How To Juggle Multiple Passions as A Medical Student, Business Owner and Future Ophthalmologist- with Khalid El Jack

🎥 Join host Dr. Jasmine Weiss and aspiring ophthalmologist Khalid El-Jack in part to of our conversation on the  Black Med Connect Podcast! In this insightful conversation, you will embark on:

👨🏿‍⚕️ Exploring Ophthalmology: Khalid shares his journey and the importance of early specialty exploration and mentorship for premedical students interested in ophthalmology careers.

💼 Highlighting How to Juggle Entrepreneurship and School: Listen in to learn more about Medschoolbro as Khalid, the cofounder, shares more about the invaluable Discord community that offers affordable support, webinars, and resources tailored to premedical students navigating the challenging journey to medical school.

🔥 Enjoying the Rapid Fire Bolus Round: Tune in for a rapid-paced session where Khalid shares intriguing answers to rapid-fire fun questions.  Get a glimpse into the life of this future physician!

🌟 Bonus Content: Access our exclusive pre-med guide featuring essential resources such as MCAT study schedules, personal statement examples, and research opportunity templates by commenting "medschoolbro" on our IG page!

Visit https://medschoolbro.com/collections/discord for more details, and don't forget to follow Khalid @eljack101 on IG for additional inspiration and advice.

🔗 Subscribe to @blackmedconnect and Black Med Connect on YouTube for even more valuable content tailored to premedical students.  Visit bmedconnect.com for more tips on your journey to medicine!

Transcript

Dr. Jasmine Weiss: 0:00

Hey, are you looking for a community to help you prepare for the MCAT and the medical school application process? You're in for a treat, because today is part two of our episode with future Dr Khaled L Jack. He's the founder of a discord community to help support you along your journey. In this episode of the BlackMed Connect podcast, we jump in and talk all about his entity. We talk about his experiences as a medical student and more, and if you want to stick around, there's a special bonus for you at the end. But you've got to watch all the way to the end to get that bonus. Let's jump right into the episode and so you're maneuvering through your clinical years. You've done your preclinical classroom work. What got you interested in ophthalmology and how did you begin to navigate, making sure you were going to be the best applicant possible to match into an ophthalmology residency program? For the audience who may not know, that's an extremely competitive field, an extremely competitive field.

Khalid El Jack: 1:23

So I got through my pre-clerkship classes and they still didn't necessarily know what I wanted to do. And then I started my clerkship year and I was navigating different opportunities and one close friend of mine at a different school brought to my attention was a program called the Minority Ophthalmology Mentorship Program. It's also called the MOM Program and it's sponsored by the AAO and it's specifically for underrepresented minority students interested in ophthalmology. So I got admitted to that program. Thankfully, and I think that really tuned me into ophthalmology I was able to go to the national meeting. They gave me a mentor, like directly you get assigned a mentor, and I was able to continue with that mentor. I actually called him literally last week. He was talking about my match. So I was just like I got tuned into the field by that mentorship program.

Khalid El Jack: 2:15

And then I went to shadow an ophthalmologist at my med school and thankfully we had one week of ophthalmology actually in our clinical rotations. So there was a week where I always kept it in my back pocket, so like I would go through my rotations and then mentally I'd compare it, I'd be like, okay, I just did pediatrics, do I want to do this more than that? And then I would think, okay, no, I still want to do this more. And then I continued thinking that as I went through, and after every single clerkship, I was like, okay, this is the thing that I still really want to do.

Dr. Jasmine Weiss: 2:47

I love that. I love that, especially that comparison. I think people don't realize. Everybody doesn't know, even when you say you're going to do one thing, because we know. Obviously when you're trying to get into med school, the more clear you can paint the picture that you have direction and that you're excited about a specific thing. It just helps you to be more competitive. But everybody knows on every admissions committee that people are going to change their minds. So that mechanism that you had to like say okay, I really like this. You know I rate this a 10 out of 10. Can something exceed that or not? That's a really cool way to think about. You know how you're going to choose your specialty over time as you're in your clinical years. So that's really cool.

