C
lass of 2020 alumna Chia Shu-En Stephanie is one of 168 freshmen at the Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine (LKCSM) this year. Reflecting on her time at SOTA, Stephanie chats with us about how her Visual Arts training has helped her strive to understand human emotion and connections while also providing useful analytical skills. Read on to find out more!
"Hi Stephanie! What inspired you to pursue medicine, and/or apply to LKCSM?"
STEPHANIE: Hello! My interest in medicine, in general, stemmed naturally from a love of biology I developed going through the IB Syllabus while at SOTA. I became fascinated by the human body and felt that pursuing medicine was the only way I could be fully immersed in the inner workings of the human body, how systems function and fail, and how to address those failures. It was also through service learning opportunities in SOTA that I developed a passion for service to others.
I strongly believe that health is the most important asset in life. Having shadowed in clinical settings, volunteered with the ill, and experienced my own family member's hospitalisations, I see the value of medicine as unquestionable. I chose medicine because I wanted to live without questioning, for any minute of any day, why I do what I do.
I was attracted by the LKCSM's innovative pedagogy, eagerness to improve itself and make its mark as a young medical school. I really appreciate the emphasis on student experience and feedback.
"How do you think your arts education will impact you while you are pursuing medicine?"
* The Feldman system of criticism is a four-stage model for making statements about a work of art - description, analysis, interpretation, and evaluation.
STEPHANIE: An arts education is an excellent foundation for medicine. An arts training provided me specific transferable skills, such as analytical skills in dissecting a problem or case presentation. For example, the Feldman's Approach*, which is something we learnt from Visual Arts, is very similar to how you would analyse a patient's presentation to form a diagnosis of a patient.
Being immersed in the arts in general put me in an environment where there was an
ever-present strive to understand human emotion and connections. This strive is also at the heart of medicine, which aims ultimately to make improvements in physiological well-being as a means to serve people according to their and their family's emotional needs.
Finally, having a foundation in the arts gives me a different perspective from some of my peers in medicine, most of whom came from purely science backgrounds. For example I find that, with an arts background, approaches to problem-solving differ. As a result, collaboration is more enriching. In dealing with patients, I also find that my background in art and current pursuit of medicine has broadened my mind in that by having
foundations across a wide range of disciplines, I am better able to understand different patient perspectives and expectations.
"Any thoughts about your time at SOTA?"
STEPHANIE: When I entered SOTA, I never expected that I would pursue medicine following graduation; I always thought I would work in the arts. However, being in SOTA has taught me that the arts is powerful precisely because it is not just an isolated field, and instead in every part of life. It is our job as SOTA graduates to bring the arts into what we do, which is what I strive to live up to. There are people surprised that an 'arts' student is doing a 'science' course, but having done just that, I can tell you that the arts and medicine are truly not mutually exclusive, binary categories, but for the labels we give them.