Treehouse’s Where Do Our Graduates Go is a series that features our former students in the Vaske Lab!
This week, we talked to Sneha Jariwala. Sneha is a first-year medical student at California Health Sciences University (Photo of Sneha Jariwala).
Where they are now:
I am a first-year medical student at California Health Sciences University.
What is one thing you learned as an undergrad in the Vaske Lab?
I was an undergraduate researcher in Treehouse during my first and second years. In my third year, I received a grant from Alex’s Lemonade Stand Foundation with Dr. Vaske to study RNA-seq data in acute lymphoblastic leukemia tumor samples. I worked on this project during the summer and published this research as an abstract and poster in the American Association for Cancer Research.
I graduated from UCSC in March of 2021 and then worked at Stanford University as a Clinical Research Coordinator in the Pediatric Cancer Cell Therapy program. I managed and coordinated phase 1 CAR-T cell therapy trials. My job included coordinating with other research institutions, communicating with physicians and other clinical staff about trial protocols, and conducting neurological assessments on children with Diffuse Intrinsic Pontine Glioma (DIPG). I worked here for 3 years and really appreciated this opportunity to learn more about what cancer care actually looks like, especially after spending time doing research on pediatric cancer at Treehouse.
In my first two years of medical school, I’ll learn about different body systems, diseases and conditions, and various clinical skills needed to assess patients. During my third and fourth years, I will be doing rotations in various specialties. I am interested in pediatrics, specifically pediatric oncology.
What is one thing you learned as an undergraduate student?
I learned that there is a tremendous amount to learn for the career that I am pursuing! A lot of people say that the first few months of medical school are like “drinking water out of a fire hydrant,” and I definitely understand this now. There’s so much information out there, and though it is daunting, it made me appreciate how lucky I am to be given this opportunity to learn so much. I’m sure those in other graduate programs can agree that it is scary to start a new educational program because it seems so difficult to learn so much in such a short period of time. The one piece of advice that I can give to undergraduate students is to be confident and have perseverance.
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