Learner Profile
Hira Sakhawat

School

Shifa Tameer-e-Millat University, Pakistan

HMX Course

Physiology

Hira Sakhawat is a first-year medical student at Shifa Tameer-e-Millat University in Islamabad, Pakistan. She took HMX Physiology to complement her in-class curriculum, and says she took away some important lessons from the experience.

The problem that we face here in the medical school, during the lectures, is that you can’t actually follow every single concept that the professor is giving. Because we have the lectures which are usually for two hours or one hour long, and sometimes if we misunderstand a concept, we continue to fall behind, and it’s very hard to catch up. So that leads us to quit very quickly. So the HMX course was at a really good pace – it was a really well-run classroom.

During the lessons, the notepads really helped me improve my learning and studying skills, because they were organized in categories. First there were key concepts of what you are learning, and then there were notes about the videos, the lectures, and then afterwards we had to answer some questions about it, and at last there were learning objectives. So this method of studying is something I’ll take for the rest of my medical career for sure. It was less stressful to study, because you had everything organized at your pace.

The clinical case studies were my favorite part of the lessons; that really helped my focus stay at the peak level. Going virtually to a hospital or a cath lab or a dialysis unit was more than I could have asked for, because it really gave me the opportunity to apply what I’ve learned to real-life scenarios and to better absorb the content due to the clinical examples with real patients. This was a really nice humanitarian aspect that was added with the patients – it was really nice to see how it was connecting back to the same physiology concept which [instructor] Dr. Richard Schwartzstein taught us.

In physiology, there are some concepts which are very difficult to understand. Grasping them the first time is incredibly tricky, but HMX has a good way of teaching. In the section on obstructive pulmonary disease, we saw how restriction of flow relates to Ohm’s Law. Ohm’s Law was repeated in a manner where the students had to wrap their heads around it. We got the complete concept of Ohm’s Law and how it applied to every aspect of the lungs and the restriction of flow.

I did – I was actually amazed how quickly I received a response. Most of the time I asked a question, they referred me to something in the lectures, and that connected me to information I had. In the discussion forums, you actually get a chance to connect with other students, I made friends from India and Russia, they’re amazing people.

The final exam questions stimulated my neurons in a way that my university curriculum did not. The questions were challenging and thought-provoking; the answers were not straightforward, we had to think for a while. I was thinking at least 10 steps ahead, and that was really nice, how the questions were organized. It was more like the big picture behind the question, and we had to go through all of the concepts we learned and finally we had to organize our answers and attend the question.

Also, Dr. Richard Schwartzstein’s teaching skills and clinical skills are outstanding. He approaches topics from an intellectual standpoint, and he kind of unravels the elements of mystery. He’s a great teacher, and I really like the way he talks with the patients, the way he interviewed them about their diseases, that was really nice. Also I liked how he talked to different practitioners about what’s going on under the surface; he talked to Dr. Melanie Hoenig in the dialysis clinic, and also he talked to Dr. Duane Pinto about the heart. So it was really amazing.

It was an amazing experience – the best teaching staff, the support in the discussion forums, and by far the best lectures I have ever had. Being part of this program has really helped me to boost my knowledge. I think other students should apply for this, especially in the first year; it might be very helpful for them to understand and to grasp the concepts better.