Episode Transcript
Interviewer: This is the Spencer Fox Eccles School of Medicine at the University of Utah booth here at AAMC in San Antonio 2025. It is the opening night reception, and we're just talking to people about what's going on. We're really lucky to have three guys here who did a panel today. Was this your only panel? Now the rest of the conference, you can have fun.
Greg Memmott, MS3: We're good.
Noah Danesh, MS3: The panel was probably the most fun part so far, though. I'll say that.
Interviewer: It's really stressful putting on a panel, right?
Nick Kieran, PGY1: Yeah, I won't say we're seasoned veterans at this point, but I think if we do this next year, it will be even better.
Interviewer: Okay. Let's get to know who's on this panel here.
Greg Memmott, MS3: I am a third-year medical student at the University of Utah, going into pediatrics.
Noah Danesh, MS3: My name's Noah Danesh. I'm a medical student at the Keck School of Medicine at USC. I'm a third year.
Nick Kieran, PGY1: And my name is Nick. I graduated from Thomas Jefferson University, which is in Philadelphia. And now I am completing my residency at CHOP, which is the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.
Interviewer: So how do you know these two?
Nick Kieran, PGY1: The story started back in 2023, when I came to this conference. I ended up meeting Tom Hurtado, one of the faculty members at Utah. He and I had an idea to start a student-based leadership curriculum session at the AAMC conference, discussing what's going well at schools and what could be improved. Last year, we hosted a panel that included these two people next to me, Greg and Noah, as well as some others. Then we created another panel for this year that has really continued to expand on what we've done in the past. It's been really great seeing it grow over time.
Interviewer: Let me get this straight. You met Tom at this conference. You had a conversation with him. You're like, "Hey, let's do a presentation at this conference." Then you found these two guys?
Nick Kieran, PGY1: Word for word. And we are working on something for next year. That's Noah's job this year is to figure out what we're discussing next year.
Noah Danesh, MS3: The panel was successful this year because it followed up on the questions we received at last year's panel.
Interviewer: I love this story. I love how this conference is connecting and causing people to talk about their ideas, and then bring their ideas to everybody else. So what was this panel about?
Noah Danesh, MS3: Our panel this year was on creating engagement in medical student leadership programs. Leadership is really a fundamental part of being a physician. We talk a lot about how a physician is a leader, not just to their own patients but to the broader community. So our panel looked at what programs can we implement in medical schools to help people develop as a leader? And what programs are successful for helping students become who they want to be?
Nick Kieran, PGY1: Since we've started doing these panels, we've discussed a lot about what leadership is.
Interviewer: What does it mean?
Nick Kieran, PGY1: I think simply, it can be perceived as whoever's leading the team, taking charge, making decisions, directing people, and being part of a team. What's unique about medicine is that leadership is really involved in every aspect of every decision that you make. Because medicine is a profession where every single function relies on so many people. There are nurses, pharmacists, technicians, the doctor, the IT specialist who helps make everything happen... So leadership skills are integral in having conversations with each of those people, and with patients, and directing conversations that may not be going well between another specialist and that patient. Leadership comes down to the coordination of care—both the minute details of making decisions, but then also the broader understanding of sometimes accepting losses when we have to, and then making the most out of the few wins that we get. Leadership is a necessary part of what we do, and we felt as though helping students learn those skills is something that we should try in advance. That's why we come here every year.
Interviewer: Greg, I want to get really specific with you on this idea of leadership. Sometimes people think leaders are those that can inspire others. Is that a component of leadership? Other people think leaders are the people who direct and tell other people what to do with this big master plan. Is that how you guys think of leadership, or do you think about it a little bit more in depth or differently?
Greg Memmott, MS3: One of my favorite takeaways builds right off of that. In a survey we did, we found that, when you're trying to teach someone leadership skills, people don't like feeling confined or put in a box, which is difficult in education. We did find that when people have mentors or people that can be a guide to them, inspiring them in a certain direction, that seemed to be what people took out of it the most.
Interviewer: Do leaders inspire?
Greg Memmott, MS3: I'd say so.
Noah Danesh, MS3: I'd love to talk about the survey he mentioned. One of the things that was really interesting about our panel this year was that it wasn't just based on our own anecdotal experiences. We pulled in the ideas of medical student leaders from throughout our different institutions and sent that survey out. We got responses about why they got involved, how they got involved and how they see themselves as meaningful leaders in their community. What made our panel really valuable was being able to share those actual perspectives about mentorship.
Nick Kieran, PGY1: What's difficult about leadership is that it is not a defined term. It's not a single skillset. It really depends on the situation. The leadership skills that one uses when they talk to a patient are maybe different than when they're directing a team, which is different than when they're leading their own project. Teaching somebody leadership skills can differ so much, and that's why it's important to have a course that is not rigid in the way that it teaches those skills. Instead, it should allow people to be flexible and teach a broad set of skills that really cover a number of different domains. That's why leadership is so hard to teach, but also why we need more leadership education in medical
Noah Danesh, MS3: I could not have said that better. Nick is really good at getting to the point of things.
Interviewer: I feel a little naive now because in my brain I'm thinking, "Of course there are so many aspects or components of being a leader." Can you give me some examples? What are these skills we're talking about?
Noah Danesh, MS3: One of the values is trust—being someone who can be trusted, someone who can be a member of a team, because a leader leads the team, but they're also still a member of it, and they still need to coordinate with others.
