medicine at University of Arizona in Phoenix. They have a very cool program where they’ve been working with the Navajo Nation to fly in supplies that are donated. A lot of sharing of ideas of how different projects were run and then running with it for one’s own local environment.

One thing we hear frequently is, “My volunteer position got canceled. I want to volunteer clinically both because that’s what I want to do and because I need it for my application.” I think it’s really important that people know about the example that you and the CSSC have set. It means that if your internship got canceled, there are other avenues. [28:02]

Some of it comes down to expectation setting. Even for medical students, clinical opportunities are pretty sparse right now. That’s not because anyone’s trying to take them away; that’s purely from an infection control standpoint and a safety point. The traditional opportunities that people do in getting ready for medical school may not be available for quite some time, and many of the things that are needed may be remote and many of them may be nonclinical, and that’s all okay. I think it’s about looking for organizations and for people that speak to you and reaching out to them to see what you can do to help, because I think ultimately it’s being willing to do what’s needed at a time of crisis that’s most important when looking to do something over the summer.

If you’re thinking about something like the Student Service Corps, a larger organization, the kinds of things that needed to be filled in our organization and I would assume similar organizations, there’s a big need for tutoring, and then for some sort of summer replacement now that a lot of summer camps are being closed to keep children and young adults active when they’re still at home or outside.

There’s many organizations that need support. We talk about a lot of the protests that are going on, and there’s a lot of support that can be done there in terms of water and supplies and supporting the movement, of course. But I think it’s looking local. It’s looking where you are, looking to see where their needs are, and then looking to see where you may have institutional connections through your undergraduate and who are the people that have been involved and what opportunities they may know, and what organizations are around you, like a Red Cross or something that could use some help.

How did you manage the time demands of all these other things that you were doing as well as medical school? [30:27]

The caveat to the Student Service Corps is that I had pretty much finished everything else in medical school, so I didn’t have much else going on, so I was able to do that. That said, it was a pretty crazy time commitment, especially in the first few weeks. I was working anywhere from 16- to 18-hour days, six and a half to seven days a week. It, thankfully, calmed down a lot in the latter half, but for the first eight weeks or so, I was working most days and most waking hours.

Medical school goes in waves. The time that you have to do other things varies. In the classroom phase, there’s usually more time. Of course, there’s little mini-waves as you have exams and different things come up. During the first clinical portion, that’s when you typically don’t have a lot of time, and ironically, that is the time where having those brief moments of time to do things for yourself is most important.

Then after that, it varies again. It depends on what you’re doing. In the public health year, I had a lot more free time again, time for myself to do other activities. That’s when I took up a lot of the Public Health Commute work. Then the residency application process and interviewing took up time because I was traveling. It’s finding those dips in the waves where there’s more time to do other things and taking the advantage of that time. I think, again, it’s expectation setting. It’s recognizing that there will be periods where you don’t have time and being able to let go of trying to do all the things. I think that was a really tough transition from college to medical school. You can’t do everything anymore in medical school. You have to be able to let things go and transition them. I think that was a very important thing to learn.

How do you advise applicants to use their volunteer experiences not only to help their communities but also to test their interest in medicine, or teaching, or whatever it is they’re involved in? [32:28]

I think testing the experience in medicine is the hard part right now. If there’s no replacement for being a part of clinical visits, which there may not be for some time, then I think honestly, it’s just finding people to talk to about their experience. Finding other people who are in the same process too and talking and reflecting on what it’s like to be in this process. Taking space to write it out and speak about it. I found that to be helpful in medical school in general. Reflecting on what I am doing makes me more aware of how I feel about all of those aspects. I think that could be useful in helping to explore what one thinks about medicine. It’s an escape answer from the fact that there may not be in-person clinical activity.

There’s a lot of things that are clinically related that you don’t think about very often. Care of the elderly is very clinical. A lot of what we do in medicine is simply talking to people and helping them understand things, because medicine is just a totally different language, and so you have to be able to translate that. Then add that on top of an aging population, a lot of the isolation and loneliness that’s happening with COVID, distance from families, and to be able to be a support for families, for people who are in need, for people in nursing homes and assisted living I think is really important. I don’t know what opportunities are out there, but I think it’s something that’s service-related, that is a volunteer work, but maybe isn’t seen so much as clinical, but it has a really important significance. I think building on that empathy and those interpersonal connections are just as much about medical school as seeing a surgery.

