Student Spotlight: Impana Shetty

 

    When I first started at Pitt this past fall, many people told me that grad school would go by fast. I was pretty skeptical, especially since a two-year program seemed like a pretty long time! Now that I am more than halfway into my first year, I have realized that grad school truly does go by fast. It seems like we were learning about taking pedigrees only a few weeks ago, and now we are having the second-year students give us presentations on clinical rotations. With rotations starting in a few months, I have been starting to seriously think about what I would like to do for my optional rotation.

    At Pitt, students have space for a three-week optional rotation in their rotation schedules. The optional rotation is a time for students to get experience in a specialty they are interested in. A few of the rotations on the list of possibilities are working at Ophthalmic Genetics, the UPMC Clinical Genomics Laboratory, and the Muscular Dystrophy Clinic. You can also get extra exposure in a certain rotation or even craft your own rotation with the help of the program directors and site supervisors. If you want to spend your optional rotation outside at Pittsburgh, you can use this time as an opportunity to either rotate at a place close to home or work at a place you might want to live in after grad school. If there is a particular optional rotation that a second-year student has recently done, you can talk to them about their experience to get a better idea of what the rotation is like.

    Being able to choose an optional rotation is exciting since there are so many different possibilities you can choose from. However, with all of these options, it can also be overwhelming to pick the one rotation you want to do! As I go through the list of the optional rotation possibilities, I have started narrowing down my top three choices based on the specialties I may want to pursue in the future. After taking a GeneDx seminar series last semester, I became curious about laboratory genetic counseling and working in a non-clinical setting. As a result, the options that are in my preliminary top three list are rotating at GeneDx, focusing on exome testing, and conducting research. Since I do not have prior experience in these areas, I think that rotating at one of these places would be a great way to get a better understanding of these specialties and see which one could be a good fit for me in the future!

-Impana Shetty