I would like to share with you the email that made me believe that today’s guest, Dr. Amy Faith Ho, a third year ER resident, will be simply outstanding:

I love the mission of your site, and the Match was something that endlessly agonized me (see my article in Forbes). It is a great passion of mine to mentor junior residents, med students and premeds and I've also done a TEDx Talk on the topic for college students, but would love to talk about how I came into medicine (and how for me, scores weren't the end-all-be-all).

I was a policy hack who wanted to save the world and went to med school as a reconnaissance mission to understand healthcare as an industry better. I surprisingly ended up falling in love with the clinical practice of emergency medicine, so I did residency, but stayed highly involved in healthcare policy. I've now worked on US Congress as a healthcare fellow, been a leader in multiple national organizations and been a nationally featured writer and speaker (see examples at amyfaithho.com).

I wish someone when I was in college would've told me that 0.1 point difference on your GPA wasn't the end of the world (because at the time, it sure felt like it)! Would really love to share the message with your readers.

Welcome, Amy!

Can you tell us your backstory – how did you decide to go to into medicine? [2:14]

I’m from suburban Texas – I was a high school debater and loved everything about policy. I got interested in health policy and the healthcare industry – I thought the whole system was insanity, and I wanted to fix it. I looked at law, policy, public administration – and I concluded that if you want to change health policy, you need to understand health care, so I went to medical school. And then I fell in love with clinical medicine and realized I can’t imagine not incorporating patient care into my career.

Was there a specific moment when you realized you wanted to be a doctor? [5:15]

It’s hard to have that moment until you actually work with patients during the clinical years of med school. The patients I remember are all ones that had non-medical things that connected me – I remember a patient who kept asking to speak to her son, and I looked him up to let him know his mother was in the hospital. I don’t remember a more grateful patient.

Were you still planning the policy route? [8:08]

Yes, until very late in med school.

I decided on emergency med after shadowing in the ER late in med school and doing that rotation in fourth year – then I declared for emergency.

I like the diagnostic challenge: making big decisions with little information in a small amount of time.

For me as a health policy wonk, it’s also great and interesting to see care at this level: we see everyone.

Looking back, what was the most challenging part of the med school application process for you? [11:02]

The personal statement, no doubt!

Most of the other parts of the application process are more objective: you have a sense of what scores you need, etc.