Primary Care Population Medicine

Master’s Thesis: “Exploring Sexual Health and Risk of Sexually Transmitted Infections Among Gender Diverse Individuals”

Residency: Medicine-Pediatrics, University of North Carolina

Sam Mickel was an actor before becoming a medical student. From New York City to rural Illinois, he brought stories old and new to communities.

“The parts [about theater] that I loved the most were when it existed as something that brought a community together,” he says. It’s for similar reasons that Sam says he’d always been interested in medicine: “It’s been fun to explore the overlap between the parts I enjoyed about theater and medicine.”

The PC-PM Program was a big draw to Brown for him. He says he’d heard it referred to as the “family within the family, and it really has felt that way throughout the four years.”

Sam envisioned himself doing work in public health early on and knew that he wanted to interact with medicine through a population health-focused lens. His goals were motivated by his experience working in a free clinic in San Francisco every summer since high school. He was there through the passage of the Affordable Care Act, and “saw this wonderful shift in the way that we were taking care of the community,” he says. “We were able to do more of a social work role to get people connected to care.”

He also has a long-time interest in LGBTQ+ and sexual health. For his master’s thesis, Sam interviewed trans individuals to identify the best ways to deliver information about sexual health in an informative, non-stigmatizing way.

The LIC was a “wonderful way to do third year,” Sam says. What set it apart for him was “seeing patients independently, writing notes independently, thinking about treatment plans independently based on conversations and exams,” and getting to care for patients over the long term. “It was super exciting to hit the end of the year and realize that I felt comfortable in five to six different clinics and different specialties,” he says—which influenced his choice of med-peds for residency.

As an LIC fellow, Sam mentored third-year students and acted as a “liaison to the administration,” giving the students autonomy over their curriculum. He also helped lead an Arts in Medicine event to explore “ways to use art … to become better practitioners of medicine.” One activity encouraged PC-PM students to reflect on their experiences in third year using watercolor or creative writing, because, he says, they “sometimes have to rush through moments that are really charged emotionally or otherwise without having the time to process them.”