Episode 77: Transferable Skills That Matter: Insights from SOF to SOM Leaders

From Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Cleveland, Ohio, this is the All Access Med School Admissions Podcast. Hello again, everybody. I'm your host, Christian Essman, and I'm the senior director of admissions and financial aid here at the medical school. It's great to be with you again. And, boy, that's some dramatic intro music. Hey, today we have a really fascinating conversation lined up

for you. I'm joined by two current medical students named Brentyn Jones and Ricky Ditzel, who are also former Special Forces operators and and now serve as leaders in the nonprofit organization called softasam, that also stands for Special Operations Forces to School of Medicine. Their mission is to support transitioning Special Operations forces veterans as they pursue careers in medicine. But our conversation goes far beyond that. Now, you might be thinking, I'm not a veteran. So

is this episode really. For me, the answer is absolutely. Don't leave. One of the key themes we explore in this episode is the idea of transferable skills and how experiences from one part of your life, whether it's leadership, problem solving, teamwork, or staying calm under pressure, can translate into success in medical school and beyond. So no matter what your background is, I think there's something in here for

you. I think you'll also find some inspiration from these two remarkable individuals as they discuss topics like resilience, confidence, and the mindset that has helped them navigate both elite military service and medical school. Plus, these guys share some candid insights into their own journeys through medical school, offering some valuable advice for anyone considering this path. So stick around. You won't want to miss this. And I'm also thrilled to share some exciting

news. Our medical school has officially become a partner with the SoftASAM organization, so we're joining their mission to support veterans on their path to medical education. And we're really proud to be a part of this meaningful initiative. If you're inspired by their mission and you want to learn more, get involved or even support their work, you can visit their

website, which is www.softtusamits. so you'll find a link to that their organization in the show description, and there you'll find detailed info about their programs, resources, and all the things they do, how you connect with them. So, hey, with that, let's jump right into it with Brentyn and Ricky. Enjoy. All right. Hey, guys, Welcome. I have Ricky Ditzel and Brentyn Jones with me, and it's great to have you guys here.

Really interesting conversation. One that's a little bit different than what we normally do on this show. So I'M really grateful for you guys to be here. We're going to talk about the organization you guys are both a part of and help build and then we're going to talk a little bit about some of the transferable skills that I think you guys are going to have some great insight in both med students right now. So I want to start off with Breton. Tell us a little bit about yourself, man.

Yeah, thanks for having me on, Christian. So my name is Brentyn Jones. I'm a first year medical student at West Virginia University School of Medicine. So I am a non traditional student. I joined a little bit later into the medical school pipeline. I spent the last nine years in the Navy as a Navy SEAL and a special operations combat medicine and I pretty much joined

that straight out of high school. So left high school, joined the Navy, knocked out my undergrad while I was in, and then applied to medical school on the back end and started this last fall. Wow. So your background with the seals, how did you decide to be a combat medic? That's an interesting story. I guess I'd always been kind of interested in medicine, but I think that it was appealing because. Because the scope of work that we were able to do

seemed to be a little bit better if you were a medic. And I like the idea of being able to help my teammates and so it kind of put my toe in to go to the school. Our class basically votes when you graduate, who goes. I got voted to go over there and I ended up falling in love with medicine while I was doing it and kind of decided to pursue it on the outside of the civilian. Wow. So the team votes who

to send to combat medic school. The way that we had done it, like when you graduate from what we call SEAL qualification training, there's a couple of billets basically to go to medic school. We get augmented with the army for about a year and go through like the Green Berets training pipeline for medics called Sockham. But we generally you have a lot more people that want to go than you have billets for. So kind of make your case and then your classmates get to decide who ends up going and

who doesn't. Oh, it's interesting. Ricky Ditzel.

So like Bren, I was a. I'm a non traditional student as well. I'm a second year medical student at Rush Medical College in Chicago. I also joined the Army. Well, I joined the army, not the Navy, 30 days after graduating from high school, so graduated and went

right off to the military. Initially served as an infantry medic and a brigade support battalion medic at Fort Liberty, which used to be known as Fort Bragg, before assessing and selecting to become a Special Operations flight paramedic with the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, which is the premier aviation unit within the military to support the United States Special Operations Command. I also did my undergraduate degree while on active duty. I graduated from the George Washington

University with a disaster management degree. And when I got out of the military in order to go to medical school, I completed a post baccalaureate pre medical certification at Columbia University in New York. Wow. Talk a little bit about how does the, the aviation battalion that you mentioned? Like how does. Is that support all branches or is it just army? Oh, so yeah, that's probably my favorite part is that we support anybody under the Special Operations

Command umbrella. So that could be guys like Breton with seals, it could be folks like Reed Berets, it could be Special Mission Unit guys. It can be a whole bunch of different organizations. So that was one of my favorite parts of that job, was I needed to understand the protocols medically and tactically for all different units so that we could work cohesively. How many years were you in? I did eight years active duty. Okay,

deployments. Where were you guys? Where'd you guys find yourself? Around the world? Yeah, I deployed once to Europe and then once to Africa. And then after my last deployment, they did what they call a shore command. But you get generally put in like a training type situation where you're non deployable, you're kind of giving back to the force before you deploy again. And while I was there, I stood up a tactical medical training command for all

the SEAL medics on the East Coast. That means you were training other SEALs and in medic work? Yeah. So basically we set up a bunch of courses for them that was kind of the one side of it. We were able to partner with some civilian institutions and get them rotations up in New York. And then you're training. Like we kind of give back a little bit at the give and take relationship. But yeah, we train all the SEAL and like Special Boat Team medics.

