1. Tell us a little bit about yourself.   My name is Thomas Albert Hall IV and I am starting my second year of premedical studies at Baylor University. I took two gap years after high school to work at local farms and train with ALERT, an emergency response/Christian discipleship organization in East Texas. I grew up all over the United States, living the longest in San Jose, CA (4 years), but I would have to say that home is either Austin, TX or Louisville, KY, where my family lives. My hobbies include gardening, hiking, running, hiking, and sketching.

2. Who was your favorite teacher in school and how did he or she impact you? I was homeschooled so my primary teacher and the teacher who had the greatest impact on me was definitely my mother. She taught me a love of learning that will be with me for the rest of my life. Most importantly, she taught me the interconnectedness of everything, that no facts exist in isolation to be memorized, but are part of a greater system or story, especially in the case of history, which was her favorite subject.

3. When did you first decide you wanted to become a doctor and why? There is a story that I heard about eight years ago about a woman who was pregnant and was diagnosed with cancer. She was told that she would have to abort her child as obviously chemotherapy or radiation therapy would be fatal to him. She refused to accept this deterministic counseling and started looking outside of the mainstream. Her midwife recommended her to an alternative therapist who started her on nutrition therapy. a few months later the cancer was gone and the baby boy was born safely. This is probably the first story that inspired me to pursue medicine. At first I was most interested in nutrition and alternative medicine and although I am moving toward a more conventional approach I am still very excited to learn about new and potential alternative therapies.

4. What area of medicine are you interested in? At this point I am most interested in family practice, although I am holding off on making any decision until I get more shadowing experience. Neuroscience, which I am majoring in, is awesome, but I feel like most of the things that interest me in it are on the research side and I want to be in a position with direct patient contact. Pathology sounds cool and I love working in the lab, but again there seems to be little patient contact. I am also interested in missionary work and it seems like family practice could be most relevant to that.

5. What’s the coolest experience you’ve had so far on your premedical journey?  My coolest experience so far was getting to shadow at Restoration Gateway hospital in Uganda. I got to see a surgery and hoped sanitize the equipment. In the lab I learned about how to test for malaria, TB, and lots of other diseases and got to help out with focusing in microscopes on some of the difficult slides.

6. What is your favorite book?  One of my favorite books is The Bronze Bow, the story of a Jewish zealot from the time of Christ struggling to find where his loyalties stood in the midst of turmoil in his nation, his religion, and his family.

7. Tell us one thing interesting about you that most people don’t know.  As a young child I had all of the major symptoms of mild Asperger syndrome, although I was never diagnosed. Now I have outgrown many of the symptoms and learned to live with the rest, but it gives me a special interest in Autism Spectrum Disorders and other neurological and developmental disorders.

8. If you couldn’t be a doctor, what would you want to do?  If I couldn’t be a doctor I would be either a permaculture farmer or a paramedic.

9. What has been your biggest obstacle as a premed and how did you (or are you) overcome it?  My biggest challenge is definitely time management. I want to do everything and then I end up staying up past midnight working on homework assignments and getting up at five, which does not work well. I keep a calendar with increments as small as 10 minutes that I change every week or two to better match my schedule and allocate time earlier in the day for homework. This helps me to refine my schedule progressively, though I have to mostly start over at the start of each semester.

10. What do you like most about PreMed STAR?  The thing I like most about PreMed Star is that it provides a simple, organized system for me to keep track of shadowing and service hours that I don’t have to worry about losing like a notebook or a word document.

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