Learner Profile
Lauren Kratky

HMX Courses

Physiology, Immunology

Lauren Kratky has never shied away from a challenge. In high school, she took an EMT course and spent some time working on an ambulance after her older sister said it was the most stressful thing she’d ever done. As an undergraduate student at Wake Forest University, she volunteered at a free clinic where she spoke mostly Spanish with patients. This spring, she set off to South Africa to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro with her parents. Lauren talks about how HMX courses helped her to prepare for her next challenge: the MD program at Wake Forest School of Medicine.

I had taken a phys class before; I was a health and exercise science major. We had a human phys class, a human anatomy with a cadaver lab, exercise physiology classes, so I was pretty well exposed to those topics, but even still some of the concepts were new.

Immunology I had not taken at all. Some of those concepts, the first time I had seen them was studying for the MCAT. I took the MCAT before taking this course, but it would’ve been super helpful had I taken this course beforehand.

I loved it. What I thought was the best part about it was, most of your courses that you take in school, you’re getting basic science knowledge, which this had a ton of, but then it spun it and presented it in a way that made me be like, ‘oh, this is why this is pertinent, I will need to know this as a doctor’. It very clearly laid out how all of these concepts translate into medicine in real life and helping patients and working with people.

I remember there was a look at a dialysis unit in [HMX Physiology]; I just didn’t really know anything about that before, so I thought that was really interesting.

I just loved the immunology course. There’s so much going on especially with research and all these new drugs coming out. There’s so many different ways to stop certain conditions from happening or to try and prevent them or slow them, and it was really cool to see all of the different things that go into the immune system, and all the ways drugs can interact. I realized I really liked immunology, which I didn’t know because I had never taken it.

For sure. I think all of it is going to be applicable, and I’m pretty sure I’ll re-learn a lot of that as I’m going and I think that’ll be cool. Some of the exercise physiology stuff in the physiology course, when they were doing the pulmonary function test, I’ve done those at the pediatrician’s office that I worked at, I would help set those up for people. We also did treadmill testing like that in my undergrad education. So seeing it all reinforced was super helpful because it just refreshes all the concepts which I know that I’ll see again in med school.

For the immunology stuff, I know that I’m going to see that in med school and I’d never seen it before, so it’ll be super helpful that I’ll be refreshing myself instead of seeing it all for the first time.

Going into [the courses] it I was kind of thinking I don’t need to do this right now, but I was really happy I’d done it at the end.