Nicole Beatty

Hometown: Circle Pines, Minn. Former Career: Physician Assistant for four years College and major: Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, Minn., Psychology and Biology Likely to do on a free weekend: "I just love being with friends, relaxing. In summer, I love being on the water with friends so we can boat, ski, canoe, swim." Guilty Pleasure: "I'm sometimes tempted not to separate the recycling." Best Advice from Parents: "To think about what it would be like to be in someone else's shoes." Best Advice from College Professors: "To see all the sunrises and sunsets you can; climb up to the next peak - nothing is impossible." Best Advice from Patients: "Oh, so much! It's not always finding a fix for a condition that matters most - it's being willing to really listen and hear them, and then saying the right thing that shows you really heard them and care about their suffering."

Meet Nicole Beatty,
Mayo Medical School Class of 2010

Working for four years as a physician assistant in a busy urban emergency room gave Nicole Beatty a key insight into herself: She felt such an intense sense of patient advocacy that she wanted to do more for patients. She knew she was ready to go back to school, and that it would be medical school.

Explains Nicole: "I just loved my experiences in the ER, especially the patient contact. And while I was able to do a lot for most of my patients, there were times I couldn't do much. I just didn't have an answer for them - I felt the limits of my PA training." Born in Circle Pines, Minn., Nicole graduated several years earlier from Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minn., where she majored in psychology and biology. She trained in Chicago for her physician assistant degree.

Why Mayo Medical School?
While Nicole wanted both the rights and the responsibility to set the course of patient care, she also wanted to work as an integrated member of a highly trained team. Mayo Medical School fit her needs perfectly. Its recognized excellence in leadership, team building and patient care through integrated, multidisciplinary collaborations were exactly what she sought.

"Because of my experience working as a PA, I really knew the value of a high-functioning team; it isn't just a catchy phrase for me," Nicole says. "Mayo appealed to me because that's the model of medicine it has always practiced - they aren't just discovering it. Anytime we needed a second opinion in the ER when I was a PA, the name Mayo would come up and you could just see that people considered it the best. There was a reverence for Mayo."

Members of the incoming class of 2010 are the first to experience the new medical curriculum, which was introduced in July 2006. Nicole was thrilled to find its first course was "Leadership." Says Nicole: "By starting our medical education with that course, Mayo really sends a strong message of their commitment to training the best health care leaders, and by doing that, they gave us a framework of leadership that we can use to evaluate all our experiences here. It's been really, really great."

The School/Life Thing
Nicole's background is different from most of her 42 classmates in two key features. She came to medical school as a working health care professional seeking a second career, and she's married—which meant she had to accommodate her husband's career when pondering the move.

These differences actually helped enhance the camaraderie among the class of 2010. Not only can she regale her classmates with lively stories of life as a PA in a busy, big-city ER, she and her husband first settled in a lakeside community that was an easy commute to the Twin Cities with its large job market, yet just 20 miles from Rochester – and it became the waterfront social hub for the early bonding days of MMS students. "I just love being on the water with friends," Nicole says. "It's been really great to be able to throw a big barbeque and have my classmates over to boat, water ski, paddleboat, canoe - I'm so surprised by and interested in my classmates, especially by how helpful everyone is in class. It's not competitive at all."

The Future
Where will it all lead? Nicole's love for emergency medicine endures. It looks now as if she will specialize in it - though with so many experiences yet to come, that could change.