And then we'd also have like FBI medics, SWAT medics. We take local buyer paramedics, come in and put them through our course. Wow. I'm trying to. You guys have a different language and so I find myself trying to translate a little bit when. When some of the phrases you guys use. Ricky, where were you finding yourself deployed? Deployed. Iraq and Afghanistan. Yeah. Wow. So you guys come back and you guys start

to get into medicine. And then the next thing you know, there's this Special Operations Forces to School of Medicine organization. That's why we're here, part of the conversation today. So hear a little bit about that, talk about the origins of that and kind of, what. What does it do? What's the mission? Sure. So Special Operations

Forces School of Medicine, or softasam for short, and how we can refer to it. The rest of this talk probably is a 501C3 that's out of North Carolina that helps the current and former special operator on their journey becoming a physician. So that means the premedical phase, the medical phase, and then the residency and beyond phase. So we want to take care of you through all three phases. The origin story is quite interesting. So I was at

Columbia. Like I said, I had academic advisors who were helping me out with deadlines, personal statements. What is the working activities? Having all these great seminars about applying to medical school. So I was in this pipeline program, for lack of better terms. And then one of my best friends who had been accepted medical school in the past but had deferred to go to another military unit, was going back through the

medical pipeline. And so him and I were talking every day about, like, what. What we were putting our applications, what does it look like, et cetera. And he said, hey, I got this other guy from my organization who is a little bit older, and he's trying to go to medical school, but, you know, he's working in a specific job and he doesn't really know what to do, so we should, like, get in a group chat together. So we got in this group chat and we were all studying for

the MCAT to save time. And he's like, hey, do you remember Jesse Malaski? And I was like, oh, I know Jesse. We did X, Y, and Z together. He's like, hey, we're gonna add him to the group chat. He's studying for the mcat, too. He's trying to go to Mayo Clinic. And so that was. That's where it started. It was like five, six of us in this group chat. We're talking every day about MCAT studying. What resources are you using? You know, what are you writing

your personal statement? How much military are you putting in your personal statement? How much military are you not putting in your personal statement? You know, what are you afraid of talking about? What are you not afraid? What are you comfortable talking about? And we just kept growing this little group chat. It was like, oh, hey, I remember Brentyn Jones. He's trying to Go to medical school. We should add him in the

group chat. And the list goes on. Well, as we're in this thing, this group chat, we started doing these like, zoom sessions of talking to each other about, you know, your application, your military career and what you're going to put on your application. And we had one folk, one person in particular who's now our CEO, and I remember meeting with him on Zoom and he was going to apply to medical school and he had hit me up and he was like, hey, I'm.

My personal statement's done. I got like eight working activities. Here's my MCAT score. I'm going to apply to med school. And I found this to be a really big red flag, the eight working activities, specifically because I did a study with West Virginia University School of Medicine, wvsam, looking at all their allopathic applicants medical school. And we found that it was statistically significant acceptance if you had 12 or more work

and activity sections filled out. So if you looked at all, all variables across the board, mcat, gpa, whatever, those were the obvious, like higher mcat, higher gpa. But the work activities thing hasn't really been talked about. So I was like, hey, you can't apply to med school. You won't get in. Statistically proven. So we got in the zoom chat and it was initially, it's going to be about, how can I. How can we add to his

working activity section? So three hours later, we had a 15 section, working activities filled out, and we had a therapy session. And I think that the most important part of that zoom call was this deeper connection with someone who had really robust experiences, unlike many people in the military have ever had, let alone people on this planet. And he didn't want to talk about it.

He felt like he was selling out his teammates. He felt like he was selling out the personnel he treated that didn't make it home, both us and non US personnel. He felt like nobody would care about what he was going to talk about. He felt that his story wasn't believable and he had not talked about any of that and had repressed it for so many years due to things like

moral injury and just overall coping mechanism. When you're in the military, you know, sometimes we cope by just not talking about it, whether we're doing it consciously or not. And I said, after that call, I said, man, we really have something. And the most important part is this guy wasn't going to get into medical school and he probably wasn't going to reapply if he didn't get into medical school. And I don't know how many academic advisors could tap in the way we were able

to tap in. And I don't mean that any disrespect to any academic advisors out there. You guys are incredible at what you do. But what sparked the conversation was he said he was in a certain location, deployed location, a certain year. And I said, oh, you were part of that special Forces team? He said, yeah. And I said, so you were with this doctor? He's like, yeah. And I said, so you did that save and it's a very well known

patient save in our community. And he was like, yeah, dude, that was me. And I was like, where is that on your application? And that's when he kind of broke down. And I think that that was a huge breakthrough we had. And from that conversation we've had tons more since that person. So I know it's a very long answer from what is soft to song, but I think it's really important. Yeah. Understand that what we're doing

is a forest bias type thing. But I personally believe that these folks, most of them would be successful without us getting into medical school. They're high achievers, they've been highly selected, psychologically, physically, emotionally, multiple times throughout their careers

and they're high achieving individuals. The thing that we provide differently is that like you said in the beginning of the podcast, we speak the language, we can decode it, we know things that they've been through, we can relate to them and we can extract that and get it out of them and help them transition from a very high functioning physical and mental, but more physical type job into medicine, which is much, much different from physical to

a more cognitive, demanding job in a totally different environment. So that's who we are. That's where we came from. We're officially incorporated. We have a whole all volunteer board, all volunteer staff, and we operate through three programs which we can talk about later. And that's our mentorship program, scholarship program and research program. What's the organization do today to support. You've mentioned scholars, there's a scholar program. So talk a little bit about how that happens now.

