Try It All

By Shiv Patel

Three activities I would like to do this summer:

1. Interview a clinical data scientist or physician involved in precision radiation planning. This appears valuable not just for my capstone work, but for my own understanding of how deeply technical innovation intersects with human care. I want to hear firsthand how practitioners are navigating the ethical and logistical questions that come with AI in oncology – how they weigh fairness, feasibility, and outcomes. On a personal level, I feel that these conversations will ground my work and remind me that the true “data points” are humans.
2. Sit in on a tumor board or clinical planning conference. These are the multidisciplinary meetings where decisions get made, where patient records, imaging, genomic results, and social determinants get weighed against each other. Watching how all those factors intersect in real time will enable me to view where access barriers arise – and how equity can become a part of the treatment conversation, not an afterthought. As someone who comes from a medically underserved and rural community, this will allow me to contrast Mayo’s decision-making within an elite institution with the day-to-day reality of many patients elsewhere.
3. If possible, travel to a satellite cancer center or community clinic affiliated with Mayo. This one is personal. I would like to know more about how the innovative care developed here gets translated (or doesn’t) in lower-resource settings. How do smaller, rural, or community-based clinics engage with AI-powered tools or genomic classifiers, if at all? It is one thing to innovate within a research center; it is another to get the innovation out of the building. This will inform my capstone directly in its focus on dissemination and access disparities.

Two skills I’m actively working on this summer:

1. Interdisciplinary communication. Precision oncology is deeply cross-functional – it blends medicine, bioinformatics, engineering, and ethics. Being able to speak across these domains is critical. This summer, I’m surrounded by professionals fluent in technical languages I’m still learning. Whether it’s asking questions in lab meetings, writing summaries of literature, or conducting interviews, I’m trying to develop the skill of translating complex ideas into digestible, actionable narratives.
2. Cultural humility and listening. While it’s a temptation to walk into a high-level research chamber and feel like I need to prove myself, I’m realizing how much more I gain by asking more thoughtful questions and listening without agenda. These skills are under NACE’s equity and inclusion competency, and they’re especially useful when trying to work out problems that disproportionately affect marginalized populations.

Quote:

“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.” – Rumi

Engaging in this work – a project on disparities in cancer care – consistently evokes heavy emotions: sadness, anger, and helplessness. And yet there’s also clarity, purpose, and possibility. The “wound” here is systemic – structural inequality in healthcare – but it’s also deeply personal. That’s what makes this summer experience meaningful.