From military medics to physicians

Among Minnesota’s many military veterans are a number of highly skilled and experienced combat medics who are completing their military service and thinking about a future as physicians. 

Their experiences are rich and profound, often occurring in extremely stressful environments and with limited medical equipment. However, medical school admissions committees have historically struggled to translate a medic’s field experience into meaningful academic criteria, creating a challenging barrier for medic applicants. 

To address this issue, the University of Minnesota Medical School created the Military Medic to Medical School (MM2MS) program to encourage and support these unique—and uniquely qualified—future med students. 

A tailored transition recognizing unique experiences 

Announced on Veterans Day 2023, this first-of-its-kind program provides a tailored path to medical school for former military medics in cohorts of two to five. Sarah Loudon, Isaac Schneider, and Taylor Ritchot comprise the inaugural MM2MS class, which began last fall. 

MM2MS funds the veterans’ preparation for the MCAT (Medical College Admission Test). It also offers personal advising specific to each veteran, like what courses they still need and what topic they might need to brush up on. There’s also a seminar course over two semesters, with a research project that the cohort completes together in the second semester. 

The program actually benefits three different populations, according to Dr. Jill Foster, assistant dean for Pipelines and Pathways Programs with the Medical School Education Administration Office.

First, it honors the returning medics and the work that they have done, and allows the University of Minnesota a chance to find future physicians that otherwise might have been missed. It also benefits the medical school class they’ll join, given their unique and diverse experiences. “A lot of med school teaching is experiential—in small groups, in conferences,” says Foster. “It’s the perfect place to have this mixture of folks learning from each other.”

Lastly, it benefits veterans in general, estimated to be about 6 percent of Minnesota’s population. Foster’s brother is a veteran who receives his medical care at a VA hospital, and in all of his visits he’s never received care from a fellow veteran. “It can only help veterans to have somebody who shares that experience,” says Foster.

Preparing for what lies ahead with their next cohort

Master Sergeant Sarah Loudon was inspired by Doctors Without Borders to pursue a career in medicine, with an eye toward serving remote and underserved populations. She enlisted in the U.S. Air Force Reserves in 2013 and became a flight medic for aeromedical missions, providing care for ill and injured service members being transported from global deployments. 

Loudon views her time as an Air Force medic as an opportunity to prove to herself (and to those making the admissions decisions) that she was worthy of medical school—that she “had that capacity to be calm and collected and useful in that hands-on patient care setting and in a potentially chaotic environment where there’s a lot of unpredictable factors.” 

There have been a lot of starts and stops in her educational journey, given the military interruptions, and the MM2MS program has acted as “a third party that both reassures us and encourages us to use that [medic] experience,” she says. It also “helps with that leveraging piece—helps us repackage it and translate some of those terms to the admissions committee to allow for them to see the value of it in a more civilian-friendly context, and see how that experience would translate very well.” 

Sgt. First Class Issac Schneider enlisted in the Montana National Guard back in 2006 and served in Iraq in 2010-11. He became a Green Beret in 2016 and was a Special Forces Medic from 2016-22, including two combat deployments and three training missions. 

One of his highlights from the MM2MS program has been the seminar series that includes topics of discussion and various guest speakers.

“Some of the guest speakers have kind of peeled back the curtain a little bit, to be, like ‘This is what you guys are getting yourselves into. This is the future that you all have,’” he says. In non-military terms, it’s the general-level intelligence: “what’s going to come up, what should I expect coming into this… and what medical school and my future career might look like, depending on the specialty I go into.”  

Both Loudon and Schneider—who will be a part of the white coat ceremony for incoming medical school students this fall—have a tangible pride in what they’ve accomplished, and it seems clear that they have bright futures ahead helping countless people in the civilian ranks. 

“We don’t want people to look at this as we were given these slots [in the medical school class],” adds Schneider. “It’s still earned; we still have to compete. We’re there to provide perspective, and to improve the cohort that we’re going to be a part of.” 
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The MM2MS program's funding has a direct military connection. It came from the family of William Lewis Anderson, a World War II veteran killed in action who wanted to go to medical school. His younger brother, a 1952 U of M Medical School graduate, wanted to support future educational opportunities for veteran medics. To support the program, you can make a donation to the Military Medic to Medical School Program Fund.