CoM was a homecoming for these UGME students

In our last article about a trio of the newest MD class at the College, I mentioned that the students I had spoken to had provided an interesting cross-section of the varied paths taken to our doors. And this pair of new students are no different.

Jessica Littmann
Littmann took a year off school following high school to work as a health care aide, which prompted the revelation that healthcare was definitely the career she wanted to get into.

“I did a degree in nursing and still loved healthcare, but wasn’t sure I’d found my niche,” she explained. “I had shadowed a few doctors through clinical placements in nursing, and really liked the scope of practice. In nursing you can do so many things, but I felt like it’s hard to really specialize and get the specialty training, so this seemed like the next step - and a really good fit.”

The Lumsden native, who had studied nursing at Lakehead University, went back to school in 2014 to take some pre-med courses to help improve her MCAT scores. But she already knew that if she was going to do medical school, she wanted to do it back home in Saskatchewan.

“I had always said ‘I’m not going to stay here in Saskatchewan, I want to get away,’” Littmann continued. “But then I really missed home, and one day I was in a stats class and something on Med Schools in Canada popped up, and I got really excited because there was one in Saskatchewan. I thought if I could get into that one, it’d be my top choice.”

Littmann’s background in nursing gives her a little bit of a leg-up on some of her classmates in the sense that she has already experienced some of the medical fields first hand. But that doesn’t make it any easier for her to predict what she’d like to specialize in.

“I had so many placements in nursing that I wasn’t excited for and they turned out to be my favourites,” she said. “So from that I just remind myself to keep my options open to what’s out there - there are so many areas I want to see and shadow.

“Though I’d like to do something that has a little bit of variety in it so that I can keep learning and challenging myself.”

Anton Moshynskyy
A local Saskatoonian, Moshynskyy did his undergrad in Kinesiology at the University of British Columbia before returning home to do the MD/MBA program that the CoM runs in partnership with the Edwards School of Business.

For Moshynskyy, one of the driving forces in his decision to enter medical school was an interest in providing a positive impact on patient care.

“I have seen good medicine and bad medicine,” he said. “I think I can make a contribution interacting with patients. You can do it well and you can do it poorly - that makes-or-breaks the entire experience, and I think it has a huge impact on the outcome as well.”

That focus on patients is part of the reason that when it came time to choose a medical school Moshynskyy came home.

“Don’t get me wrong I liked Vancouver, but it was quite large and I just wanted to come back - here’s home,” Moshynskyy explained. “And Saskatchewan seems to be quite keen on rural medicine, which is an important aspect of overall healthcare.

“What I’m trying to do is experience a little bit of everything and go into it with no biases and no preconceived notions, and make my decision as I go along,” he continued when asked if he had an idea of what kind of medicine he’d like to practice. “I won’t rule anything out that way.”

Outside of the classroom, Moshynskyy is hoping to participate in the upcoming MedGames in Sherbrooke, QC in swimming – a sport he also coaches several day a week on campus.