Joann Farrell Quinn, PhD.

Imagine you’re the manager of an equity-trading desk and you see two employees constantly in conflict and arguing with each other. You don’t understand why and don’t see an end in sight.  What do you do?

Seeing scenarios like this play out when she was an equity trader prompted Joann Farrell Quinn, PhD, to earn her doctorate degree in organizational Behavior from Case Western University to help answer the question “What makes people tick?”

Dr. Quinn is the competency assessment director for the USF Health Morsani College of Medicine Scholarly Excellence, Leadership Experiences, Collaborative Training (SELECT) program. She and the SELECT team administer the Emotional Social Competency Inventory (ESCI) to SELECT students several times throughout medical school using a model that focuses on self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management.  The ESCI uses those four focus areas to help students understand how to use their own emotional and social competency to communicate more effectively, a must for aspiring doctors.

“Emotional intelligence has always been important, but lately it’s been more of a topic of discussion given how [health care] organizations are set up to be more interprofessional with people moving between teams constantly,” Dr. Quinn said.

Emotional intelligence is simply about understanding what’s happening and finding ways to mitigate the effects of certain emotions, she said.  This is one of the first steps to preventing burnout in medical school and in the profession of medicine.

“Medical school is a big lifestyle change.  Students come into a new setting and must develop new processes for how they retain lecture content and study. If we can give them the tools ahead of time to recognize the signs that things are starting to slip, it’s like training your brain what to do before it happens,” she said.  “We can combat burnout by being self-aware. The more aware our medical students are, the better doctors they are likely to become.”

Dr. Quinn is a sub-award principal investigator for an $880,000 grant recently awarded to Rochester Institute of Technology professor Casey Miller from the National Science Foundation INCLUDES program, a national program that seeks to boost efforts to create a more diverse workforce in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). The parent award is an $8 million award, which is one of the NSF’s 10 Big Ideas for 2018.  Dr. Quinn is developing an assessment to gauge applicants’ behaviors related to emotional and social characteristics of successful PhD researchers, such as self-awareness, adaptability and grit.

“The short-term goal is to come up with a valid, reliable instrument that programs can use as part of their application process to assist in deciding which applicants they are going to accept into their PhD programs. Long term, I’d like to expand that into all professional degree programs,” she said.

With additional grant funding, she hopes to be able to focus her research to other professional degrees career paths including medical degrees, and Juris Doctorates, in addition to all PhD programs.

Photo by Fredrick J. Coleman, USF Health Communications and Marketing

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The second group of students arrived this week for USF Health’s SELECT MD program, which chooses medical students based on criteria beyond the traditional science GPA and MCAT scores.

At 44 strong, the SELECT cohort of the Morsani College of Medicine Class of 2016 is more than double that of last year’s inaugural group of 19.  They emerged from 1,100 applicants interested in SELECT as among the best matches for the program, which seeks students with high emotional intelligence, including the empathy, creativity and passion to change patient care, the health of communities and the medical profession.  

At the USF Health CAMLS Virtual Patient Care Center, incoming SELECT MD student Kristian Johnson, left, interviews standardized patient Alicia Menzies during an exercise that draws upon the principles of emotional intelligence. Observing in the background are student Peter Hwu and Dr. Kristan Bresnan of the Lehigh Valley Health Network.

The success of first-year year students in blazing the SELECT trail is evident in the stellar backgrounds of the new students, who come from such institutions as Stanford, Emory, Georgetown and the University of Pennsylvania.

“I’m extremely proud of all our accepted students, including the SELECT group,” said Stephen Klasko, MD, MBA, dean of the USF Health Morsani College of Medicine and CEO of USF Health.  “They are impressive young people who truly will change the face of healthcare. They are proof of what a success SELECT has already become.”

SELECT student Jamie Dyal,left, practices his injection technique (without actually dispensing medication) with assistance from fellow medical student Keith Groshans. The faculty-supervised orientation activity at CAMLS gave  students a chance to  practice basic skills used during health fairs.

Positive feedback from the inaugural group of students and faculty mentors led to SELECT’s accelerated growth over the last year, Alicia Monroe, MD, the college’s vice dean for educational affairs, said in a Tampa Tribune article this June.  Eventually, the college expects to admit 56 SELECT students a year, in addition to a core medical class of 120 students. Dr. Monroe said

The SELECT program’s emphasis on emotional intelligence and how it relates to effective leadership appealed to Kristian Johnson, 25, of Eagleville, PA.  Johnson organized and participated in an NYU student volunteer relief and clean-up effort along the Gulf Coast following Hurricane Katrina, and ran the New York City Marathon to raise money for cancer research.

“SELECT was exactly what I was looking for,” Johnson said. “I believe it’s very important for physicians to be able to put themselves in their patients’ shoes and understand the challenges people face in negotiating the healthcare system.  To be an effective leader you need to connect with your patients and the team you work with.”

SELECT students Nick James and Rachel Snow at one of the blood glucose monitoring stations.

Johnson conducted research in interventional radiology at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in NYC for more than two years and for a summer at Stanford Medical Center. But, she has also worked several summers as a physical therapy aide and nursing assistant to help pay for her education.

“These are tough jobs that often go unnoticed, but having had that experience gives me a better perspective about the importance of every member of the healthcare team.”

In addition to Johnson, who holds an interdisciplinary MS degree in medical science from USF, the second class of SELECT students includes:

• Jamie Dyal, 26, of Sarasota, did his undergraduate work at Stanford University and recently completed a master’s degree in bioethics from the University of Pennsylvania. His honors thesis explored factors that affect the end-of-life decision making and medical care of terminally ill physicians. Dyal has made several clinical service mission trips to Ghana and Uganda, Africa.
• Elizabeth Ciaravino, 23, a Georgetown University graduate who grew up in Tampa, is trilingual (English, Spanish and Italian).  Ciaravino was an American Cancer Society Fellow in Dr. Daniel Sullivan’s research laboratory at Moffitt Cancer Center. She has served as a reading and writing tutor in Washington, DC schools, helped set up mobile medical clinics for health screenings on a medical mission trip to Costa Rica, and painted houses and planted sustainable gardens as a volunteer in the Dominican Republic.
• Michael Goodwin, 21, who grew up in Allentown, PA, has a bachelors’s degree in physics from St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. He worked in radiation oncology research at University of Pennsylvania Hospital to help design a new laser delivery apparatus. Fluent in sign language, Goodwin has worked as both a Special Olympics and hospice volunteer.

New student Elizabeth Ciaravino in one of the standardized patient exam rooms at USF Health CAMLS.

 They all echo Johnson’s enthusiasm about following in the footsteps of the first class – the SELECT pioneers who will help to mentor the new students along with faculty.  And, as they integrate into the core Class of 2016, they are eager to leave their own imprint.

“I’d hope we can take the best of SELECT and build upon the great foundation that has been created for us,” Johnson said.

The 44 SELECT MD students in the USF Health Morsani College of Medicine’s Class of 2016 emerged from 1,100 applicants.

Incoming SELECT medical students toured USF Health CAMLS.

 – Photos and Video by Eric Younghans, USF Health Communications