Dr. Jasmine Weiss: 3:28

And then the other pro tip that I want to make sure we highlight, because, again, I think you're dropping some huge tips to find mentorship opportunities and programs that help you navigate the career you're interested in, even in med school, and I'll even take it a step further and say even for you, even in residency, because some people think you know, keep your head down, do your classes, do your clerkships, but you really do need to think about what interest groups you're going to join what national organizations exist to help you reach your goals and, to your point, the program you were able to join to make sure you knew all the steps you needed to know to be a successful applicant.

Dr. Jasmine Weiss: 4:07

So can you say that it was the American Academy of Ophthalmology?

Khalid El Jack: 4:11

So the American Academy of Ophthalmology like is the sponsoring organ?

Khalid El Jack: 4:15

Yeah, the program itself is called the Minority Ophthalmology Mentorship Program, also called like MOM or MOM program is the abbreviation I will.

Khalid El Jack: 4:24

I actually thought of one other, one other tip to answer the second half of your question. I think one thing that's also helpful is if you have any interests or indication that you might want to pursue like a competitive specialty, like whatever ophthalmology, dermatology, plastics there are a lot of competitive specialties it would help to identify that interest earlier rather than later because, as I mentioned, I didn't really know until after my preclinicals and then into clerkship here, which isn't super late but like relative to it's not, it's not early certainly. So I felt like I was always playing catch up, Like I had to do a lot of research and I would do that research like at night, during the time that I'm studying for my shelf exams, where it's like I actually ended up having a lot more free time Earlier on in medical school and had I known I had this interest, or even if I had known that it could be even a potential interest, I could have really saved myself a lot of time and effort doing that stuff earlier.

Dr. Jasmine Weiss: 5:21

That makes sense. So the earlier you know, the more, the more time you'll have to explore your interest.

Khalid El Jack: 5:29

Exactly.

Dr. Jasmine Weiss: 5:31

Gotcha, that's really good. And do you feel like let's talk a bit about the nuts and bolts of it? Right, Because ophthalmology is competitive because of the scores you need and research opportunities and experiences. What things do you think are critical to the future ophthalmologists of the world who you'll be mentoring one day when you're a resident and an attending?

Khalid El Jack: 5:52

Yeah. So I think if you break it down into different buckets, so I think one is developing interests, doing electives. So after my clerkship here I did electives within ophthalmology, like at my home program. There are some schools that don't have home ophthalmology departments, which makes it more challenging but not impossible. So that involves like doing away rotations and that's again where you can like lean on mentors but I think doing the home rotations and doing them well so that, like, you have a good network of supporters, a good network of advocates, like in your own department, because ophthalmology and, I'm assuming, other fields that are really small, everybody knows everybody.

Khalid El Jack: 6:35

So you want to have like that reputation of oh, like Khaled he's that guy who was like working really hard in our department we can back his application, we can support it, we can advocate for him, like if it comes down to it. So like just similar to how, like a pre-med student is trying to do excellent in their like grades, you're trying to do excellent on your rotations and develop like a good reputation. Other buckets I would say like research is usually a core component. It depends on the institution in which you're trying to match in, but I would say having some research background would be very helpful. And then, finally, third bucket is like your network, so the network of mentors, people who can like write you letters of recommendation, people who can advocate for you when you've like identified. Oh, this is like the place I really want to go, and they might know somebody there or especially in these smaller fields. It's actually very helpful.

Dr. Jasmine Weiss: 7:31

Yes, absolutely the network. You got to keep building it from start to finish, from the time you are pre-med. It really never ends that you're going to need community support all the way through. And you mentioned the research. Can you share what kind of cool project that you get to work on during this time?