Yes. So the way that happens now is we have application cycle that opens up basically in line with the AAMC cycle so that we're aligned to what the medical schools are looking for. And we take folks up to two to three years out from them applying to medical school so people can be in all the different stages of being ready. So it could be the postbac stage The I'm figuring my life out stage,

or hey, I'm taking the MCAT six month stage. And we have a proprietary screening model of objective measures that we found to be successful for what makes someone successful in medical school to our standard. So once they're selected by our committee, they're brought on and we provide them one on one mentorship with a paired mentor who has something in common with them that's going to help them succeed. So that could be seal to seal, that could be sealed, a green

beret. But those persons are both married and they both want to go the same geographic area, et cetera. So we find something where those folks can connect and provide best value. We provide funding for their application fees, tutoring fees, and MCAT preparation fees. And then our research program helps these folks become published authors for the first time or speak at conferences, teach them about research, just add to their overall picture of being a physician and also help to become

highly competitive. And Bren has a very specific role in our nonprofit that has also, I would say, stemmed from the fact that we have this great selection program which allows his job to flourish. I'll let Brentyn kind of talk about our outreach. Talk a little about what

you do. Yeah. So I'm the director of partnerships, and my job more or less has been connecting with different universities that value the backgrounds and some of the skill sets and strengths that prior military and specifically special forces have to bring into medical school and then later into being physicians. So we basically try to see where they stand, see where these universities and softasam and our scholars have common interests and we make these linkage programs.

So we have about 10 right now. We have four or five more that are in the process at the moment. But these linkage programs basically allow our scholars to get a little bit of a second look, I guess is probably the best way to describe it. So they, the universities are buying in on the fact that the average training pipeline for our guys is around one and a half to two years. And the average investment of training of special operations course of personnel is around $1.3

million. And so that's obviously all taxpayer funded, but they're making an investment in the investment that's already been made in and allowing these guys to use the high specialty training and the mentalities that they've been able to grow throughout their time in the military and transition it into being the same high level performers in an academic and then later in a medical environment. Yeah. Talk a little bit about Ricky. How many scholars now

have gone through the program. Like, how many cohorts have you had some success rates? What's that look like? Yeah,

so we've done three cohorts successfully so far, and that's 30 personnel, plus or minus, like, five, like, four people. On the plus side, actually about 30 personnel so far in a medical school. And right now we're at 100% success rate there with people applying and being matriculated. And I think the exciting part of that has been that, you know, we set this goal of trying to take 10 folks per year, just from a

bandwidth perspective and a funding perspective, mostly the bandwidth. Just make sure we can really mentor them and put the effort into them. And to see that payoff has just been incredible. I think my favorite thing ever is we have a candid photo of one of our folks getting accepted into medical school. And one of our guys had taken a picture right as he got the phone call, and he's got this big smile on his face, and he's been trying

to get to medical school for, like, three years. I think that that picture summarizes our why, for sure. Yeah, that's. It's such a amazing organization. I'm still grateful that you guys reached out to me to talk about this, because I think you guys are doing great work for great, great people, and it's very impressive what you. What you guys have put together. Let's talk a little bit more about. Like, do you want to transition to talk about some transferable skills? And I. I have to think,

guys, that that was probably something. When you're having these conversations with the scholars, is drawing out from them, like your. To your story, Ricky, about the. The one. The guy who didn't feel like they could share some stuff or just was reluctant in a way to maybe talk about things in a way that medical schools would want to hear about them. How do you get guys to talk about transferable skills or understand the things they've done in their training? Med schools want to hear

about this? Yeah, for sure. This is something I'm, like, really passionate about, too. So when we talk to the special operations medics, this. The. So we take care of any special operator. It doesn't matter if you're a communications person, a medical person. If you were a weapons expert, whatever, it'd be your special operator. Special operations. What we see with the

medics is the medics, because they function this high capacity of trauma diagnosticians and proceduralists. They want to talk about their transferable tactical medical skills. They want to talk about the fact that they can do a chest tube or take someone's airway surgically. Major minor surgeries they've completed. And what we've realized, and actually what we move away from is we don't want them to really talk about these crazy

medical cases they've taken care of, because that. That part, while transferable, isn't what we think makes them unique and special. We think makes them unique and special across the board of our special operators is they're highly resilient individuals who are expert problem solvers. So what they can do and tested throughout their career is, you know, when you're in the unit that I was in, or even the unit Brent is in, rank doesn't

matter and age doesn't matter. So when I was a brand new young guy at my unit, I deployed for the first time. You know, I'm briefing 200 people on a tactical medical plan at a, you know, task force level of 200, 300 people for an entire area of operations. And I'm, you know, 23, 24 years

old, you know, low rank. If you were to look at traditional military ranks, and my word is gospel, and the ground force commander who you could say is like the CEO of the mission, that CEO takes everything I say seriously and is like, okay, that medic from that unit said, that's what we're going to do. As soon as injured, I trust them. There's no. No questions, because that unit's reputation has been that for so many years. So I think what's very transferable from our folks is extra

little problem solving. They're extremely resilient individuals. The whole stage of medicine in the career of being a physician is all about resiliency. In medical school, it's resiliency. In studying and test taking, it's resiliency and prepping for step one, it's resiliency. When you score a bad on one test, can you bounce back and get good at the next test? It's telling your friends that you can't go out on

