UW med students link to hospitals around nation

The University of Washington Medical Center lobby was full with about 150 medical students for Match Day, an event in which senior med students find out where they will spend their residencies for the next four to five years.

Residency is a post-graduate process during which recently graduated medical students work in a specialized medical field under the supervision of a senior doctor who acts as a mentor for the graduate.

“It’s exciting because you don’t really know where you will be placed,” senior Miriam Castro said.

Her top three picks were at regional hospitals: University of Washington and Virginia Mason in Seattle and Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, Ore.

“I want to do something in anesthesia,” Castro said, adding that she is interested in the neurology and obstetrics specializations.

Medical student Greg Lipski was anxious about his assignment. He hoped he didn’t have to move too far away from his family.

Lipski graduated from the University of Washington in electrical engineering when he was 22. As a Navy ROTC student, he spent five years of post-collegiate work on nuclear submarines. He received his master’s degree in electrical engineering from the UW while working and researching in the aeronautics department for seven years in wind tunnel testing.

“I also worked as a medical electrical technician in hospitals,” Lipski said, “I think that’s when I had a sort of mid-life crisis.”

At 33, Lipski decided that he wanted to become a doctor and started taking premed classes at the UW, while also doing research.

“I wanted to do something that more directly affected people’s lives,” Lipski said.

He was accepted into the UW Med School at 35 and at the end of the winter quarter of his second year, he was diagnosed with leukemia.

“It was right around spring break of that year,” Lipski said. “I finished my spring quarter, but it wasn’t [until] after I got my bone marrow transplant in August from my sister that I had to take a break from med school.”

A bone morrow transplant devastates a patient’s entire immune system and is intended to give the patient a new immune system. The process left his body very weak and extremely vulnerable to disease; Lipski was ill for more than six months.

“I didn’t start up again until the spring of the following year,” Lipski said. “During that time, everyone was very supportive. All my classmates pitched in to cook me dinners, give me notes from class, and some also videotaped some lectures.”

Now at the end of his fifth year, Lipski got his second choice: anesthesiology at the University of Washington Medical Center.

“This was my gut feeling,” Lipski said.

However, some, like Miriam Castro, didn’t receive the hospital assignment they were hoping for.

“Apparently I’m going to L.A.,” she said. “That was like my fifth of sixth choice.”

[Reach reporter Ben Schock at news@thedaily.washington.edu.]