In Our Midst | Stephanie Albin
Like many pre-med students, senior Stephanie Albin was inspired to enter the medical field after encounters with doctors. Unlike many others', however, Albin's encounters were negative in nature.
"My mother had breast cancer and lymphoma since I was a junior in high school," Albin said.
Her mother's relationship with doctors was often far from positive. "They just didn't communicate to the family and to her," Albin said. "Instead of just talking about the problems, it made me want to go and actually do something about it."
"It made me realize that I want to be a specific kind of doctor," Albin said.
The "specific kind of doctor" Albin hopes to be will be explained in the senior honors thesis she's writing on the topic of narrative medicine.
"[Narrative medicine] is the way in which language and writing affect medical training and care," Albin said. "It's all about how communication is the link between doctor and patient ... and how doctors really need to think about the social aspects of medicine."
Albin's love of language and writing has manifested itself in many ways. Instead of majoring in chemistry or biology, Albin chose the arts. "I knew that if I were to go to medical school, my undergraduate education would be the only time for me to take anything non-science related, so that's why I chose to be an English major and do humanities," Albin said.
Albin's writing recently appeared in TuftScope, the university's ethics and public health journal. Her article, "First Impressions of Medical Research: An Anecdotal Journal" recounted her experience as an intern at Bellevue Hospital in lower Manhattan during the summer after her freshman year. The experience affected her views on a career in the medical field.
"Once you're exposed to serious problems of medical care and underserved areas, it's hard to neglect that and say, 'I'm going to go have my comfy private practice and make lots of money,'" Albin said.
After medical school, Albin would like to work within the state; however, she said that "at some point ... I want to work in the humanitarian sphere."
Albin's desire to help others is reflected in her extracurricular activities with the Leonard Carmichael Society (LCS). "For two years I did CHILD, which is Caring Help In Living with Disabilities," Albin said. "I was paired up with a disabled child and we played in the gym and went swimming."
"Last year, and this year again, I'm going to do READ, Reading Education Advocacy and Development," Albin added. "[It involves] going to the health project and tutoring young kids and helping out with their homework. Advocating literacy is the general goal."
During the summers, Albin has worked as an intern, both domestically and abroad. Albin worked in Geneva last summer, integrating her interest in language with her interest in international humanitarian aid.
"I spent a month at the International Center for Migration and Health," she said. "It was a lot of researching and writing, working to create policy papers."
The research focused on the AIDS crisis in sub-Saharan Africa. "I did a lot of work on HIV/AIDS, specifically within the African military," Albin said. "No one's really looking at that sector, so it's something that the organization I worked for was really spearheading."
Albin enjoyed working for such a new area of medicine. "I felt like I was actually involved in some really important new topics of medical care," she said.
One of Albin's many accomplishments has helped to make her multiple internships possible: Albin is a recipient of the Tufts Neubauer Scholarship. Created by Tufts graduate Joseph Neubauer, the scholarship donates money to seven or eight students per class for them to use toward any endeavor they choose. "I spent my money doing all these internships and traveling," Albin said.
Before her internship in Geneva, Albin used the Neubauer money for an internship at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School.
"It was a two week intensive shadowing of a doctor," Albin said. "You were supposed to keep the hours of the physician, and then we had lunchtime seminars. We had some really interesting speakers come in and give lectures about different aspects of medical care."
One of Albin's experiences at Robert Wood Johnson has made her ponder the difficulty of dealing with traumatic events in medicine. "There was a security guard who had been stabbed in the chest and he died," Albin said. "Hearing [the surgeon] describe it was really surreal, because all the student nurses were like, 'Oh, you missed a really cool case, we had to crack open the rib cage.'"
Though Albin was horrified by the nurses' attitude, she also understood their reasons for it. "I don't think that doctors aren't sensitive to issues," Albin said. "I think for most of them, it's the only way to cope."
Still, Albin said, "I don't know if I'll ever become comfortable with the idea of death and illness on such a traumatic level. I personally would like to think of a patient as a person rather than a set of organs."
Practicing medicine is not Albin's only goal. "Medicine has so many opportunities," Albin said. "Just because I'm a physician, that doesn't mean that I won't be able to write policy papers or journal articles. I can pursue all those interests along with my clinical practice."
Some of Albin's interests, though, were sacrificed when she reached Tufts. Before arriving at school, Albin was involved in dance.
"I've taken ballet since I was five until I graduated high school," Albin said. "I was in a company where we competed and performed nationally." Though she hoped to try out for one of the many dance troupes at Tufts, between school and working as a part of LCS, Albin found herself too busy to do so.
Albin has been even busier than usual since June, when she began applying and interviewing for medical school. "I want to be in New York, Manhattan proper," she said. "There are schools in Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx ... I want to go to one of them."
Albin has been close to New York all her life. Living in northern New Jersey, Albin attended the Bergen County Academy for the Advancement of Science and Technology. "It was like five years of high school in four years," Albin said. "We had an extended early-August to late-June year, from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m."
This extra time in school helped Albin decide on her career path. "One of my favorite teachers in high school was my biology professor," she said. "He actually always envisioned me as a journalist."
Albin is content with her choice in medicine, though. "I'm happy with all the decisions I've made," she said.