Khalid El Jack: 7:46

Yeah, I think probably my most interesting project. I actually looked at the social media platform. Reddit is something that I was pretty interested in and we analyzed it. We specifically looked at the Reddit forum r slash glaucoma, which is just a sub Reddit on the site, looking at glaucoma patients and basically looking at the conversations that these patients are having and what kind of trends arise in the conversations. And we found that the number one type of conversations that patients are having on the site is conversations related to patients, related to prognosis.

Khalid El Jack: 8:19

So, like these patients are worried that their visual prognosis is poor and they're afraid that they're, like, going to go blind. And this is important because Reddit is actually like an anonymous website so anybody can can write anything. So these patients are actually a kind of a risk for misinformation because anybody can go on Reddit and like comment hey, take this medication, or I used to take this medication. So it's important for physicians to kind of understand this data so that, like when they have patients in person, they can kind of work on some of these top questions, so that patients don't necessarily expose themselves online to that, to that risk.

Dr. Jasmine Weiss: 8:56

I love that for for so many reasons to your point, our patients are absolutely getting information on the internet. And a lot of it isn't necessarily backed by evidence or may work in a small group but not larger groups. Like we know, most times a lot of studies try to have as many patients as possible enrolled in the trials to make sure that we know the results generalize to a whole population.

Dr. Jasmine Weiss: 9:21

But people don't know those things when they're just, you know, googling a question or on Reddit. To your point, that's a really cool project to figure out what are the challenges that patients are really worried about and what are the common struggles that they're worried about. And the other really interesting thing about what you just said, especially for our audience members who may be looking for research exposure opportunities, research experiences. So many people, especially in college, only think of research in one particular way.

Khalid El Jack: 9:51

Yeah.

Dr. Jasmine Weiss: 9:52

So so for you to do a project first of all that's patient focused, but also social media focused, is really creative, and there are a lot of different studies that look at how social media impacts health and how technology impacts health. So everything's not always you know, a lab or a mouse or animal model. Some of us that, but a lot of it can be really cool creative experiences like the one you're doing.

Khalid El Jack: 10:14

Yeah, I would say, and this was something that like didn't necessarily like. A lot of times people reach out to professors who do existing research and then they just adopt a project. But this was something that I actually like generate, like generated. The question reached out to like the computer science department, and I suggest that because If you don't have like, it's okay to not have a deep interest in drug development or well, and that's okay and there, and it's okay to love that stuff, like. But if you have an interest that's not necessarily the norm, it's okay to pursue that In terms of like residency and things like that. If that's your passion, people will see that those are your passions and that that's a respectable way, even if it's a bit different.

Dr. Jasmine Weiss: 10:58

Yeah, yeah, and I'd argue even respectable, and it makes you stand out right. Because, you're doing something so unique that it immediately captures people's attention. So very, very cool that you were able to pursue that interest that you had, and you know some other interests that we both share are medical education and entrepreneurship, and so I'd love to take a moment now to talk about kind of your passion and your business that you have, and if you could share more about it with the audience, that would be fantastic.

Khalid El Jack: 11:30

Yeah, me and a classmate earlier on in medical school, like four years ago, we did a lot of freelance like MCAT tutoring and things of that nature. But one of the things we realized about providing those services is number one it's incredibly time intensive to learn every single thing about like one specific applicant. And then number two, it's incredibly expensive and burdensome for the applicant themselves. Oftentimes if they're going like major corporations, they're paying like thousands of dollars in admissions packages or MCAT tutoring. So, fast forward four years now.

Khalid El Jack: 12:04

In our fourth year, when we've been pretty free in terms of our time, we developed an idea that we were able to answer questions to a lot of students for a lot for a much more affordable price point. So we use the platform discord. It's like a conversation platform and we partnered with a popular social media creator in the space. The name is Med School bro. He has about 1.5 million followers across, like all of his social media following, and we created a discord community in which me and a classmate are there kind of on an on demand basis like answer students questions and interact with students across the country and across the world.

