Marina Cox has always known she wanted to pursue a career in medicine.
It’s a passion that only grew stronger growing up in Kalamazoo, so when she learned she had been accepted into WMed, she knew, “this is where I’m meant to be.”
Now in her second year at the medical school, a typical day for Marina begins at 6:30 a.m. She wakes up, has some coffee, eats breakfast, packs her lunch and is out the door by 7:30 a.m., embarking on her 20-minute commute to the W.E. Upjohn M.D. Campus for morning lectures.
Students have the option to watch lectures remotely from home, but Marina prefers to attend in-person, admitting it’s much easier to focus and it’s great to be among friends.
“It would be very easy for me to kind of stay in my own lane and do my own thing at home, but I really wanted to make sure I was connected with my classmates, connected with my friends because it's a long process, it's grueling,” Marina said. “To be surrounded by people that know what you're going through and to go through it with them is really important for me.”
Lectures generally run from 8 a.m. to noon. Each lecture is about an hour, with short breaks in between. Subjects range from general physiology of various body systems and progress to specific diseases.
With lectures in the rearview, Marina takes time from noon to 1 p.m. to eat lunch and catch up with friends in a study room. Her afternoons on campus vary depending on the day of the week.
On Mondays, she heads up to the seventh floor for Anatomy Lab. Each session kicks off with a quiz, followed by walk throughs of different radiology cases led by WMed faculty.
From there, Marina and her classmates break off into groups and head into the Gross Anatomy lab where they are tasked with identifying different structures on prosected cadavers. The lab generally wraps up by 4 p.m.
“I really love anatomy,” Marina said. “It’s one of my favorite parts of the curriculum. I think our faculty is incredible, and it makes it a lot easier to understand what's happening in the body when you can understand where it's all located and how things are functioning on a more anatomic level.”
Tuesday afternoons and Thursday mornings are blocked out in Marina’s schedule as part of the medical school curriculum, giving her the flexibility to pack in some additional study time or relax, depending on how she feels.
- 6:30 a.m. - Wake Up, Breakfast, Coffee, Pack Lunch
- 7:30 a.m. - Drive to Campus (20-minute commute)
- 8:00 a.m. - Lectures (three to four each day, short breaks in-between)
- Noon - Eat lunch with friends
- 1:00 p.m. - Anatomy Lab, Clinical Skills, or Principles of Medicine
- 4:00 p.m. - Homeward bound
- 4:30 p.m. - Spend Time with Family, Eat Dinner
- 6:00 p.m. - Study Time
- 9:00 p.m. - Shower, Relax, Read a Book
- 10:30 p.m. - Bedtime
A Day in the Life of M2 Marina Cox
On Wednesday afternoons, Marina attends Principles of Medicine from 1 to 4 p.m. The course covers the socioeconomic aspects of medicine, including professionalism, leadership, ethics, advocacy, patient safety, health policy, healthcare law, research design, epidemiology, and more.
Marina particularly enjoys the community panels featuring individuals of diverse populations.
“We'll have people from the community come in that are of the LGBTQ+ population or recently we had a panel on disability, so we were able to bring in people from the community to tell us what experiences they have had with physicians in the past, good or bad, and how we can learn from them and what can we do better or differently when we're physicians,” Marina said. “These are the people we're going to be treating. Hearing directly from them what we can do to be better physicians is really important.”
Thursday afternoons from 1 to 5 p.m. Marina participates in Clinical Skills where she learns and practices skills physicians use every day including communication and interpersonal skills, teamwork, history taking, and physical examinations. Sessions are held in WMed’s virtual hospital with high-fidelity patient simulators as well as in WMed’s virtual clinic with standardized patients.
“It's really good practice, especially for people that didn't have as much clinical experience heading into medical school, just to get the hang of interacting with the patient and small things like knowing how to adjust their gown to listen to heart sounds,” Marina said. “To be able to gain some confidence and get your footing on how to do that is great.”
Most days at the W.E. Upjohn M.D. Campus for Marina wrap up around 4:30 or 5 p.m. She then returns home to enjoy dinner with her family and a bit of relaxation.
By 6 p.m., Marina is studying, which often consists of going over earlier lectures, finishing independent learning modules, making note sheets or reviewing flash cards. She typically calls it quits on studying at about 9 p.m. each night.
Marina often ends her evening reading a good book before going to bed around 10:30 p.m.
“That's my way to decompress before I go to bed,” Marina said. “I take time to escape the world into a book for a little bit and I never read anything difficult or nonfiction. It's always something fiction that's just a break, something fun.”
Outside of her daily course schedule, Marina participates in a handful of student interest groups at WMed, including the Dermatology Interest Group, Volleyball Interest Group, and HEAL, an early introduction to health careers group that invites high school students to WMed once a month on Saturdays to study body systems through team-based learning sessions and activities.
Marina is also a member of the Student Ambassadors interest group where she sits on interview panels fielding questions from prospective students and offers tours of the W.E. Upjohn M.D. Campus.
Overall, Marina said she is very grateful to be at WMed.
“I've had an incredible experience here,” she said. “It feels like everybody here really has my back. All of the faculty want me to succeed, all of my classmates want me to succeed. It's a pretty small class and so we all get to know each other and it feels like a little family, which when med school is so hard, it's nice to be surrounded by people that all have your back, and all just want you to get to the same place. ... The community that we've built here is special.”