ENTERING THE TIGER’S DEN:
STRIVING, STRUGGLING, AND SUCCEEDING WITH KYLE MCLAIN
POSITION: medical student
CURRENT LOCATION: Ann Arbor, Michigan
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN DEGREE: BA in Philosophy
GRADUATION YEAR: 2014
ACTIVITIES AT MICHIGAN: Michigan Pops Orchestra, Campus Symphony Orchestra, Honors College
MICHIGAN POPS ORCHESTRA INSTRUMENT: Viola
Listen to one of Kyle’s favorite Pops pieces while you read about her Pops Life!
Kelly Compton, our Pops Life Correspondent, catches up with Kyle McLain on lessons learned and insights on success as she enters her fourth year of medical school.
KC: Kyle, could you tell us about your musical background before you got to Michigan?
KM: I started playing piano when I was four years old. My brother and sister had been taking piano lessons, and I think because I was the youngest I always wanted to do what they were doing. I kept being drawn to the piano; I would always wake my parents up in the morning playing, so eventually they found a teacher for me. Piano became my biggest hobby as a child, and even throughout high school I was still doing the whole “waking my parents up at 6am from practicing” thing, which in retrospect was probably pretty annoying.
When I got to middle school, they had us try out instruments, and I picked the viola. From then on, I realized that the viola sections were always my people in orchestra. I felt like they weren’t there for the glory like the violins; violists had to understand the music and the piece on a harmonic level to be good. In high school, I actually briefly considered pursuing the conservatory route and ended up auditioning at Michigan. But as I neared the end of my senior year of high school, I thought, “I want to be a doctor, AND a musician, and I’m already this stressed out and overextended, so maybe I should just choose one.” I chose pre-med and pursued that at U of M.
KC: Did you pursue a music minor as well or did you mostly stay involved with music through Pops?
KM: Pretty much Pops only! I came in and was ambitious about getting overly involved with music, because I knew if I didn’t prioritize music I was probably going to let it drop. I auditioned for the Campus Orchestra and the Pops Orchestra in my first semester and was still practicing and learning solos at that time as well. But by my second year I figured Pops was all I needed. It had the great repertoire, a reasonable practice schedule (because everyone in the orchestra, like me, was also doing something else). It was a perfect fit!
KC: It seems like the violas are often the most tight knit of all the sections in most orchestras I’ve been in.
KM: Maybe that’s because violists always get memes! What I’ve loved about my experiences in the viola sections is that a lot of the people I’ve become fast friends with are people whom I probably never would have met otherwise.
KC: What was your favorite Pops concert?
KM: One prominent Pops memory I have is when we played with Yaniv Segal during my freshman or sophomore year for the “Pops Lock and Drop It” concert. Yaniv was conducting us through a techno piece that I’m sure made the audience think “… uhhhh what is this…?” They probably didn’t even know that it was supposed to be techno! We had been practicing it so much though because it was pretty modern and technically difficult. Finally, we perfected this thing, and at the concert Yaniv started twirling the baton like we were at a rave. I remember feeling ecstatic and realizing that the Pops orchestra was made up of a bunch of goons.
KC: Leave it to Pops to try a techno piece!
KM: I know, right? Someone probably composed it thinking, “I don’t know if anyone is going to go for this,” but Pops was like, “perfect, just what we were looking for!”
KC: On the social side of Pops, do you have any particular memories that stand out?
KM: Definitely! I met my stand partner Caitlin Urban my junior year. I noticed her at first because A. she was a violist, and B. we kind of looked the same…we’re the same height, same body type, same hair color, both our dads are lawyers, she was pre-med – all of these things were the same, and I felt like I was in The Parent Trap. We became best friends, and she was like a little sister figure to me. Now that we’re both adults we still keep in touch and hang out in Ann Arbor all the time. She’s also applying to medical school now! My friendship with Caitlin is definitely a highlight.
KC: Were you ever on the E Board?
KM: I wasn’t, but I was first stand in the viola section for a couple concerts. For that reason I tried to take an active role in sectionals and such. Viola sectionals can turn into a joke really fast because people just like to hang out with each other. But a bad viola section means we’re just fueling the viola jokes…
KC: What have you been up to since you graduated from Michigan for undergrad?