Dr. Jasmine Weiss: 12:46

That's amazing. And so to your point of being creative. That's super creative to kind of partner with an influencer and create a community around answering questions to help people make sure they're successful on their journey to getting ready for Med School. And so you mentioned that you did some freelance kind of tutoring stuff. What made you want to solidify this as a, as an entity? Because, of course, for me, I'm excited about this. Right, because how amazing is it for you, as a medical student, to to start an entity? Right, because so many people again, don't think about how you, as a person, in your passion and your interest, can impact people at every stage. You're on and you all are doing it. So, like, how did you go from like oh, this is something we enjoy doing, to like we really need to organize this and create a platform?

Khalid El Jack: 13:36

Yeah, I think we realized that as we work with more students, the amount of questions that overlap is actually very high. So if you work with 10 students, oftentimes like eight of them have very, very similar questions. So rather than having one person get charged an exorbitant amount of money to just answer a few questions, when everybody has the same concerns, it makes more sense to talk to them all in a group and if they do need like an additional question and they want to privately ask a question, that's fine too. So that was kind of like the generation of the idea. And then it became kind of like this, this entity as you're describing, when we reached out to like a larger creator, because they already had like products and systems in place. So we had to like legitimize what we were doing to kind of keep it on par with the existing brand that we were working with.

Dr. Jasmine Weiss: 14:28

Yeah, that's awesome. And a few times throughout this conversation you've mentioned systems, whether that be when you mentioned like having your study tips, or having your methods for studying, or having your method to figure out mentorship, or having your method to figure out your specialty. So to your point. Building this is hasn't you got to have a system in place for this too? And so how can students get involved with what you have going on with med school, bro, right now? What can they do to get involved with that?

Khalid El Jack: 14:59

Yeah, specifically, we offer, as I mentioned, a discord community. Some of the highlights we do weekly webinars every weekend specifically, like recent ones we've done have been on the MCAT. We partnered with universities, so actually last week we spoke with the University of Iowa. A couple weeks before that we spoke with Dartmouth University. But in terms of our service itself, it's subscription service through our website, which I can link actually after this talk and students can definitely check out more information on it from there. Fantastic.

Dr. Jasmine Weiss: 15:29

We'll be sure to share that information. In order to get that information, you got to go ahead, and if you haven't already subscribed to BlackMedConnect, right, you got to go to BlackMedConnect to subscribe and comment that you want the information. So we make sure you get it directly. And if you haven't joined our email newsletter that we send out every week, we'll be sure to drop that link in the newsletter too for this week. So be sure to go to bemedconnectcom to join the newsletter and we'll be sure to get you in touch with the med school bros and what they're doing. So I love what you're doing and I would love to know, from your perspective, where do you see this going in the next couple of years and how are you thinking about what you have going now with balancing the transition to becoming an intern and starting in your ophthalmology residency?

Khalid El Jack: 16:14

Yeah, I think. To answer the second happy question first, that's definitely something we've been thinking about because, of course, similar to how I was describing, like taking things one step at a time and thinking about the thing that's immediately in front of you, to be completely honest, like the priority is to be a good intern, to be a good ophthalmology resident, to be succeed in that. That's my main priority. That's like what I'm trained to do.

Khalid El Jack: 16:39

But, in terms of how this will continue, we have students that have been in the community, as well as other classmates at our medical school that are able to kind of handle a lot of the responsibilities that I've been handling, so that my participation won't be as much as time intensive moving forward. And then, where do I see this in a few years? So I think we're growing in a great direction by partnering with universities. Speaking with clubs, I hope that in the future we have representation on a lot of the campuses here in the United States and medical schools. We have students in there from many universities UCLA, uva, george Washington, there's just a name of few but all across the country. So I see it being a prominent thing on campuses when students are looking for, as I mentioned those peer mentors that they need on like an on-demand basis.

Dr. Jasmine Weiss: 17:36

I love that. I love that. So if you haven't, and if you are trying to figure out your way to medical school, you've got to go to this resource to check out the Med School Bros and what they're doing to make sure you can be successful along your journey. So I appreciate you sharing more about your entrepreneurial endeavor and I commend you for not only being awesome and getting to the stage where you are now. It's not easy. So many people don't realize that again, ophthalmology is extremely competitive, so you've had to do amazing things, and to still want to give back and still help the next generation is something that's extremely important, and so I appreciate all the efforts that you're putting in to do that.

