Q&A with Tina Wu: Trainee at MOTSRTP, Education, & more ✏️
Learn about Tina's experience creating a Transplant 101 course for the MOTSRTP Program!
Welcome to the Invite Health newsletter. These newsletters highlight students pursuing careers in healthcare, and the experiential learning opportunities they've had. From market access to clinical research to global health, my goal with this newsletter is to introduce you to the various pathways that students can pursue in healthcare.
Whether you’re reading this on a commute, during your study break, or from the comfort of your own home, I hope you enjoy reading today’s newsletter.
- Sachi
This week, I invited Tina to share her experiences as a trainee at Toronto General Hospital’s Multi-Organ Transplant Student Research Training Program, to create an online learning course called “Transplant 101”. Read on to learn more about her experiences!
Q&A with Tina Wu, trainee at the Toronto General Hospital Multi-Organ Transplant Student Research Training Program (MOTSRTP) 💉
First off, tell us about your journey so far. Where do you study, what inspired you to pursue this, and what’s next? What else do you like to do outside of studying?
My name is Tina (she/her) and I recently graduated from the Bachelor of Health Sciences program at McMaster University! This fall, I will be attending the University of Ottawa for medicine.
It’s silly but even after hearing back from medical school, I was still questioning my decision to pursue medicine. For some, medicine is the “big dream”—the reason we work hard in our classes, take on leadership roles, and get involved in our communities. My mother nearly cried when she heard the good news and my sister physically jumped of joy. Yet, when I read my letter, I only felt a sigh of relief. This feeling led me to wonder if I’d mistakenly chosen this path out of a fear of failure. Was it ever my “dream” to become a physician? Was it just the product of my environment? What if I only adopted someone else’s “dream” because it was easier than creating my own when I didn’t know what else was out there?
My experiences in high school robotics taught me that I liked problem-solving with a team to achieve a common goal. Beyond that, I recall witnessing three health emergencies on the TTC (Toronto Transit system) in grade 12 and wishing I had the skills and knowledge to do more than worry and call for help. My earliest motivations towards healthcare, like many others, came from liking high school biology combined with a desire to be helpful and provide meaningful contributions to a team.
My first real examination of medicine occurred when I started volunteering at Dr. Curnew’s cardiology clinic. I really liked getting to know the individuals coming into the clinic and connecting with them. I witnessed the level of vulnerability and trust in the physician-patient relationship. You can look at a person through a lens that many other individuals in their lives might never know. From here, I could see myself fulfilled in a career where I would be supporting someone through the scariest moments of their life like a diagnosis or celebrating during the happiest ones, like the birth of a newborn.
Most recently, chatting with my mother about her view of work and life also helped me gain insight. She owns a convenience store and works there every day to provide for me and my three younger siblings. It’s not easy; she never gets a real break. She work through holidays and weekends, and once the workday is done, she still has to go shopping to make sure the store doesn’t run out of stock, place orders, calculate employee wages, and probably another 50 tasks that I wouldn’t even know goes into running a business. My mom finds herself very fortunate to be in a position where despite having language barriers and no higher education, she is still able to support her family. She’s so grateful to have me and my siblings as a reason to work so hard every day. Everyone finds purpose in life differently, and hearing her say this made me realize that while medicine is difficult work with long hours, I would count myself very lucky to be working in a profession where I can use my knowledge and skills for a purpose beyond supporting only myself, but to touch other’s lives in a meaningful way.
Outside of studying, I love to read trashy YA romance, sing, dance, dragon boat, and try new food places with my friends. I also have three younger siblings that keep me busy!
Tell us about your experience as a Trainee at the Toronto General Hospital Multi-Organ Transplant Student Research Training Program (MOTSRTP).
As an Multi-Organ Transplant Student Research Training Program (MOTSRTP) trainee, I was responsible for working with my Principal Investigator (PI) on a research project, watching lectures, attending virtual research workshops, presenting at a journal club meeting, and completing a group project called Dragon’s Den with other trainees. There is both a summer program that runs from approximately May to August, and a fall/winter program that runs from around September to April. It was hosted in the UHN’s Ajmera Transplant Centre in downtown Toronto, though most of my work was completed virtually during the year, with the exception of an orientation meeting. My role was unpaid, however there is an option to do a paid work–study placement if you’re a U of T student. However, one of the trainees from McMaster was able to receive an external research stipend from a grant application after being on the program for a term.
For my PI tasks, I personally worked with Dr. Cynthia Tsien, Segun Famure, and Anna Cocco on creating a massive open online learning course called "Transplant 101”. The goal is to make a foundations course that teaches the basics of the field to ease the transition for a healthcare professional who has never worked in transplant before. We want our course to be applicable not just within the UHN, but nationally and even globally. My work was to contact various healthcare professionals including nurses, nurse practitioners, nurse coordinators, dietitians, pharmacists, research coordinators, and social workers in the different types of solid organ transplant (e.g., kidney, liver, lung, pancreas). I set up meetings together and conducted interviews to get their feedback on our current course outline and sample lectures. Currently, my work involves mentoring new trainees to take over this project.
There are several different PIs in the program, and the specific work that a trainee’s PI assigns will differ. One of my friends was working on coding a machine learning algorithm to predict a patient’s risk of acquiring diabetes post-transplant, and another friend worked with rats to understand the liver’s ability to regenerate when fibrotic. You’ll be matched to a project depending on what you discuss in your interview with the program with our director, Segun.