Friday or Saturday because you have step one, step two coming up. It's all these little things you're attending telling you did a terrible presentation that day on rounds, and you got to come back the next day and crush it and be happy you got told you did that. And then in residency, it's first time a patient dies. It's the first time you make a medical mistake.

It's your attending telling you you're terrible that day, and then the next day come back and looking them in the face and being like, hey, I Had a bad day yesterday. And then when you're attending, it's all on you. So our folks have been tested through that, through every stage of their career, and that's what our those selections are looking for. In the military, it's not about 100 push ups. It's not about the super fast runners. It's usually

the middle of the pac fol. Folks that have extreme mental and emotional maturity, who can take that adversity and smile and be like, oh, man, this sucks right now, but it won't last forever. This backpack's super heavy, but at some point I'm going to take it off. And I think that's what's really special about our folks, and that's what's really transferable. And then the last thing is these people have been in leadership positions since day zero. They know how to get people motivated. They know

how to drive people towards a goal. They know how to take a really big goal and chop it down to small pieces so that you have a cohesive vision for where we're trying to go and what we're trying to do. They can see the long game and break it up into short pieces, which really is your first two years of medical school. What do I need to do every single day so that when step one comes around, I'm gonna crush it? And then you just

keep doing that. And then medicine is teamwork, and medicine is teamwork of people with different levels of education, different levels of experience, and different specialty. Whether that specialty is environmental services, business administration, billing, or neurosurgery versus family medicine. Special operators. They have the SEAL team. So Bren has him and his group of seals. They have the motor guys,

the mechanics who've helped fix the vehicles. They have the regular Navy corpsmen or regular Navy folks who are going to support them on their, you know, on their ship or say, be a cook or whatever. Then they have the special Operations command in charge them. And then sometimes they might have a big Navy command team that they have to interact with that's very similar

setup. So being able to have this meta leadership style where they can lead up, down, left and right and work cohesively in a team of differing opinions and skill levels to be successful, I think is really unique and really rare. And you don't see that in a lot of different. In a lot of backgrounds. So I think that's highly transferable skills that make these folks

successful. Yeah, we, we had a prep call before this and before we sat down today, and you were talking, you guys were talking A little bit about how the, our rigorous selection process to be a scholar. And I kind of laughed and said, haven't you guys been through enough to be selected for this? I mean, you guys have been working your tails off for almost 10 years in the, in the, in this area. And I think, Ricky, you said something like there's always selection. Yep. Selection's

an ongoing process. That's right. Selection is an ongoing process. And isn't that something that's transferable you see in medicine? Yeah, I think Brentyn can really talk about this better than me. But I'll say something to prime him, which is you got to earn the Trident every single day. You got to earn the right to call yourself a SEAL every day. So I think, Brian, you can talk more about what it's like to be constantly selected. Yeah,

that's one of our sayings. You have to earn your Trident every day. And basically the premise of that is you put all this effort in on the front end, going through our selection courses, to be able to wear a trident, which is the insignia of a Navy seal, and to be able to be called a Navy seal, but you have to consistently earn that right. You've never made it more or less

is the thought process behind it. And what that does is it weeds out complacency and it weeds out a lowering of standards, which is what happens a lot of times when you set a goal and you reach it is you've already hit the pinnacle. And so it's very easy to see that start to regress, whether physically, whether it's mentally, whether whether it's the amount of commitment, time and effort you're putting into something. It's very hard to keep motivation when there isn't a follow on

goal. So I think that that is probably one of the more, the more relatable things when you move into medicine and into health care is it's very easy to finish your residency and then basically not make any changes for the rest of your career, which is what you see happen sometimes with older physicians who are stuck in something they learned 30 years ago and unwilling to change, but if you have this ever growing mindset of change and growth, it

allows you to be able to not only stay at the forefront of your given field, which in this case is going to be medicine, but also to be a leader and innovative because you're not falling behind, you're actually staying on the forefront of whatever it is you're doing. How have you found Brentyn, now that you're a first year medical student? That you're seeing transferable skills not only in yourself, as you're now out of the military and you're back to being a student and in your

classmates. What have you seen that has been helpful to you as far as these transferable skills, ones you possess and ones maybe you've seen in your classmates?

I think that for me, I didn't have as much of a rigorous school background as some other people. I didn't have a bioengineering undergraduate degree. So going into medical school, I think for a lot of traditional students, especially that lean very heavily into the sciences is a lot easier due solely to the fact that they have been very high achieving academically and they've been put in very rigorous learning and testing conditions for pretty much the entirety of their academic careers.

