As a rising fourth-year medical student at The Johns Hopkins University, Mya Abousy would soon be applying to residency programs. She was planning to pursue a career in plastic surgery, but after reflecting on the reasons for her choice, she began to wonder if it was the best path for her. “I realized that I’d had tunnel vision, and I never gave anything else a chance,” says Abousy.
She began talking to some of her peers about their choices. Through a friend, she learned that someone in the class above her had just matched into ophthalmology. The student was so happy! Her curiosity piqued, Abousy reached out to some students who matched into ophthalmology and asked them what interested them about the field. “They talked about how it was a surgery-heavy field if you wanted it to be, but it could also be nonsurgical at times, and you could really focus on the medicine, the differentials and the imaging. That sparked my interest, because I definitely wanted to do something surgical, but I also wanted to have patient contact and build patient relationships, and I felt like I wouldn’t have as much of that with plastics,” she says.
To learn more, Abousy reached out to several ophthalmologists at Wilmer Eye Institute, Johns Hopkins Medicine, including Fasika Woreta, the Eugene de Juan, M.D., Professor of Ophthalmic Education and the residency program director; James Handa, chief of the retina division and the Robert Bond Welch, M.D., Professor of Ophthalmology; Henry Jampel, the Independent Order of Odd Fellows Professor of Ophthalmology and Medical Student Educator at Wilmer; and retina specialist Mandeep Singh. She was struck by how happy they seemed in their work and how enthusiastic they were about the field. “They were thrilled at the prospect of another student joining them, and they wanted to share everything about their field with me,” Abousy recalls. “Their enthusiasm really started drawing me in.”
Singh shared his own journey to ophthalmology, one that resonated with Abousy. “He was originally interested in plastics at one point, and like me, loved working with his hands. Then he found the field of ophthalmology, and really gravitated toward it. I saw a lot of similarities with my story, and that inspired me to continue digging, to make sure this wasn’t a field I was overlooking.” She decided to take a research year to work with Singh, an experience that culminated in her decision to pursue ophthalmology.
An Idea Takes Root
Having made her decision, Abousy found herself reflecting on how much more prepared she might have been had she learned more about ophthalmology earlier. As a medical student, she received only three to four days of ophthalmology lectures as part of the preclinical curriculum, as compared with one or two months in most other specialty areas. Speaking to her peers, she learned that many of those who decided to pursue ophthalmology had been exposed to the field early on. For example, one student’s mother was an ophthalmologist. “She was familiar with the field and knew that it was interesting to her,” Abousy says. “I think oftentimes that happens with ophthalmology, that if you don’t have a friend or a parent or someone to guide you toward the field and expose you to it, you don’t really know what it’s about and you don’t realize how incredible it is.”
What if, she wondered, there was a resource where younger students could learn what a day in the life of an ophthalmologist was like, the kinds of subspecialties that exist and about research in the field? Last summer, Abousy put her thoughts to paper, sketching out her idea for a curriculum that would better inform medical students about careers in ophthalmology. She presented it to Jampel, who embraced the idea.
Woreta connected Abousy to second-year medical student Nathan Pan-Doh, one of the student leaders of the Ophthalmology Interest Group, and they were soon joined by Christina Ambrosino, another second-year medical student who volunteered with the Vision Screening in Our Neighborhood (ViSION) program. The three students worked to secure speakers for monthly sessions. In October, Jampel became the first speaker in the Ophthalmology Virtual Curriculum, presenting to Johns Hopkins medical students about the field, what a residency path would look like and options for subspecialization.
In the ensuing months, Singh and Mona Kaleem, a glaucoma specialist at Wilmer, presented. In January, the group took the meetings national, with Woreta presenting to a group of about 180 medical students from across the country. (Woreta has since begun offering office hours to allow students from different institutions to ask questions related to ophthalmology or the application process.) In February, Handa presented on why he chose ophthalmology and specifically retina, and shared the story of his path to ophthalmology, his experience with mentors and his retina research. Upcoming speakers include National Eye Institute director and Wilmer alum Michael Chiang.
Abousy says establishing the National Ophthalmology Virtual Curriculum has been a massive team effort. “Dr. Jampel, Nathan, and Christina have been truly instrumental in making this idea come to fruition. Nathan has been crucial in the organizational process — he found nearly all the contacts for numerous medical schools across the country, and reached out to programs and ophthalmology interest group leaders to involve them in the lecture series. Christina has taken charge of creating surveys to assess the efficacy of the program, which will be essential as we move forward and try to improve on the curriculum. I am so grateful that they believed in this idea and have helped make it a reality,” she says.