How do you see your career evolving? You’re just about to start your residency at Montefiore. You’re doing a very interesting residency in that you’re not just doing internal medicine but social internal medicine. How do you see things developing? [34:28]

It was an interesting career path for me. Columbia doesn’t have a lot of primary care exposure. It’s a big specialty hospital, so I didn’t fully grasp my interest in what I wanted to do until I was in my public health year and saw that the intersection of medicine and public health that I was looking for is really happening on the ground level of primary care work. That opened my eyes to the experiences that I loved the most in medical school, which were these free clinics where I was a primary care doctor, and then my primary care in internal medicine rotations. Internal medicine is a really big field. You could absolutely go to an internal medicine program and come out the other side and be a primary care doctor. But I knew from the outset that I wanted to do primary care medicine, and so when I was exploring residency programs, I looked at both the traditional internal medicine programs and also the primary care ones.

The primary care ones offered things that, to me, felt really important, so instead of elective time in something like doing colonoscopies with a gastroenterologist, that time would be spent more in the clinic or dedicated to learning about something called motivational interviewing; how you speak with a patient to elicit their motivations about some habits. Smoking cessation is a big example of that. That felt more important for what I wanted to do in the future than using that time in some other clinical subspecialty. Then I think there’s a benefit to being among a like-minded population of people who know the other career opportunities within the primary care world. Social medicine is really an extension of that, in that it’s taking the lens of health equity and social justice and social determinants and really reinforcing it within primary care.

I think the best way I’ve been able to describe it is that it is, itself, the manifestation of public health and medicine together. It is the fact that you cannot be a physician in primary care without understanding what community and population health is and what the risk factors are for disease that are the not 10% of things that you can cure with medicine, but the 90% of things that come from elsewhere, where you live, the color of your skin, the way you’re treated, the language you speak, the food around you, smoking and the taxes, all of that. All of those are things that affect people’s health that are not traditionally medicine.

This program, I felt, better than anywhere I was really considering going, was the embodiment of the doctor that I wanted to be, who would really tackle those issues. As I look forward to my career, I love patient care, and I want to see patients, and to be able to do that a couple of days a week and be able to do more systems-level public health work would really put those together, I think, in a good way.

What would you have liked me to ask you? [37:41]

It’s not necessarily a question to have asked me, but I think when I look back on my time as an undergraduate, always having that lens of wanting to go to medical school, I did things because I enjoyed them, but I knew in the back of my mind that I was also doing it for my application. It still bothers me a little bit. I wish I had done things just solely for the pleasure of it, because I know now that it didn’t matter that it was for my application or not because so many people go on and do amazing things and then go into medicine. It almost held back my full ability to enjoy some of those experiences because I was so caught up on going to medical school. I think something I’ve seen over the five years is that more and more people are taking time off between college and medicine because there’s so much to life to experience.

I’m lucky I got to do a lot of that in college, but I think it’s okay to enjoy things that you don’t see as medically related, just because you enjoy them. If that means you’re not going to do the thing that you’re told (“You have to volunteer in this capacity” or “You have to shadow all these things”), and you do it maybe a year later than you otherwise would have and you take some time off, that’s fine, because I think it makes you a better doctor. I truly believe that doing things not related to medicine, doing things in the arts, in languages, in literature, whatever it is, dance, sports, that all makes us better people, and being a better person makes us a better doctor.

Do you regret not having taken a gap year? [39:53]

No. I think that in a lot of ways doing public health was my “gap.” I think there’s this misconception that a gap year is like, “Oh, relaxing.” In reality, I think a gap year is taking a mental break from all of the science and all of the pressure. Doing the public health year was really just all about immersing myself with incredible peers in these topics that were related so much to my passions. I don’t regret that at all. I think it was more of a mindset in college. I think it was the constant pressure of like, “How is this going to affect med school?” I wish I could have lived a little bit more in the moment.

Where can listeners learn more about the CSSC? [41:30]

You can find information about the COVID-19 Student Service Corps at Columbia online at ps.columbia.edu/CSSC. You can also Google the COVID-19 Student Service Corps at Columbia.

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