So transitioning into that was difficult for me. It was kind of a bit of a learning shock. And I think when I look back at the question you were originally asking, it is when you're not doing as well as you know you can be doing, what changes can you make to be successful? And I think that what we see, what I see in buds when I was going through, was kind of

something Ricky touched on previously. But it's that the people who are generally the most high performing, the people that are holding, you know, world records for running or for powerlifting or whatever it is, they've never really come to a situation where they failed. And what each of these selection pipelines does, and even once you make it through, as they put you in positions where you will fail, nothing you will do will be good enough. And it makes you have to recover from that and

figure out how you're going to make changes to be successful moving forward. So in these selection pipelines, a lot of the people who have never failed fail for the first time and it's detrimental to them and they end up washing out and not finishing selection because they can't cope with the fact that their best effort in this case was not good enough. I think in that medical school it's

been very, very similar so far. And I would assume that that translates well into residency and to being an attending physician as well, where you're going to fail and you have to be able to recover, make changes and not make the same mistake again, which is the name of the game for us. You can make the mistake once, but you can't make it twice. So what are you going to do to make sure it doesn't happen again? Ricky, what would you say about that? What

have you seen? What have been some of the skills that maybe surprised you, that you possess, that you're like, oh, like I'm. That I didn't think that kind of skill or characteristic would, I'd be using that today. But you are as a second year medical student. You know, one that surprised me. That's a tough question. I have to really think about one that has surprised me. There's so many that haven't surprised me.

But no one that I think surprised me, that we're really good at is public speaking and briefing. I think that is the superpower of the, of our community. I didn't real, you know, I didn't realize that. Well, you know me having a medical background, I knew about presenting patients, I knew about presenting to a attending physician. I've done that my whole

career. But what I didn't realize was that being confident in speaking is something that really helps you stand out and it really is a differentiator in medical school. I think a lot of the folks in medical school are extremely smart individuals. They're very, very smart. But there's a difference in confidence level sometimes of folks and I'll be in class or I'll be in

a situation with attendings and other medical students. Sometimes you want to keep your mouth shut and not speak because you're like, oh, I'm a med student, I don't need to speak up. But from my background and other backgrounds of guys in Soft Assam is we've always been in rooms where there's a higher ranking individual with more experience and might be smarter and if you identify there's a problem or you identify something wrong, you're supposed to speak up because

that could get someone killed if you don't. And I think that surprised me a lot as being classroom is, I'm surrounded by people who probably know the answer faster than I do, may know it earlier than, than I do, but they won't speak up. And I speak up a lot. And I think that just comes from having confidence, being in rooms and speaking up.

Because I've, I've been in situations where my senior medic or someone's like hey man, when we're in briefing, like you're the guy so you need to talk and they force you to, they put you in uncomfortable positions. You know, I, I go back to briefing ground force commanders and task force overseas. You can't question yourself when you're going to go spend and stand in front of 250 people and tell them what

the medical plan is. You know, the medical mission plan is if one, their best friend gets hurt, you know, I can't walk up to Brighton's platoo command, you know, SEAL team commander, and say, hey, I think I have an idea of what's going on, but if you need me, call me. That they're gonna shut the mission down, you know, and that's, that's, that's, that's just too important. So that's very much surprised me is our folks have this ability to brief. They know how to

brief long and short. Because we had to be in situations where we, we have to adjust our methodology. And they're very confident, dang. What they think is incorrect in certain rooms. And I think the thing we have to work on ourselves as special operators and we, we remind our guys in south dasam is you guys got to change the approach a little bit. You know, in the military, you can tell someone they're wrong a certain way. And

medicine, we, you know, in academics, we just gotta. The tact a little more tactful. Yeah, a lot more tactful. Yeah. So I think it was something Ricky, you said was important a moment ago was that. But you can't be afraid to speak up. I think there's an analog between the hierarchy in medicine, which you've mentioned. You can have attending, fellow, resident, medical student, and there's hierarchy obviously in the military.

And to your point, if you don't speak up about something, there could be very detrimental consequences to that. And I think there's a, I think there can be a, in medicine, a tendency to have group think. And if you get stuck in group think, that's when problems can occur. And if you feel like I'm the, the junior person on this team, but

I, I think I see something. There's a mistake here, but I'm the medical student and I'm in a vulnerable position because I'm being evaluated by the resident or attending and I'm afraid to say something that group. And if the attending is like saying, I think this is happening right now, this is where we should proceed. But if that student is astute and picks up on something but feels the fear to not saying something, that group think can bleed through

the rest of the team and there can be problems there too. Is that something that you agree and have seen? 100%. I've actually talked to my classmates about this a lot. You know, at my school, we have conversations all the time in what we call our, like, role sessions. More of the professionalism side of, of our curriculum. And we always talk. There's always examples of like, you're in the operating room and there's a malignant surgeon and they're telling you they're doing something wrong and

you're the med student. What do you do? And I'm like, tell them they're wrong, like calling a safety timeout or something. And like, you know, a lot of my classmates will be like, well, aren't you afraid they're going to yell at you? Aren't you afraid they're going to hold that against you for residency? And respectfully, what I say is the only thing that separates us from

them is time. We're in the, you know, to all the other med students out there, you're in the same pipeline as any of these surgeons, any of these attendings that you're going to work for one day. They've just started earlier than you. They're born earlier than you. They worked just as hard. They went through the medical school pipeline. They went to a residency, and now they're using the same skills they learned as a medical student resident and applying it