KM: When I first graduated, I got recruited to a tech job in Palo Alto; I worked on the healthcare team for a start-up called Palantir. I had no computer science background; but that didn’t matter too much. The company looks for people who are willing to teach themselves anything needed to succeed, so even though I was somewhat in over my head, I made it work. I did a year in Population Health and then a year in cybersecurity, and during that time I applied to med school and was accepted at U of M. The past three years have flown by! I started med school in 2016 and I’m now done with my clinical rotations. I’m applying for residency this fall.
KC: When you took the job after graduation, did you know that you still wanted to go to med school or were you unsure at that point?
KM: I always knew that my long-term goal was to be a doctor; I’ve wanted to be a doctor since I was super little. The “gap” year came about because I applied to med school my senior year summer and realized I needed to do something in the meantime to support myself. Once I started working at Palantir I discovered how rare it was to have a job where as a young person with no work experience I was being given so much autonomy and ownership in my role. I was constantly put in meetings where I could directly influence senior decision-making with our clients. I guess that encouraged me to stick it out for an extra year and learn whatever I could learn. But during that time I was always eager to come back to med school, and as soon as I came back it felt like I was with my people.
KC: Do you have any advice for people who are pre-med but don’t want to go straight into med school after undergrad? How would you suggest they make the most of their time?
KM: My biggest point of advice would be to do something that scares you. I know that’s very Pinterest-y and cliché, but I’ve done very well clinically in medical school, and I think that’s because I ripped the bandaid off after college and put myself in an environment where I had to be constantly scrambling to keep my head above water. In a hospital, any healthcare worker knows that you have so little control over everything, from the patient’s situation to their perspective, to the availability of things, to documentation requirements. It’s really easy to get bogged down in all of that, and I think that’s why a lot of doctors are unhappy, especially for those of us who came from a pretty well structured undergrad into this chaotic environment.
In retrospect, one of the best things I could have done was put myself in a situation where I didn’t have a similar background as most of the people at the company. I had to learn how could I adapt and teach myself the skills I needed to succeed, and also how could I grow in maturity and understand that not mastering something right away is okay. Approaching medical school with that attitude has made it an infinitely more comfortable experience; otherwise, it’s just a thing that will chip away at your ego over time if you think that perfection is the goal.
KC: Are you still involved with music now?
KM: Not as much as I would like...when I was on clinical rotations, I was working so many hours that there wasn’t an opportunity to be involved with much. Now that I’m going into my fourth year, which is famously chill, I hope to! I’ve realized how much happier I am when I spend time and effort building out hobbies. If you don’t actively prioritize that, medicine will just take it away from you. I’ve been thinking about auditioning for an orchestra or trying to do the pit orchestra in the med school Smoker, which is this annual parody where people basically roast all of the faculty. It’s very Pops-esque, lots of Pops humor, and some people who I know from Pops are even in it!
KC: Do you think that being involved with music before you applied to med school helped you with your application, and how did you leverage those experiences?
KM: I definitely listed Pops as one of my experiences on my medical school application. Also on a less tangible level, all of the skills that I learned from becoming a musician seem to resonate well with physicians. Focusing on something and always trying to improve at it is so critical to both music and medicine. I feel like students with an athletic background have a similar advantage.
KC: You mentioned that you’re interested in pursuing emergency medicine – how did you decide that, and what exactly do you like about that specialty?
“MY MOST BIZARRE MOMENT IN THE ER: The time a patient pretended to be in a coma but squeezed their eyes shut when I tried to pry their eyes open to look at their pupils! ”
KM: What I love about the Emergency Department is that you can’t turn anyone away and you don’t know what’s coming in. For a lot of physicians that’s their hell. In medical boards land, you have all of the information you need; you have vitals already, and you have the person’s medical history. But if someone comes off the street acting funny, you have to figure out what’s going on – you feel like you’re just hung out to dry in some ways. What I saw in a lot of emergency physicians at the U is that they were very comfortable thinking on their feet and loved to peel through these diagnostic mysteries and use whatever information they could get to solve the problem and move forward.
