Learner Profile
Julie Yelle

HMX Courses

Biochemistry, Physiology

Julie Yelle’s background is different from most who are considering a career in medicine, with a bachelor’s degree in Middle Eastern Studies and a master’s in Arabic Linguistics. When she took HMX online courses, she was contemplating a career change, working as a medical scribe, and also writing a book about the intersections between art and science. Julie says her experience in the courses challenged her to understand and analyze unfamiliar, complex topics – useful for writing and for her potential future in health care. 

I have an interest in medicine, but I did not take any science classes as an undergraduate. I thought taking HMX online courses would be a good way to dabble a little bit and see what a career in medicine might look and feel like, and I combined taking the classes – the intellectual side of things – with the medical side, going into the clinic every day as a scribe. I found that doing those two activities simultaneously made each experience richer to me. Some of what I learned from case studies in the biochemistry course, for example, helped me to fill in the blanks and connect the dots when I was listening to patient-provider communication as a scribe.

I found that the two courses that I took were demanding in different ways. I found biochemistry generally more difficult. I think that was partly because it required more memorization, or memorization of a different kind than I was used to. Because biochemistry deals with quite complex structures and functions, it required more visual learning, which was challenging for me.

Physiology, on the other hand, came more easily to me, while still being appropriately challenging.

Although both subjects were new to me, some of the foundational knowledge I had from high school courses in biology, chemistry, and physics was not that hard for me to revive, and it helped to draw upon it.

I think they were good! Visualization is not my strong suit, so the quality of the images and videos that the course provided helped me a lot. If I had had to imagine biochemical processes without seeing them illustrated in video format, learning about them would have been much harder.

There was one very direct overlap: one of the clinical scenarios in HMX Fundamentals Biochemistry discussed a condition that a patient at my clinic was diagnosed with. While listening to the doctor I worked with and filling out the patient’s chart, it helped to be familiar with the symptoms, the medication prescribed for them, and the lifestyle modifications that can mitigate or exacerbate them.

Often patients come in to discuss more than one condition that they are managing, and part of my responsibility as a scribe was to follow and understand the dialogue patients bounced back and forth from one medical complaint to another. The clinical scenarios shown in the coursework helped me to do that.

Understanding how a certain chemical is produced and accumulated in the body, how that contributes to the symptoms, and how it can be inhibited by some aspects of medication, also made my role as a scribe more intellectually engaging.

Yes. Beyond sometimes reflecting what I was seeing in a real clinical setting, the clinical scenarios in the videos helped me to follow the coursework. Hearing a patient’s story about the effects of the biochemical and physiological processes going on inside their body made the theoretical parts of the courses more engaging. Since the part of the brain where stories are stored is easier to access, the clinical application videos helped me to retrieve what I had learned and made that knowledge more sticky – whether or not I saw the same diagnoses firsthand in the clinic.

I am still leaving the door open to that possibility. Right now, I have a good situation professionally that suits this phase of my life, but nevertheless, I have many more years ahead of me in my career. I do not have an exact timeline in mind, but I plan to keep taking steps to lay a foundation that I can build upon later if I ultimately decide to walk through that door.