TCOM Student Article
By Jean Nie, OMS-II
This article was originally published in the September/October 2025 issue of Tarrant County Physician.
While weaving through the Oculus in New York City, I found myself drawn to a small storefront with walls covered in handwritten notes. The space, The Strangers Project, invited passersby to pause and read the anonymous stories of others—fragments of lives laid bare in ink. I wandered slowly, absorbing confessions of heartbreak, illness, hope, loss, and quiet resilience. As I read, I was reminded that every person is carrying something—often invisible, often unspoken—and how unjust it is to reduce a person to a single narrative, a surface impression, when human beings are anything but simple. Despite the many ways we might differ, I felt a deep familiarity with their words. Suddenly, in a city that often feels vast and indifferent, the room felt like a heartbeat—small, warm, and profoundly human.
Fast forward to my first year of medical school. That experience stuck with me, and I found myself trying to recreate a version of that space—this time in the halls of my own school. I organized a “reflection wall” for SOMA, a student-led advocacy organization, not knowing how it would be received. Nevertheless, I wanted this reflection wall to serve as a space for medical students to share their feelings and thoughts in the midst of a seemingly never-ending study session. Over the course of the day, I watched as students came in, some in waves, some peeping their heads in out of curiosity. Some students I knew, others I had only smiled at in passing. But gradually, the wall became filled with notes. Some were long, taking up the entire allotted half page, while others left short yet equally impactful single liners. The vision for this wall was to provide a space for students to pause in the middle of the relentless pace, to process what we often suppress, and to speak without needing a response—only to be heard.
There were papers written with bubbly letters that matched bubbly attitudes. Several students wrote about the moment they knew they wanted to enter medicine: a family member that was saved, a compassionate healthcare worker who made an exception to hospital policy so a patient could say goodbye to a loved one, and personal anecdotes of healthcare saving the writer. These stories echoed familiar themes of wanting to make a difference, to help people feel seen, to be a source of hope during dreary times. Many mentioned that despite the difficult journey, they are reminded of the privilege it is to be in this position, and by expressing gratitude, they are able to see the light at the end of the tunnel, even during the late nights.
But alongside the gratitude, the wall became a fuller picture. Many of the students were tired—beyond tired. Not just from studying, but from what feels like a constant negotiation between who they are and who this profession demands them to be. There were reflections that whispered of burnout and others that screamed of it. There were fears that ran deeper than fatigue—fears that this profession might not deliver on its promise of fulfillment and that a patient’s care would be determined by billing codes and insurance coverage rather than sound clinical judgment. Some reflections expressed fear of the future as well as scars from the past, especially moments where the healthcare system abandoned them or a family member physically or fiscally.
But the pain extended beyond the personal. Threaded through many reflections was a sense of despair about the system itself. Students wrote about the deep inequities they had witnessed: how wealth shapes not only who becomes a doctor but who gets to see one. How poverty, often the root of illness, remains beyond the reach of prescriptions. How medicine tends to treat symptoms while the structural causes—housing, food insecurity, systemic injustice—go untouched. One note captured a particularly painful irony: that even physicians, trained to heal others, often struggle to care for themselves.
I stood in front of the wall in silence, letting each emotion resonate with a part of me that’s felt it before. Like those notes in the Oculus storefront, the ones we wrote were acts of vulnerability—honest, unfiltered moments that revealed the beating heart beneath the white coat. That tension between inspiration and injury felt like the core of the wall. I realized that in creating this space for my classmates, I found myself reconnecting with the essence of why I chose medicine: to confront, to share, and to bear witness to the human experience alongside others. Because at its core, medicine is not just a discipline of diagnoses and treatments—it is a deeply human endeavor. It asks us not only to learn but to listen. Not only to act but to bear witness. Science may guide our hands, but it is our humanity that allows us to truly heal.
The fears expressed by my peers are real, and some will undoubtedly come to pass, if they haven’t already. But within the fatigue and frustration, I felt a reprieve. It’s in these moments of reflection, both quiet and collective, that I find the thread connecting all of us—not just as students or future physicians but as human beings. If we can protect that thread and create space for our own humanity as fiercely as we do for our patients’, then perhaps we won’t merely endure this profession; we’ll have a hand in reshaping it.
Tarrant County Physician Online 