My name is Steven Huynh and I'm a second year medical student at the Michael G. DeGroot School of Medicine at McMaster University. I'm a first generation Canadian. My family came from Vietnam as refugees. And when I was a bit younger, my grandmother ran into some health problems. She didn't really get all the help that she needed in the hospitals that she was staying at.

There was a communication barrier. No one really knew how to speak Phukinese over in Edmonton. I ended up doing a lot of translations for my grandmother when she was in hospital to try and give the doctors a better idea of what sort of problems she had. That was the first time I started considering going into the medical field as a career.

McMaster's method of teaching has made it very easy for me to flourish and thrive in this environment and learn what I need to learn as a medical student. They give you a lot of flexibility to tailor your education to the way you want it while also providing the guidance that you need when you're lost and you have no experience in the areas that you're learning. McMaster really supports students that want to make something a little bit different with the program by, I think, tailoring to their own advantages.

So whether it be taking advantage of immunology or people's own interest in global health, etc. McMaster definitely supports and encourages people's own individual strengths. I feel very lucky to have been able to come to the McMaster program. Being from outside of the province, I didn't have a lot of friends here in Ontario when I came over.

And even though it's only been a year and a half since I started the program, it doesn't feel like I have a new set of friends who I'm still trying to get to know. It really feels like I have a new family over here. I've also found that off-campus McMaster students are very much welcomed into the Hamilton community, whether it be around Lock Street, Westdale, or in Dundas.

If you're someone who is really interested in getting to know the community, there's plenty of opportunities for that. My goal as a physician is to be able to give back to the community. I'd like to be able to share stories with people, learn a little bit about their problems, provide support for them when they have difficulties in their own lives.

I think, as a physician, I'm well-placed to be able to do all that stuff. I'm excited to enter the field of medicine and to help others, and McMaster is helping me to achieve that. We'll see you next time.

My name is Barbara Tatham and I'm a third-year medical student at the Michael G. DeGroot School of Medicine at McMaster University. Being in medicine is something that I have wanted to do since I was very young. Growing up, we all knew that my dad was a doctor but we didn't really know what that meant. I was the "why" child, always asking him about his profession and about the human body.

For me, it was inspiring. I decided to come back to McMaster for medical school and it's been the best decision for me. The medical program really allows you to explore your own weaknesses, self-direct your learning, but it's also great because you get to work in small groups and learn from one another. I found that this type of learning is one where the information really sticks.

It allows me to fill the gaps in my own knowledge and get to where I know that I need to be. Coming into the program, I wasn't really familiar with the Niagara region. They were so welcoming. I mean, right from the get-go, we were introduced into a very, very supportive environment. Our campus is a homey place. Students, once they get here and realize how much personal attention they get from all of our staff, within a couple of days, Niagara's home.

We're just back for interviews. The Niagara Regional Campus is really something that was born out of a true desire to teach within the community and a desire to respond to the needs of the community. So students find that they have the opportunity to travel to smaller communities and bigger centers, to work in a variety of hospitals and clinical settings, and really have a chance to get to know their preceptors on an individual level.

The students are very happy and excited to be involved here. We teach them up-to-date medicine and evidence-based medicine to make sure that we raise highly qualified students to be highly qualified physicians. As a researcher, I really enjoy having students involved in my projects. We're able to work with our local health system here in Niagara, and we can take their research ideas and apply them to real clinical situations.

The Niagara Health System encompasses six satellite sites, and the partnerships are working extremely well, whether it's through the college here in Niagara, or the University of Brock, and then with McMaster. I'm very excited about this whole partnership team approach to healthcare. I think what I appreciate about being in St. Catharines is that it really is a small town that's not that small.

You're able to get everywhere very quickly. People know each other. There's parks. There's waterfalls. There's not a shortage of things that you can find to do. I think my goal as a physician is to provide the best care I possibly can to my patients. I'm definitely a McMaster lifer. Their principles are ingrained into me, and I will be a physician that doesn't stop learning, doesn't stop striving to find the answers. So the skills that I've learned at McMaster are only going to continue to develop and hopefully make me a great doctor in the future. in the future.

My name is Kaylyn Merrifield. I'm a second-year medical student here at the Michael G. DeGroot School of Medicine, Waterloo Regional Campus. I always had interests in healthcare. My mom, when I was quite young, was diagnosed with breast cancer. All I wanted to do was help her get better, and I hated seeing her so sick, so weak, and just broken down by this disease that she had.

I mean, I could be there with her. I could do all the little kid things that we think make our parents feel better, but in the end, what she really needed was someone with skill to be able to treat her cancer. Knowing that other people go through that with their loved ones was enough to make me want to go into medicine.

The changes are very important, and so they bring that in when they see the specialist, when they see the private care provider. Okay. And so that's where these action plans come from. McMaster is an amazing medical school because it focuses on teaching the human side of medicine. Being with patients, having that bedside manner to be able to sit with people through some of the worst and best days of their lives.

One of the main benefits being here in a more community-based setting is that we've got more one-on-one time with the doctors and we have more one-on-one time with the patients. Take a nice deep breath in for me. The physicians here don't have an expectation that they're to teach. Here we have only the people who want to teach.

So people who are really driven, who are really passionate about teaching. With exacerbations, antibiotics, and multiple courses of that. The students here work one-on-one with preceptors. They're involved in patient care from day one very, very actively. At this one hospital, we do basically cradle-to-grave medicine from a very busy obstetrical department all the way up to elder care.

So I think it gives an excellent breadth of experience. You see the students with words that they can't pronounce one day. A week later, they're presenting cases at a level that I'm just astounded by. I think the great thing about Kitchener-Waterloo is that it's a city, but it's got the small-town feel to it. Everyone is incredibly friendly.

Our class, we were very fast friends. From the minute we met, we were ready to get through this together. It's more of a family. When you walk in the doors, you have the ladies in the office and they know you by name. They know what rotation you're on, what you're studying. And they're always around for a hug or two if you need one.

The family-type environment that we've created here and the way we care about each other, I think that will spill over into their practice. And they'll recognize that they need to care about each other as well as their patients. And it's an important thing. Coming to Waterloo is something I would definitely recommend to any student considering applying to McMaster Medical School.

Here you've got a support system, a family. So Waterloo has actually been the community that's helped me get through this. Medicine is hard and being a medical student is equally difficult. So having this incredible supportive environment and my amazing classmates to help me through this, I couldn't have picked it any better.