every day as an independent practitioner. But they were exactly where you were at when you were. When, when you started, when they started. So I, I respect the, the hierarchy and the chain of command a lot because I grew up in it. I understand why it's so important. You know, I'm not an attending physician. They do know a lot more medicine than I do. However, we're all people and we all have good experience. We all have, you know, a high

degree of intelligence. So I don't see anything wrong with speaking up in a room when there's something especially like a safety concern or a patient safety concern involved. It's just, it's just a timing thing. In 10 years, I'll be where they're at, too. That's awesome. Brentyn, talk a little bit about, like, what's your advice to. We've been focusing a lot on our special forces operator, like

alum or veterans going into medicine. But I'm sure you have classmates that are non traditional students as well. What's your advice to non traditional or just traditional applicants as far as these kind of skills we're talking about? Yeah,

so we definitely have a lot of non traditional applicants. I think the numbers for that across the country have been going up pretty tremendously. And I think with these universities transitioning to a more what they call holistic approach also has taken away a lot of the kind of traditional barriers. You will do four years and get a chemistry or biology degree, and you will scribe for four years and you will get a 4.0 and a 520 MCAT

or you're not getting in at medical school. I think that they've wanted to open up their aperture a little bit as to what they let in and who they're training to be physicians. Because I think like in pretty much all aspects of every occupation, there is a benefit to having diversity of background, skill sets,

knowledge, critical thinking. So in seeing my fellow veterans in my class, as well as the other non traditional students that don't have veteran background, I think the biggest thing is leveraging the skill sets that you've learned or that you've mastered in your specific trade or, you know, career background into something that is going to benefit the school and will later benefit you as a physician.

Ricky went over a lot of the things that we see in special operations, but a lot of those skills could be easily transferred to a lot of other occupations. And there's a lot of skills that other

occupations have that, that you probably don't see in special operations. So I think the hard thing and what we have done at SOFT to SOM is helped to identify a lot of the common threads to be able to use to exemplify the type of applicant that you are. But that doesn't mean that those things don't exist for

a whole plethora of other occupations. So I would say if you're somebody who's going into school, my classmates who have done the same thing, it's being able to leverage those skill sets to be able to present a model that they want to see without fabricating anything. Because you don't need to. You just really need to present in a way that they can understand what skills you have accumulated over your lifetime as a non traditional applicant. Ricky, what's

your advice? When somebody's going into the application process, they're sitting down with amcas, getting ready to write out their explanations or descriptions of their experiences. How do you do? How would you recommend to a prospective applicant to approach that and try to highlight these skills so that they, they seem to have some context, but also kind of everyone, everyone wants to stand out. What's your advice to them? Write your honest story. Write your honest

story and write who you really are. So I think anybody listening to this podcast would probably assume that my personal statement was about being a special operations medic and this crazy journey through special operations. There's two sentences in my personal statement on military special operations. The

rest of my. The rest of my personal statement about my journey to medicine had nothing to do with the military, it had a lot to do with other things, and the military cemented that for me and gave me the avenue to get on a pipeline of being in medicine. And so I think that everybody should tell their truth on their application. I think Breton hit the nail on the head. Admissions committees have read just like you, Christian. I've read thousands of

applications. You know who's telling the truth and you know who's not, and you know who's fluffing a story, and you know who's underselling a story. So just tell the truth of what it was. If you worked under a physician in the past and they taught you a valuable skill, like, you know, sometimes it's, you know, sometimes more important to hold your patient's hand than it is to reset their iv. And that was impactful for you. Talk

about it. Say, hey, I shadowed this position. We, you know, I learned dermatology. But the most important thing I took away from that was not the diagnostic skills. It was how to. How to talk to a patient with a different background than you. How to. How to, you know, overcome a language barrier. You learn that from your physician or your physician assistant or nurse practitioner. I think those things are way more important to discuss the honest, raw, deep details than it is to

just think that they want to hear that you're already a doctor. I don't think any admissions team wants you to be a doctor already or come to doctor school. So tell them what you've been doing and how you've been preparing yourself to be able to succeed in a rigorous program, because that's what medical school is. But they'll teach you the rest of it. And when you're on the other side, you're a medical student. You know, throughout your. Your first year, you're like, oh, man, I'm still not good

at writing patient notes. Like, I'm going to be so terrible in third year and in the second year. And you're like, I'm still. I'm getting better, but I'm still not that good. And then, you know, just yesterday, I was briefing attending during our clinical rotation, like, preparatory class thing that we do, and he was like, hey, you guys are getting a little better at note writing. Don't even stress about it, because third year, it's going to be totally different, and we're going

to teach you how to do it then. So just keep practicing. And you. It's like you create all this false stress and false narratives that's just unnecessary. So tell your truth. Be yourself. Talk about what you're passionate about and then realize that you don't need to be a doctor yet to get into medical school. All right? People listening can't see that I'm emphatically shaking my head up and down the entire time you're talking and you're preaching.

Ricky, I think what. And I can kind of broad stroke this. For most medical school admissions committees and people to read these applications, we're looking for the. And we keep harping on these skills. And this is why I was so excited to get you guys here, because you have a skill set that says. We keep saying transferable skills, but when we're reading these applications, we're looking for characteristics and attributes that you. That are maybe to your core, something you've worked into

or like you've grown. Like, you mentioned, like,

is it more important to describe to admissions committees that you saw the dermatological, like, pathology, or you observed that the physician held their hand when they had to tell them they have, you know, malignant melanoma. Right. And you saw empathy and that inspired you to be more empathetic. And you saw what empathy looks like and the verbal and non verbal cues going on back and forth between patient and physician and.

