Brandon University students moving into medical fields

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 13/07/2011 (5411 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

If ever Brandon University officials need a student testimonial to drive home the fact that big things come in small packages, they’ll certainly find one in recent graduate Kelby Treloar.

Treloar, 20, is off to the University of Manitoba’s medical school this fall and says she absolutely credits her success in grabbing one of the school’s coveted rural seats to BU’s small, intimate classes.

"I couldn’t have asked for a better first three years in university to prepare myself," she told the Sun earlier this week. "The small class sizes and things like that really allowed me to develop really good study skills that I probably wouldn’t have got at a bigger university, where you kind of get lost in the crowd that way."

Treloar loved Brandon’s bio-medical program so much, in fact, that she even spent the last several weeks of her schooling at BU this year fighting to ensure that next year’s students could purchase a cadaver for their advanced anatomy class.

"That course was on the chopping block this year with some budget cuts, so I did a wine and cheese fundraiser at the university and raised enough money — $2,500 — to keep the course for next year," she said. "That’s actually the only course like that in Canada, where undergrads get a chance to do a hands-on dissection … it’s such a legacy for BU.

"I just couldn’t even imagine (future students) not having the same opportunities that we had. I mean, you go into medical school with 100 other people and to have just that little bit of a leg up in terms of dissection skills and confidence when you go into the lab, I think that’s priceless."

Having already "fallen in love with the operating room," Treloar said she’ll likely specialize in something that puts her in a surgical suite when she’s done her schooling.

Joining Treloar in the University of Manitoba’s medical program this fall will be BU students Regan Grey and Kristen Wareham, while fellow students Kristen Ponscak and Aimee Hetherington will also be heading to the U of M, having been accepted into the school’s pharmacy program.

Meanwhile, a trio of other BU bio-med students — Kristen Martin, Stacy Pritchard and Marshall McDonald — will be studying patients of a four-legged variety this fall at veterinary school.

McDonald, a native of Brookdale, is set to attend the University of Saskatchewan and already has plans to study large animal medicine, which he says "suits his personality."

He jokes that his extensive experience with and passion for farm life wasn’t hard to see during his time at BU.

"My father manages a bunch of poultry barns around Brandon, so for my developmental biology class, my dad would bring in 50 eggs or so and they incubate them for awhile so we would get to see the stages of early development for a chick," he recalled.

"It was cool, just to see the complexity — that it’s not just one type of chicken producing one type of egg. There’s a lot of breeding and genetics that actually goes on behind the scenes that a lot of people don’t realize."

While he’s been forced into a neighbouring province to get his education by virtue of the fact that Manitoba does not have a veterinary school, McDonald said he’s love to return to rural Manitoba and set up a private vet practice when he’s done his studies.

And yet two more BU bio-med grads are also moving on in the technology field this fall.

Bridget Sahulka has been accepted into the medical radiologic technology course at Red River College in Winnipeg, while Brandon-born Scott O’Rourke will begin studies in the nuclear medicine technology course at SAIT Polytechnic in Calgary.

Since a trip to the hospital at the tender age of 12, O’Rourke said he’s been enthralled with the science behind body scans.

"Just as a 12-year-old kid, it was really, really fascinating to me (that they) were going to inject me with a radioactive tracer," O’Rourke said. "But then they showed me a picture of my scan and I could see what organs they were looking at. It was just something that stuck with me ever since."

O’Rourke also says it would be his preference to return home to Brandon and get a job at the Brandon Regional Health Centre once his studies are complete.