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Learner Profile
Keenan Mahan

Keenan Mahan

School

Harvard Medical School

HMX Courses

Physiology, Immunology


Keenan Mahan fell “right in love” with medicine after working as an EMT during his undergraduate years at the University of Massachusetts. While he plans to become a critical care anesthesiologist, the third-year Harvard Medical School student also has a passion for medical education and training the next generation of physician leaders – applying the management skills he’s learned as a concurrent MBA candidate at Harvard Business School. Keenan has helped to develop assessment questions for HMX Physiology and Immunology, and has worked as a forum moderator in both courses.


What has it been like working on HMX courses?

It’s been really great. One of the reasons I really liked HMX was because it’s all of the same instructors that I’m used to seeing in my classes and even in the wards. It’s very familiar, it doesn’t just help me with my studying and reaffirming my knowledge, but I know that what they’re teaching is the basics of what everybody should know in medicine or surrounding medicine. It’s a very good foundation, and continues to build on that foundation as you go through the course.

We’ve run courses with [a variety of] students, and I would say that at every level they’re asking insightful questions. It seems to really drive people’s passion for science and medicine.


What aspects of the course do you think are most useful?

A lot of the concepts that we learn in physiology become kind of intuitive and second nature once you understand them, but to grasp them the first time around is incredibly tricky. Especially, there’s this one section [in HMX Physiology] on obstructive pulmonary diseases that talks about restriction of flow, and it brings in Ohm’s Law, but it’s a very difficult concept to wrap your head around. So one of my favorite things is taking these principles and explaining them in a different way so that students can finally wrap their head around it.

I think the courses do a good job at really honing in on what the important concepts are, and really whittling it down to what’s necessary in terms of teaching, for the questions, for the videos, for everything. I think they do a very good job of not beating around the bush, but also in taking just as much time as they need to explain these concepts. And then whatever somebody might miss, that’s what the moderators are there for, and we’re happy to help.


When do you think these courses would be most valuable for medical students?

I would say definitely the earlier on, the better. I know that [Harvard Medical School] offers them to students during the summer before they matriculate which I think is really great, it gives you a chance to at least see the material before you learn it for the first time, so it can get a little bit more familiar and less foreign to you.

As a third-year student working as a moderator, I’ve had to kind of re-learn the basic principles and really remind myself of the physics of the physiology as well as the basics of immunology, which has been useful in terms of studying for boards. It has also been really helpful in tying some of the clinical knowledge that I’ve gained this year to the basic biochemical and physiologic knowledge that I learned the first two years. So I think that it’s a good way of tying it all together and bringing me back to the basic science roots that medicine is built on.


How do HMX courses compare to your experience in medical school?

I would say that there are very strong similarities in the content; I’ve definitely been presented concepts in similar if not the same ways from all of the instructors that I’ve seen. I’ve seen it in a concept video form, I’ve seen it in a lecture form, I’ve seen it in a handout form. I would say the content’s all the same, but in medical school…the pace of how you move through the material is different, but I think the material is entirely applicable.


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