Nick Kieran, PGY1: A big one is being able to read the room and know when you have to be direct. And knowing when you're giving a patient a diagnosis, pausing. Or if there's a disagreement between team members, knowing when you should pick a side versus when you should just find the middle ground and make sure that people don't argue. Being cognizant of the environment is big.
Interviewer: How about you, Greg? What's a particular skill that comes to mind?
Greg Memmott, MS3: Connecting. Going back to what Nick was saying earlier, you've got a whole bunch of different personalities and different jobs. To get the outcome we want, everybody needs to work together, kind of like cogs in a machine, where if you can't figure out how to connect those people, it's going to throw everything off and make things way more difficult.
Interviewer: Nick, after your session, did you come away with a new idea or a new thought?
Nick Kieran, PGY1: There were probably 15 new ideas.
Interviewer: Were you frantically writing when you were up there?
Nick Kieran, PGY1: I did have pen and paper, and I didn't think I would use it. Then I was sitting up there, and I was writing down the ideas.
Interviewer: I want one then.
Nick Kieran, PGY1: The tougher thing is trying to be realistic. We're in positions right now where we don't make our own schedules. I'm a resident, and the two people next to me are medical students. One's about to be a resident, and what's tough in that role is that you don't get to split your own time up between pursuing your extracurricular interests and maybe decreasing time in the hospital. You're really at the mercy of the institution, which is good because that's what we have to be learning right now. But I think it can make it tough to pursue some of these projects. So we have 15 or 20 ideas about different projects we now want to pursue. But we have to discuss what's feasible—what we can actually do moving forward.
Noah Danesh, MS3: What I appreciate about panels is you start to connect the dots. Across our different institutions, we're similar in the way that we define leadership. That can help support implementing programs, but it can also make it challenging when you want to get outside of that box of what a leadership program looks like. And so at Keck, based on last year's panel, we've started a more integrated model of leadership. We have all these different programs that exist, but they're not really all put together. We're looking at ways that we can put this together so that when students start in medical school and want toget involved, there's a transparent option of how they can really develop themselves as the leaders that they want to be, following the passions that they want to follow.
Greg Memmott, MS3: One thing that stuck with me is we had a gentleman raise a question about how to help engage students who are already in school and who are overwhelmed with rotations. It's a really difficult question to answer, one that I need to think about more. It seemed like a student who overcommitted themselves—they signed up for all of these leadership-type activities that were going to teach them good things, and then they got so wound up in everything else that school had to offer that they've dropped most of those.
Nick Kieran, PGY1: One of the questions we got was about how schools can prioritize leadership curriculum for people who are so busy. It's a common problem for medical students: you get into medical school, join eight clubs and three leadership experiences and two extracurriculars, then in February when you're now studying for exams, you're unable to continue doing them all. So one of the questions that somebody came up to me afterwards and asked was, what specifically should we cut out of the curriculum to make more space for leadership? I've never made a curriculum before, but I'm supposed to meet with this person and representatives from their school to talk specifically about what to change. Everything I say will be taken with a grain of salt, because we have to learn medicine. We also have to learn leadership curricula, which I would say is an integral part of medicine for all the reasons we've discussed. But finding that balance of the actual medical training plus the leadership, which is really key to making decisions about a patient's health, is a tricky solution.
Greg Memmott, MS3: Something that stuck with me from the panel, one area that I'd like to think about more in the future, is how we can show medical students not to pick five different things and do them all at 20%, but pick one thing and do it at 100%. How much you engage in a leadership role is going to be what you get out of it versus if you take a whole bunch of roles but only on the surface level. I really don't think you're going to get too much in the long run.
Interviewer: All right. Here's the scariest question of the night. What gets cut, right now?
Greg Memmott, MS3: We could have cut out most of the kidney and I'd be about where I'm at now.
Nick Kieran, PGY1: That's pretty important. Greg,
Noah Danesh, MS3: Quite important, Greg. I wasn't going to go to an organ system. I was going to find another part of the curriculum to cut.
Greg Memmott, MS3: That's probably better. We do need the kidney.
Noah Danesh, MS3: That's the challenge. Instead of cutting, I think it might be reformatting how we learn certain things. We have a lot of conversations every year about how lectures are delivered, how we learn certain topics, and how we can potentially make them more efficient if we need to expand them. So instead of cutting, it's more where can we squeeze and expand in a way that we can fit the space we need for leadership.
Nick Kieran, PGY1: I'll choose the annoying middle ground of, we can cut and we can adapt. I think we can actually make progress in the first two years of medical school. At my medical school, which had a fantastic curriculum, we learned what was needed for the STEP exam. But then we also went beyond that and learned additional anatomy. We learned some additional diagnoses that, while helpful for clinical knowledge in the future, seemed to be a bit superfluous at the time. That time could have been spent learning leadership training. Now, to Noah's point, we're in a time of AI increasing the efficiency of everybody learning. VR can assist for learning anatomy. What used to take students 20-30 hours to actually do a dissection and identify that nerve and then clear out all of the subcutaneous tissue, now somebody can do that in VR and find it in 10 minutes. If we're able to do that and really cut out a lot of the busy work that people used to have to do, then we can add in things like leadership. I really hope that medical schools focus on the addition of leadership curricula rather than just adding more medical knowledge.
Interviewer: Is there anything else we need to cover before we get going?
Noah Danesh, MS3: I'm very lucky that I was on the panel with these two really great guys, and I learned a lot from them in the process of developing this panel. I'm excited to see what we keep learning from this.