For many, graduation offers a good excuse to move on, leave town, fly this coop. But for Hector Chong, who graduated last week from Creighton University School of Medicine in Phoenix, it’s a reason to stay and help people in his community.
I will be graduating from Creighton University Medical School, and then I start my diagnostic radiology residency here in the Valley. So I'll be here for at least the next five years, which I'm very excited about.
I went to Arizona State University, where I studied supply chain management. I got an internship and I realized I just didn't feel like I was making the impact that I wanted to make in people's lives. I started shadowing physicians and working in the emergency department, and from that point on I really fell in love with the field.
And when I grew up here, when we first came to the United States, my parents had no idea what the process was like to even go to university or anything like that. So I had really amazing people from the community take care of me and help me get to where I am today.
I was really fortunate to have met a diagnostic radiology resident during the very beginning of my third year. And, just, the more he talked about it, the more it started to become a good idea. And it mixes things that I really enjoy — the visual side of medicine with the anatomy and physiology side of things, and then also the technology side of it.
Radiology is one of those fields that's really at the forefront of all of that. I decided to do an elective in it. And from the moment I walked in the room, it just felt like home.
I had this preconceived notion of radiologists being kind of quiet, not very sociable physicians who just sat in a dark room and made reports. And that couldn't have been further from the truth. When you walk in, it's an amazing collaborative environment where physicians and residents are bouncing ideas off each other and they're saying, “Hey, what do you think of this? What do you think of that?”
So it was really that type of collaborative environment that completely sold me on the specialty.
There's this saying that comes from the Ignatian values of “cura personalis,” and what that means is taking care of the whole person.
For example, you get an elderly woman that comes into your clinic for high blood pressure and you find out that she just hasn't been taking her medications. And we're trained to dig deeper into that and really look at that person as an individual. So maybe it turns out that her husband is the one that normally picks up her medications or takes care of her and he recently suffered a stroke or passed away.
The way that we're trained is to be able to look at that and realize: Yeah, she's here for high blood pressure, but there's also this other side of things. And that's the emotional side of things and the mental side of things.
After I graduate, I have some road trips planned before I start, and then — I've worked basically my whole life to get to this point. I’m really excited to not only start residency, but also stay here at home and stay in the Valley and be part of the community.