What the Virus Spread This Rural Mission

This Rural Mission is a podcast brought to you by Michigan State University College of Human Medicine, the Herbert H. and Grace A. Dow Foundation, and the Michigan State University College of Human Medicine, Family Medicine Department. We are so excited to bring you season three. I'm your host, Julia Terhune, and I hope you enjoy this episode.
So, I remember it being the week of March 9th, that we got the news about us needing to pretty much convert our lives in the office, working directly with our students and I remember that being the last time that I walked into the office until I went back in late July.
That's Susan Tincknell. She's the director of student programs at our Marquette Campus in the Upper Peninsula. In November, I asked her to recount what's gone on since that early March date last year. It felt like we were talking about a time long, long ago, but I also hear from Susan in just a bit the impacts of COVID on our health care systems and our medical education at MSU, all of those impacts are happening still and right now. To explain a few of these ongoings, I want to walk you through a very rough timeline of everything that happened to our students from that March 9th date, going onwards to today. COVID landed in the United States, but seemed to relegate itself to major cities. That was until it didn't anymore. When it hit Michigan, it felt inevitable and unbelievable at the same time. Maybe you can resonate with that feeling as well.
Once it hit Michigan, our students were pulled first from the Traverse City Campus, and then from all of our other six campuses. The reason really was that there just wasn't enough personal protective equipment to keep our students safe. And the more people gathered in one space, the more likely they were to contract and spread the virus, so they were pulled. Since our curriculum at MSU put students in clinical settings starting year one, all 800 of our students at the college were not in clinical settings for several months. Now, doctors, medical students, residents, all of these individuals who go into a medical career are smart and resilient people. It seems like an understatement, they obviously are smart and resilient, but you'll never really know how smart and how resilient you can be until those skills are put to the test.
And the physician faculty at MSU and our medical students are some of the most resilient and smartest people I know. Within days of things going into lockdown, our college had online learning that was keeping students on track with their education and helping give them the skills they needed to tackle COVID-19 when they return to the clinic. The online education that was implemented was revolutionary. But as we know from other forms of online experiences, it's not ideal and can't last forever, especially when you're talking about clinical learning. Nevertheless, it was the best thing we could do with what we had, but learning wasn't the only thing that moved online.
Match Day 2020, and Match Day was Friday, March 20th. And that was supposed to be a grand celebration, in-person to celebrate some really hard work and accomplishment in finding out where everybody goes to residency. And that was converted last minute to virtual. It's not the same. That was really an eye-opener that this is actually happening and we're not able to gather with people. And moving forward, that same thing happened with commencement.
We are going to share the perspectives of students on this episode. Something that I think many people are interested in, but there was a whole group of non-clinical people who have been affected by this pandemic and their story is important to hear too. There's something we at the leadership in rural medicine programs share about our campuses. And that's the real personal connection you have with our staff and faculty and preceptors. But we don't just say that to promote our program, we say it because it's true. Not only that, but we have st