Or it was their communication skills that you were like, wow, they can connect with somebody who is of completely different background than theirs. And it's that stuff that is the money in the med school application process. I think we're not as impressed if, like you mentioned before, if you can put a chest tube in or, you know, you can suture things. Like, not everybody has done that one, but we're. That's. That's our job in med school to train you how to

do those things. Like, that's just gonna ha. Everybody's gonna be able to do that eventually. So I think people are. Med schools are less impressed by, like, you mentioned going through all the procedures you may have learned in your career if you had that opportunity. It always makes us a little nervous if we see somebody went to a foreign country and they were like, doing things they probably shouldn't be doing as well. I've seen that where people are kind of bragging about, like,

well, I got to do this thing. Like, you're in undergraduate. You're not even a military member who. This is a part of your job doing this. So it's a very slippery slope if you start going down that road. But we really want to see these characteristics and attributes. It brings your application to life. It really does. It makes what could be a very somewhat dry Application just breathe life into it and gets us excited. Like, gosh, they had the core

skills to do this. So I would, I would also say the last though on, on that of telling your truth. I think one more thing that's really important. I see, see a lot of traditional applicants do this because we soft,

like someone hits us up, we help them. Obviously we're not going to take them into our program, but you know, we give a lot of folks advice is don't compare like your experience to someone else's experience where you think like they might have had it harder than you growing up or you had it, you were more privileged than they weren't or like, like, don't, don't sell yourself

short. Like, if you learned resilience through failure and it's only purely academic, like you've only, you failed a couple exams in your life and that's where you learned resiliency from. Tell that truth, that's fine. Like you learned how to bounce back academically and it still taught you something. Don't worry about that. There might be someone out there whose house burned down and that's where they were learned. It's not a competition of hard

stories. And I see that a lot in younger kids when they reach out to us is they'll be like, well, you know, you guys gone through all this crazy stuff and I just, I just, I. It's not, I just, I wasn't ready to go to medical school when I was 22 years old. You're accomplishing something extremely impressive to me. I'm going to medical school. I'm 30 as a second year med student. I think Brian's smiling because I don't think he was ready to go to medical school at 22 years old

either. So don't do this I just thing or you guys, that thing. Just tell your truth. The academic, the committees know what they're doing and you know, maybe you do need some community service hours, maybe need some shadowing hours. That makes sense. But. But I just don't like when the kids really sell themselves short when they don't need to. Yeah. And if I just want to add one thing

to that as well, because Ricky kind of touched on it, made me think of it is we have a lot of our scholars and a lot of people just generally in special operations that their pipeline looks something along the lines of they go to college for one to two years, they leave with a 1 to 2.0 GPA, they join the military, and then they go back to school some point later. And they are now mature enough to be able to be academically successful and they'll pull

4.0 GPAs and they go, you know, to Wharton. They go to all these schools and do all these great things. But I think that a lot of the times people think that if you don't get a 4.0 in every class, then you're never going to go to medical. Like, if you go down the Reddit rabbit hole, nobody gets into medical school unless you have a 4. 0 from Harvard.

You know, not true. I think that it's important in that sense as well of, in this comparison game of when you're giving somebody an actual holistic look, you want to see what their circumstances are, what they have overcome. And I think something like that, where if you did do poorly and then you come back and you show significant growth and competency, then you're showing the admissions committee that even though you don't, your cumulative is not a 4.0. It's probably

way lower than you want it to be. You're not the same person that had this terrible undergraduate previously and you still are going to be a very successful medical student and later physician. The two things you guys have said

have a great way to kind of wrap this up. And I, I, I'm glad you brought guys brought these things up because I don't want our listeners who are maybe in undergrad Christian brought in these two unicorns. And I'm never going to be able to compare myself to

them. But what we spent the last about 20 minutes or so talking about is everybody has some skills that you have to start to in your story and bring it out and don't be afraid to kind of contextualize it for admissions committees when they're reading this and not to I don't want you, I'm not bringing guys on here to, to be just like the unicorns to like, ah, these guys are, they got 100 acceptance rate in the last three cohorts. Like you got to be a special

forces operator to get to med school. No, like you. But you have to, there are things that you have inside you that you need to express out. And you, you can do that and thoughtfully and tell, like you said, tell your story and tell the truth. And you know, that's a way to get the ball rolling in this crazy application process. I want to wrap things up with two things, guys, to kind of we talked about advice for

prospective applicants. Ricky, what's your advice to any additional advice to our listeners from your perspective, your experiences? Yeah, one Thing when I was screening medics to come work at my unit, my special operations unit, I never assessed their medical skills. So that should tell you the same thing about medical school. That's why I harp on this topic so much, what I tested them

on, because it was important. Our motto is night stalkers don't quit. I would put them in an impossible situation in our trauma lane that we put them through. So what, they would fail continuously and repeatedly. And I was looking to see if they're going to quit during their trauma lane because that was more important. And I knew I could teach them the medicine.

