Shadowing a Physician: Video Transcript

Rebecca Wyma [senior major in Microbiology, Class of 2018]: I heard about it my sophomore year, but I didn't get a preceptorship until my junior year.

To be able to shadow physicians is sometimes difficult to get into contact with those physicians. I really reached out because I knew I needed the help, and I wanted the help, to be able to see as much as I could in the medical field and experience that.

So you never know who you are going to get paired with, which was kind of exciting because I didn't quite know what specialty I'd end up being with, and so Dr. [Paul] Gehring was a gynecologist and an obstetrics specialist, and so he — it was a field that I never thought I would look into, to be honest, because I wasn't just interested in that area. But after going through it, it was very interesting that I could possibly see myself in that area.

I went to the hospital that he primarily was stationed at, and so just kind of followed him around as I saw patients as they were getting ready to deliver. I also was able to witness some surgeries, whether that involved C-sections for births or an actual birth — I got to see one of those, which was incredible. Even the C-sections were incredible. They're ... you don't get to like experience them, clearly, every day and so he does, so that was one of my favorite moments, was just seeing an actual baby being born, even in the two different ways.

Being able to be seen by a gynecologist is sometimes really scary, but all of the patients that I saw, whether it was their first time being there or they had been there a million times, they were really great, and they didn't mind that I was there, and they were kind of forward with the — all for me being there and just learning, so it was really nice to see. Sometimes there were — once where I got to witness a baby's heartbeat and things like that, so I kind of got to see the whole like cycle of being pregnant and how that went all the way to birth, and so that was really interesting.

The preceptorship has for sure expanded my medical field knowledge. And that's one thing, as a pre-med student, that's hard to get. You can't get that in the classroom and sometimes it's even harder to get outside the classroom and on your own. So that was, being my first hospital experience, besides volunteering in hospitals, but that was the first time I really got to step in a surgical room of a hospital, and being able to walk all the different levels without me being there to visit someone for the first time. It was great just to see that side. So just to experience that was great.

[March 2018]