Jesse Tai, MD Student

Growing up, I didn’t know that I was going to become a doctor or anything like that. Actually, when I was really young, I wanted to be a firefighter. I really enjoyed the idea of breaking down doors with axes, going in, and saving people from a fire. I feel like surgery fulfills a lot of those qualities that I found heroic growing up. You get to work with your hands, sometimes in emergencies where a patient is crashing or is in a dire situation, and you have the power to go in there to try your best to rescue them from that situation.

For a while, I actually thought I was going to do internal medicine because I really like research, and I really enjoyed sitting back and thinking about things like diseases and broader challenges. But clinically, surgery is quite different in that it requires really fast-paced thinking and prioritizes action over contemplating disease processes. I'm glad that I'm now figuring out that in surgery, even though the clinical practice is very fast paced and it's very much about action, I'm also able to pursue projects on the side about the broader aspects of surgery and the questions that are plaguing the field or are more controversial. Being able to have the action as well as the research has been great.

In undergrad and in the first few years of med school, I really enjoyed web lab research. In med school, I was looking at metabolites produced by cancer and how they affect T cells and their anti-tumor effects. Those were the big picture questions that we tackled in Dr. Tian Zhang’s lab.

It was really inspiring working with Dr. Joseph Forrester. In the trauma service, it's super busy,  consults and traumas are coming in left and right, and it is easy to get buried under all the work. Dr. Forrester really tries to push us to present patients in a streamlined fashion so that all the vital information is communicated, which allows us to see patients in a timely manner and devote more time to make proper plans for their care.  But at the same time, he also recognizes when patients need a physician to walk them through what is happening, and he always takes the time to speak with the patients, to really help them through the pain, as well as the uncertainties of going through surgery. I really like that approach.

I was recently doing a Whipple procedure in the operating room with Dr. George Poultsides, and he let me do the gallbladder portion of the procedure. I wasn't expecting it, because a lot of times [as students] you’re helping out with instruments, retracting, closing skin. But for him to tell me to come up to the operative side of the table, it was pretty exciting, and also a little bit scary. Dr. Poultsides really took the time to not only instruct me very thoroughly, but he was also there assisting so that for every single stroke of the electrocautery, he was making the right tissue plane, and lifting and showing me the right angle to really make sure I knew exactly where to take the tissue. I’m thankful that he was able to give me that opportunity. I think it’s those moments that inspire students, because you realize how meaningful it is to heal someone with your hands. It gives you a better idea of why surgeons are driven to dedicate their lives to saving patients.

Moving forward, I’m definitely thinking about a surgeon-scientist career. I think it'd be really cool to be on the front lines and have fast-paced clinical action while also like trying to tackle a bigger problem in the lab.

About the author

Catherine Wu is an undergraduate student at Stanford University interested in biology and the humanities. On campus, she enjoys writing for The Stanford Daily and other ways to learn and share stories of members in her community. She hopes to pursue a graduate or medical degree on a pre-med track.