Betsy Szeto Finds a Framework for Compassionate Care

Over the next two weeks leading up to Commencement, the Mailman School website is featuring first-person accounts from nine members of the graduating class as they reflect on their singular paths into public health, some of the surprising lessons they took away from their experience at the Mailman School, and their aspirations for the years ahead.

Among others, you’ll meet a former high school teacher who excelled in the lab while working to overcome the “imposter syndrome”; a Texas native intent on improving the odds for young women’s access to reproductive health in her home state; an executive who teamed up with “Jeopardy”-beating technology to improve cancer outcomes; and a scholarship-winning MHA grad set on making his mark at the Mayo Clinic.

Today, you hear from Betsy Szeto, an aspiring physician who has hit on the winning formula for compassionate care. Growing up in a Chinese immigrant home in Toronto, Szeto was called on to translate for family members visiting the doctor. The experience sparked an interest in medicine while highlighting the importance of cultural competency. Before she goes on to medical school, Szeto shares some of the most valuable experiences from her MPH in Epidemiology, including her role as a teaching assistant and working effectively with a multidisciplinary research team studying inmate health on Rikers Island.

I came to Mailman with two goals: to gain the public health framework for my medical training and to obtain a toolbox of epidemiologic skills. It was working on a project on social inequalities as an undergraduate at McGill University that stimulated my desire to study epidemiology and a volunteering experience that opened my mind to public health. Through home visits, I came to know a 10-year-old girl who was non-verbal, afflicted with an intellectual disability, and had epilepsy. I visited her every week to engage her in activities aimed at stimulating intellectual development and to provide her mother with time for herself. The more time I spent with the young girl, the more I recognized that her disability was situated in circumstances of an immigrant family with low socioeconomic status and poor social supports. Within this broader societal context, I came to understand that to be a compassionate physician and provide the best care, I needed to understand the multifactorial issues that patients face.

It was my parents’ example of endurance as immigrants—they worked physically demanding jobs and lived frugally to invest in my education—that inspired my belief in social justice and my desire to be a lifelong scholar. Being bilingual, I translated at doctor visits from a young age. The experiences of communicating to health professionals my family’s health complaints, translating doctors’ diagnoses and medical advice, and eventually working part-time at a walk-in clinic gave me insight into the importance of cultural competency in care and served as an early motivation for my interest in medicine.

Mailman and the CUMC community have been extremely conducive to my professional development and personal growth. I thoroughly enjoyed serving as a teaching assistant for the Quantitative Foundations module of the Core. Of all the responsibilities, I was most excited about leading the weekly session for a group of 22 students. I was blessed with a diverse section of excellent, enthusiastic students, who all had a strong desire to understand epidemiologic and biostatistics methods. Through our time together, I was able to improve my own understanding of the material and discovered that I loved teaching. I hope to have opportunities in my medical career to continue serving as a mentor to students.

Working with Dr. Tawandra Rowell-Cunsolo at the School of Nursing, I put my epidemiologic skills to use to assist with studies on sexual behavior and drug use among incarcerated populations and an HIV risk reduction intervention for previously incarcerated individuals. A turning point in my education was the knowledge I gained from working in a large multidisciplinary team with clinicians and epidemiologists for my thesis on skin and soft tissue infections that affected inmates at Rikers Correctional Facility. Not only did I learn so much about concise scientific writing from my advisor, Dr. Elaine Larson, but through this collaboration I gained the leadership and managerial experience needed to work effectively in any interdisciplinary healthcare team.