That resonated with me having come from Silicon Valley, where what separates a great entrepreneur from a not-so-great one is comfort in having to adapt every single day. Leaders in the tech world always have to say, “Okay we’ll pivot” or “we’ll try this differently” or “we tried that and it failed? We’re going to do this now.” That executive decision-making, plus the high acuity interesting cases, is what drew me to the field. On another aspect, in the Emergency Department, since you can’t turn anyone away, you get to serve everyone. I’ve had a deep interest in disparities work, and I’ve done a fair amount of work in med school around that. This field will also allow me to directly serve communities that rarely engage with other specialties.
KC: Are there opportunities to specialize within Emergency Medicine? Or are you mostly excited for the more generalized nature of that field?
KM: There are! There are a number of different fellowships you can do: pediatric, toxicology, wilderness medicine, critical care, and I think there’s also a newer one out of Harvard in Global Health. Being a generalist definitely appeals to me because I like knowing enough about a lot of things that I can move things forward even if I’m not the person who’s making that exact tissue diagnosis to solve the entire case. If I can put something in a bucket and say, “This is rheumatologic” or “This is musculoskeletal,” that’s satisfying to me, even if I’m not ultimately doing the management of care. Though there’s this whole other side of medicine that’s appealing too, where you’re rounding on patients and there’s continuity with them, so I’m wondering if I would prefer a combination of something like ICU and emergency room work. There are programs where you can do three years of residency and then two years as a fellow in the ICU, and I’ve been thinking a lot about that!
KC: What advice could you share with current pre-med students who might be on the fence about pursuing medicine?
KM: I think the traditional answer for figuring out yes or no to medicine has been to take science classes and work in a lab, and see if you like both. But there’s an increased emphasis on patient contact now. I think one of the best pieces of advice I received going into medical school was to do a patient contact experience where you actually smell the patients. I thought that was really weird when I heard it, but I think it’s true; you want an experience where you’re up close and personal and actually doing what you might be doing as a doctor. It requires walking through the process of, “I have to walk in this person’s room at 5am and ask them a million questions and tap on their back, bend their leg; how do I do that while being respectful, and am I ok with doing that?” I know some of the people who have had a really clear sense that medicine is for them have worked in nursing homes or volunteered in less exciting wards in the hospital. So make sure it gets you excited, and make sure those moments resonate with you.
The other piece of advice would be to try something else first. I can’t emphasize that enough. There are so many physicians who are burned out, and there are many many reasons for that, but I think it often boils down to people not knowing what the opportunity cost is; most of them went straight through from undergrad. For me, when I feel frustrated or down about my job, I have a frame of reference to which I can be like, “this feeling that I have is exhaustion, but it’s not job dissatisfaction.”
KC: That’s interesting that you credit so much to your time spent away from the medical field; I’ve heard mixed reviews about gap years. One of the reasons that people don’t recommend gap years is because they say it would have been too difficult to get back into the habit of studying. Did you find this to be true?
KM: There’s some truth to it, but I also think a lot of it just comes down to confidence. I remember wondering if I was actually going to be able to study like I used to. It requires a little bit of calibration, but your skills are still there. What people really struggle with is having perspective if they don’t do well on an exam…yes, exams do carry you fairly far, but there are these interpersonal qualities and an intangible maturity that patients and residents and attendings pick up on. When these people first interact with a medical student I think they can tell within the first minute whether this person has had a lot of different and valuable experiences, or if this person is just trying to optimize on signaling that they know information. That’s a common failure of people in clinical rotations, because they say, “I studied SO hard, I know SO much, how did I not get a great grade in this rotation?” when they probably came off as very anxious – you need to be focused, calm, and confident.
As a physician or as a person working in healthcare, you’re really uniquely positioned to be with people in vulnerable moments. For me, when I came into medical school, I was focused on impact first. I knew I needed to have some base level of competency, but what people are going to respond to is my commitment to them and my willingness to advocate for them. When I see people who are pursuing their careers in this or anything else that will be a long haul, it’s in the low moments where you have to remember that you’re doing it for the right reasons and you know who you are. That will keep you going in the rough times, regardless of what field you pursue. But I’m really excited about moving forward in my training and I’m looking forward to being a doctor! Unfortunately, not everyone feels that way in this phase; so I think I’m very lucky.