Khalid El Jack: 18:16

Thank you so much For sure.

Dr. Jasmine Weiss: 18:19

All right, so we are going to jump into the next part, which is the very cool bolus round that we like to do. And for those who don't know, a bolus is when we give a patient fluids pretty quickly because there may have been a reason why either they're losing blood or they may be very sick and so they need to get fluids quickly. And that's what we do when we give a bolus in the emergency room or elsewhere in the hospital. And so this is our rapid-fire Q&A round. And so, callan, I'm going to ask you some questions and you can answer however you'd like, and, if you're ready, we're going to jump right in.

Khalid El Jack: 18:56

Sure, let's do it.

Dr. Jasmine Weiss: 18:58

All right, All right. So if you had to eat three foods for one month, only three. What would those foods be?

Khalid El Jack: 19:06

Okay, I need a type of fruit, so I'm going to go with clementines. I like clementines. I have them as a snack all the time. For us Sudanese people, we eat a lot of rice and chicken-based foods, so I'm going to go with a protein rice chicken type dish, and then we have this bean-based dish that is called Ful. That's our national dish, so I'm going to go with those three things.

Dr. Jasmine Weiss: 19:32

Oh, that's amazing. Tell me what's in that dish?

Khalid El Jack: 19:35

It's literally, I think, they're fava beans and then there's some oil and then you eat it with bread and they're usually served with breakfast. They're usually served breakfast, lunch and dinner in Sudan.

Dr. Jasmine Weiss: 19:47

Very cool. I love that, all right. So we got you three foods. Now my next question is if you had to choose between a vacation that's warm or you had to choose a vacation that's cold, which would you choose, and where would your destination be?

Khalid El Jack: 20:05

I would say absolutely a warm destination. So even though my family is from Sudan, I grew up in Wisconsin. It's incredibly cold, like negative 20 sometimes in the winter. Even it's like there's, it's pretty but like I still prefer, I prefer the warm. If I could go anywhere warm growing up it would be Sudan, but recently I've actually been to Egypt. I've been to Cairo. Egypt it's like a really really I enjoyed a lot and the thing about Egypt there's actually a lot of other cities that are really pretty in Egypt too that people may not necessarily go to.

Dr. Jasmine Weiss: 20:41

That's amazing. That's amazing. What other cities should people check out?

Khalid El Jack: 20:44

Yeah, there's one in particular. It's called Ergada. It's in the southeast, it's a beautiful city, it's like on the water, and then it's also about three hours from Luxor, which is where, like the Valley of the Kings, a lot of the famous like archaeological structures are too.

Dr. Jasmine Weiss: 21:04

Very neat. I would. I definitely have Egypt on my list.

Khalid El Jack: 21:07

Yeah, it's a beautiful country, places to go, places to go.

Dr. Jasmine Weiss: 21:10

That's fantastic, all right, so we know that you would go to Egypt and Cairo and Ergada, and what was the other place?

Khalid El Jack: 21:17

Luxor.

Dr. Jasmine Weiss: 21:18

Luxor. Okay, we've got those. We know your destinations. Now, if I had to ask you if you wanted to buy, if you had a million dollars and you were gonna buy a new mode of transportation, what would you buy and why?

Khalid El Jack: 21:32

A new mode of transportation, I would say yeah, yeah, no, I would. I would default to a car, I think. I think a million dollars is a lot for a car. I don't know like it'd be a pretty, pretty fancy car, but I would. I think I think the reason I say car is because I'm the type of person like when I get a gift, I want something that I could use on a daily basis, like a new laptop or like something that I'm using all the time. So I would say like, even though there are other things I could get, a car I know I would use on a daily basis.