Meanwhile, Dragon’s Den was a team competition. Each group of around 4-6 trainees were assigned a different real-life issue that exists within transplant today, and spent the program term developing a solution. We had access to a mentor that we could request meetings with to assist our progress, and attended seminars that taught us how to work through a problem. The problem my group was assigned was “how can we improve psychosocial assessment of transplant candidates and allow them to better capture the level of social support that a candidate has”? I worked with my 3 teammates to perform environmental scans and literature reviews, and presented our final solution to the program director. The two teams with the best solutions were chosen to present in-person to transplant specialists and only one team was declared the winner.
How did you come across this opportunity? What did the application process entail?
I heard about this opportunity through my friend Rhea Varghese. The application can be a bit difficult to find online, but once you get to the PDF, it’s pretty straight forward! You need to submit a cover letter indicating your interest in the program, an updated CV/resume, university/college transcripts (all years to date), and a 500-word scholarly essay. This year, the prompt is “Patient-Healthcare team partnerships could be the driving force for healthcare innovation, especially in the field of transplantation. Discuss.” The application is due Tuesday July 4 at 9:00 am EST for fall/winter.
After the written application is submitted, there is a group interview with the director of the program, Segun Famure. I was in a group with 3 other interviewees and was super intimidated at first. In retrospect, the interview was just an opportunity for Segun to get to know who you are and what projects you would be a good fit for. I told him that the reason I wanted to be a part of the program was less for the research-intensive side and more for the teamwork aspect—my exact wording had to do with how I thought “the soccer tournaments seemed like a lot of fun”. From there, I was put on a project where most of my work is interviewing stakeholders and interacting with others, which I was very happy about.
Did this experience lead you to pursue any other related opportunities?
I can’t say that it directly led me to related opportunities, but I still found it a very valuable experience for many other reasons. It showed me an example of what work in healthcare can look like beyond only medicine and research. My current trajectory is that I want to end up at an intersection between education and medicine, which I would not have known was possible otherwise.
Where can students go if they want to learn more about this experience?
This is the link to the MOTSRTP Brochure to learn more: uhn.ca/Transplant/Education/Documents/MOT_ED_MOTSRTP_Brochure.pdf
It’s taken from this website on the education programs at the UHN: uhn.ca/Transplant/Education/Pages/education_programs.aspx
And this is the link to the application:
uhn.ca/Transplant/Education/Documents/MOTSRTP-Call_for_Trainees.pdf
To connect with me, this is my LinkedIn:
Is there anything else that you would like to add for Invite Health readers?
Making decisions about career paths and the future can be very daunting, but I would encourage anyone who’s struggling with how to choose a future profession to read “Designing Your Life” by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. We read it in my Work Self Purpose class and it changed the way I view career planning! Here are some of the main takeaways:
Prototype a lot! Try stuff out! Designers prototype their way forward expecting that most of the designs will fail, but eventually one of them will stick, which is the same thing with life designs. It’s good to adopt an action-oriented mindset when it comes to discovering what suits you as a career. When I was trying to figure out whether I liked research or not, my initial approach left me a bit stuck because I was doing all the thinking in my head. Yes, cold emailing for a research opportunity is painful, especially when you’re not sure if you even enjoy research. But if you never do it, you’ll always be unsure—you’ll only know if it’s meant for you after you try. It’s great if you end up loving research because then you have direction for your future, and it’s also great if you realize you hate research, because now you know more about what you don’t want in your future. Have faith in the process and don’t be afraid to reach out to peers and upper years to find opportunities!
Finding your career is not about looking for a perfect final destination, but looking at a compass and knowing the directions you want to go in! To get a better sense of your own compass, try making a “Good Time Journal”. Essentially, it’s a journal where you list all of the things you did each day and rate how engaged you were in the activity, and how energized you were. An example of being engaged but not energized might be de-escalating a conflict in a customer service job—you might be good at the task and very focused during it, but you feel really drained and tired after. After trying this journal for a couple weeks, reflect on what left you the most energized and engaged. Bring more of that into your life!
Lastly, for anyone interested in healthcare, I would encourage you to explore the many different professions related to healthcare. For many people, working in healthcare often means being a physician because other professions are less publicized. Becoming a physician is an amazing role and privilege, but there are also many, many other important and interesting roles in healthcare.
There’s rehabilitation sciences (speech language pathologists, physiotherapists, occupational therapists), dieticians, nurses, nurse practitioners, physician assistants, genetic counselors, mental health counselors, social workers, clinical psychologists, spiritual care support providers, clinical research coordinators, pharmacists, health administration, dentists, dental hygienists, dental assistants, chiropractors, health policy, paramedics, exercise science professionals, imaging specialists (radiographers, sonographers), art therapists, music therapists, public health, health educators, and probably more that I can’t think of or don’t know of!
This long list might look scary, but from a life standpoint, it’s really good to consider what you value most in a career and which of these options would be a best fit. Even if you are thinking of medicine, it’s still super important to understand “why medicine” as opposed to nursing, or any of the other many professions I’ve listed. If you’re not interested in medicine, but you are interested in healthcare, hopefully this list is a good starting point to explore the possible options and levels at which someone can get involved in the field!
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Invite Health newsletters highlight students pursuing careers in healthcare, and the experiential learning opportunities they've had. Invite Health can also be the start of building a network, learning a new skill, or finding your next opportunity.
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