Julia Cochran (’21), Rising 4th-Year Medical Student

Julia graduated from the Systems Medicine Program in 2021. She is a rising 4th-year medical student at the California University of Science and Medicine. Julia has lined up amazing rotations in great schools and is leading the effort to create a Clinical Rotation in Systems Medicine.

“The Systems Medicine Program is definitely the future of medicine! Right now, even as I’m studying for Step 2, there are multiple questions where we are given a patient presentation and a research abstract and have to make clinical decisions for that patient based on the research we are given. For this level of evidence-based medicine and precision care to reach even the massive licensing exam we take as third/fourth-year students (and it typically takes advancements a couple of extra years to trickle down to these exams) makes me very excited to see how systems medicine will be increasingly integrated into clinical practice.

The relationships I built in the program have also been super valuable. You in particular, Dr. V, have been so supportive of me from the beginning. There are multiple of my classmates as well who are also in medical school and it’s been so fun to see them progress on their journey, and I would love to encounter many of them in a hospital somewhere one day! I am planning on doing a residency in general surgery now with a fellowship in vascular surgery afterward. I’m about to finish my third year at CUSM and next year i’ll be doing surgery rotations at ARMC (my home hospital), Columbia, Harbor-UCLA, and Denver. Very excited for my schedule next year. Thanks to the program!”