Dr. Jasmine Weiss: 22:05

I love that. Fair enough, you can share the rest of the wealth with others. What type of car would you get?

Khalid El Jack: 22:12

Oh man, I'm not even into fancy cars like that. I would get something, probably really basic, like a, like a Tesla or something, but I know that's only like I'd have like $950,000 left.

Dr. Jasmine Weiss: 22:25

Fair enough. Fair enough, you could use that money a lot of different ways. Then my last question is gonna be if you could well, it's not really a question, I take that If you could rep your organization, any organization you want I have a feeling I know what you're gonna say Share a little bit more and tell us what you would rep him and and how people can check you out. One more time.

Khalid El Jack: 22:46

Yeah, lastly, so we mentioned a bit earlier, but thankful to to have been working with the med school bro brand to create our our discord community. That's, that's exactly what I'm representing today. If you'd like to check us out, as Dr Weiss mentioned, it'll be on the newsletter, but specifically it'll send you to our website, where we have a lot more information outlined onto some of the features of our discord. And, yeah, just the one last plug for it. The whole point of creating it was that it's a much more affordable service versus going to like a major corporation and paying thousands of dollars.

Dr. Jasmine Weiss: 23:25

Excellent, excellent. So if you're looking for that affordable way to make sure you can ace the exam and get ready for med school, then that is the platform for you guys to check out, and so, with that being said, I just want to say thank you again, callit, for joining us on this episode of the BlackMed Connect podcast. We've we've really, really enjoyed what you've had to say.

Dr. Jasmine Weiss: 23:47

You shared such valuable information, and so we look forward to seeing what you do in the future and I know you'll be an awesome resident and we're looking forward to seeing how you progress along your journey.

Khalid El Jack: 24:00

Thank you so much.

Dr. Jasmine Weiss: 24:00

So you are welcome. You are welcome. So thank you everybody again for tuning in to the BlackMed Connect podcast. We had a great guest today, callit L Jack, or, as I should say, future Dr L Jack very, very soon, and if you want to check us out, I got a few things I need you to do. If you haven't done so already, please subscribe to BlackMed Connect. You can listen to us on all podcast platforms. So if you're walking or if you're studying or need some motivation, you can listen to us on our podcast platforms, or you can check us out on YouTube and subscribe there. And if you haven't followed us on social media, check us out on Instagram, tiktok, anywhere where you like to kind of check out social media. We're there as BlackMed Connect as well.

Dr. Jasmine Weiss: 24:48

So until next time, always remember I'm Dr Weiss, remember to dream without limits and we will see you on the next episode. Bye. We hope you enjoyed this week's episode with future Dr Khaled L Jack, part two of his interview, where we explored all about his entity with med school pro, the discord community that he has, and we talked about what it's like to Build something like this while you're a med student. So if you enjoyed this episode, then make sure you check out the bonus that I'm gonna share with you now. So if you watch the entire episode, then we have a special bonus for you. So, khaled, I'll let you share what that bonus is with our audience.

Khalid El Jack: 25:32

Thank you, dr Weiss. We're giving away our pre-med guide that we've created. So this is a 24 page guide created by me, my classmate and the med school bro team specific highlights in it. We have a MCAT study schedule in there. We have my own personal statement that I applied to medical school with. We also have an example of a medical school secondary that I used to apply to medical school and screenshots of my activity section used to apply to medical school and finally, there is a Template letter for sending out research opportunities professors. So if you ever confuse on how to reach out, we've got you covered on that.

Dr. Jasmine Weiss: 26:10

I Love that. I love that. So thank you all for watching and definitely definitely click on that resource, and I want you to comment med school bro down below so we can make sure you get that resource, if you enjoyed this episode. I have a few things I need you to do. I need you to be sure you like this video. Make sure you give it a thumbs up right now. Yep, now and Then I want you to subscribe to black med connect on YouTube and on all Podcast platforms, and don't forget to check us out on social media as well. Until next time, always remember to dream without limits. Bye.