Inside HOKIE SPORTS | Vol. 13 No. 1 | August 2020

inside.hokiesports.com 37 instruction, but the third and fourth years involve clinical rotations at any number of hospitals around the country. In mid-March, Johnston, who wants to pursue family medicine, and Feehan, who wants to become an OB-GYN, were pulled from their rotations, in Newport News, Virginia and Danville, Virginia, respectively. They thus missed time applying the practical knowledge and skills that they had been learning. Most hospitals wanted to preserve PPE and to free attending physicians to deal with other COVID- related situations. “It was tough because all you want to do is help,” Feehan said. “You’re helping people all year, and they tell you for the first time in your career, ‘No, you can’t help anyone. Don’t go in. Study for your boards.’ In a good way, it gave me time to study for the board exam I took, but I was very upset that I wasn’t able to be on the front lines and doing what I had been doing all year. Luckily, they let us come back, so I’m back in Danville doing my primary care/ family physician clinical. I’m on the front lines again, finally.” Johnston and Feehan also ran into conflicts while trying to schedule the second phase of their Comprehensive Osteopathic Medical Licensing Examination (COMLEX), which students usually take at some point between January and June of their third year. “I think my boards were canceled 10 times,” said Johnston, who managed to take her exam before the July 4 holiday. “The boards are a nine-hour test of intense questions with barely any breaks, and you train for that. It’s almost like a marathon where you want to peak at the right time and taper and all of that, and we’ve had students that have showed up the day of the test, and it got canceled and moved a lot of times. So there were a lot of unknowns with that.” Their more pressing concern, though, centers on the future location of their residencies. Once students graduate from medical school, they work anywhere from two to five years as residents, practicing medicine under the supervision of a senior medical doctor in that specialty. In the final year of medical school, students apply for residencies usually in September and then interview with medical schools later in the fall or early in the winter. In March, at a “Matching Day” ceremony, they get matched with a residency based on an algorithm that literally matches the highest ranked program by the student with a program that ranks that student the highest. Usually, the interview process takes place on the hospital’s campus, allowing the candidate to get a feel for the program, the staff, and the city/town. Now, because of the pandemic, those interviews are taking place online. “I think about Virginia Tech,” Johnston said. “You can look at pictures of Virginia Tech, but the look and feel you get from being there, you can’t put that on paper. “To me, that’s another setback [because of the pandemic], just not being able to see the program and get a feel for it. Normally, you travel to the interview site and get to see the program and meet all the residents and get a feel for the program. Now they’re doing interviews online, so it should be interesting to see how that plays out.” Feehan agreed. “They say they’re going to work on giving us virtual tours and meeting the residents virtually, but yeah, I definitely think it’s a disadvantage because no one is going to show the bad parts of their program,” she said. “They’re only going to show the good parts of their program. So it’s a big change. It’s going to seem like we’re going to trust programs from just looking at them online. We’ll see.” A lot rides on every decision for medical school students. They invest four years of their lives studying to become doctors and not to mention the hundreds of thousands of dollars that they pay in tuition. As most know, medical school isn’t cheap. But for Johnston, Feehan and many others currently in pursuit of their dreams, the price, work and sacrifice are totally worth it—no matter the risk. For them, the risk never outweighs the rewards. “What has been hard is that I’ve wanted to be out there helping, and I think a lot of my classmates feel the same way,” Johnston said. “We want to be in the field helping, and we realize right now or when it first started, that the personal protective equipment was limited and we were non-essential personnel, so it made sense to pull us from clinical rotations. But the whole pandemic, it’s made me realize, ‘Man, I just want to get back out there and do what I can to help people and be a peace in the chaos.’” READY FOR WHATEVER THE FUTURE HOLDS COVID-19 has affected everyone worldwide in some way, but for Feehan, the disease hits a little harder than for most people. She comes Continued on page 38 Former Tech women’s soccer player Marie Johnston is in her final year at VCOM and wants to specialize in family medicine after graduating. (Note: photo was taken before the start of the pandemic.)