And I think all the prospective students out there, when you're looking at medical school, one know one thing as someone who's older is going through it and we have folks in south sumper in their 40s who are going to be M1s. Medical school will always be there. If there is no real timeline, that's our all arbitrary. If you think you're not ready and you need to take time or you want to go experience life or the world and you're very young, it's okay to go do

that. I encourage it. You'll have more life experience. You'll have more relatability to your patients. You'll have experienced, you know, paychecks and other things if you've never worked before. And all these other parts of life, they're important. So I encourage you to go live that if you want to. I would listen to trusted resources. If you're going to go to medical school, listen to this podcast. Christian is meeting with ADCOMs

from all over the nation constantly. That is better information than the Reddit or the student doctor network channels. It's better information than your buddy who knows a guy who knows a guy who's in medical school. Okay, Listen to trust the resource. And then lastly, use the AAMC website and look at the core competencies of. They're telling you exactly what medical school admissions committees are looking for and how to be

successful. That's like showing up to the 160th to try and be a night stalker, not knowing the night stalker creed or, you know, not going to Ranger regiment, not knowing what their background was. Like, you would never prepare for a job interview without knowing about that company. And so I think when you're looking at medical, when you're looking at the. The AMCAs, look and see what they want physicians to physician applicants to

look like and make sure you hit those pillars in your application. And there's a lot of different ways to do that. So that's my overall advice. And I'd pass it over to Brian.

Yeah. The only thing that I would really add to that, which we semi touched on previously, is when you're telling your story, I would say focus on being okay and letting yourself be okay with opening up and being a little bit vulnerable. Because everybody has stuff in their life. For us, it's, you know, a lot of the silent professional stuff.

What have you done that's hard to talk about, but whatever the struggles are that help make you who you are and it puts you in whatever position it is that you are currently in, being able to openly talk about that, I think only enhances your application and I think that it lets the admissions committees be able to see a lot more of you and a different side than just this academically superior student who, you know, has no faults. So I think that that's very important.

I've mentioned that before and I don't know, several episodes, but just about. You don't have to come across as perfect. You can show that you have areas of growth you've identified. I'm working on them. That's showing growth, mindset. Not like, I am absolutely perfect. I'm only 23 and I've got it all figured out. And I don't know, there's really a person out there that is like that. Guys, I. I've appreciated this conversation. Again, I was

really grateful to have you guys here. Last thing, I've been asking you guys all the questions. What questions do you have for me? What do you. Oh, yeah, I would say, you know, what. What challenges have you seen veteran applicants have when they, when they've applied? Things you guys have touched on, and this may be this reluctance to share things that they don't feel like they should. Like that I. Maybe I should. I'm bragging about my service when it was just. That's my service. And, and

that would be one thing. I like that we, we see stuff that they've done in their military career, but it's just the facts and not a lot of like the background or the context or any storytelling. Second thing would be, as I mentioned, right at the. Be at the beginning, you guys have a different language, the. The language of the military. And I've seen veterans when they write stuff. I don't know what some of this stuff is. Like when there are certain. There's certain phrases or

battalions or like, like kind of if. If you're a veteran and you're applying. And I think this also can apply to other People I like, they put like, their organization abbreviation, and they don't tell you what the abbreviation stands for. I'm like, I don't know what AC Ms. Stands for. And. And so be thoughtful and understanding. People that are reading this are not maybe from the military background or they. You make sure you make things kind of clear and spell it out a little

bit. Dumb it down. If it's like your guys, you know, language. Dumb it down a little bit. And that can also be part of the bragging piece. Like when you say, I'm in a battalion and I was in front of. You said 250 people. Had you not. Had you just said it's. I'll say the word battalion, I would have been like, Is that like nine guys? Or is that like 250 people getting that. That level of context? Like, wow, it's a big deal. Like, I. I

was a reader. Like, that sounds like a big deal. They're in charge of a lot of stuff and they're. So don't be afraid to kind of go into some of those details and explain to people. I remember reading one application and the applicant said they received the Bronze Star, and I didn't know what that was. I had to go look it up. And so I think if you take. Go to the next step and just kind of say, I received the Bronze Star. It's awarded to people who've

done acts of courage or that kind of thing. Go ahead and say that. Yeah, yeah, I think that's okay. I've seen. I've also seen, unfortunately, on the awards thing, I've seen academic advisors tell personnel not to put their military awards unless it's a Bronze star or higher. And we've pushed back against that and said, hey, you, if you get an award, just explain what it was for. So if so. One thing that's pretty common is there's an Army Accommodation Medal. Navy Accommodation

Medal. Usually it's given for leadership. So I tell folks, I'm like, hey, just say

you've received six awards for leadership versus say, even call saying what the award name is. And that's kind of the advice we've given our applicants. So if you're a veteran out there and you have awards, read your citation and say that. So if your commander thought that you explained great resilience and leadership during a training exercise, say, I received award. An award of. For leadership during a training exercise that had 400 people in it. You know? Yep. It's. Yep. Absolutely.

Yeah. Listen, fellas, this has been highly enjoyable. I appreciate your time and your expertise and your insight and certainly your service. I mean, I think there anybody listening, this should have gratitude for the service you guys have given this country, and it's a level that very few have been able to do. So I'm. I'm thankful. And thanks again for taking some time today. Thanks for having us, brother. We appreciate it. Appreciate it, Christian. Thank you. Bye.