The EthnoMed Podcast
The official podcast of EthnoMed.org, a website based in the Interpreter Services Department at Harborview Medical Center which serves as a cultural bridge connecting providers and patients with resources for cross-cultural medicine. The podcast features provider interviews, community highlights, and topical episodes related to cross-cultural medicine.
The EthnoMed Podcast
Provider Pulse Episode 1: Dr. Kimia Memar
The inaugural episode of the Provider Pulse interview series where we elevate diverse voices from across healthcare fields to learn the paths people took to their current roles in healthcare.
Dr. Kimia Memar is an internal medicine resident at the University of Washington Medical Center. She discusses her childhood in Iran, her early interest in engineering, and the reasons she transitioned to the field of medicine. She highlights the challenges faced by international students who are interested in medicine, as well as her deeply personal reasons for seeking a career in medicine.
Visit EthnoMed.org for additional resources. Follow us on YouTube and Instagram @EthnoMedUW
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Welcome to the EthnoMed Podcast, a community voice in the clinic. My name is Dr. Duncan Reed, a physician in the International Medicine Clinic at Harborview Medical Center and medical director of EthnoMed, a web resource for providers and patients with information for cross-cultural care. . Today we are launching a new interview series called Provider Pulse.
We elevate diverse voices from across healthcare fields to learn the paths people took to their current roles in healthcare.
Whether you are an undergraduate student considering a career in healthcare, a practicing health professional, or a member of the community, these conversations are for you. In this series, you will hear the personal stories of health professionals from diverse backgrounds.
How they found their path into medicine, what inspired them, and the challenges they overcame along the way. Our hope is that these stories will not only inspire you, but they will also highlight the diversity of voices in the medical field and deepen your understanding of the human experiences that shape healthcare.
Here is the voice of Dr. Kimia Memar, an intern in the University of Washington Internal Medicine Residency Program. We will hear her path to a career in medicine in our first episode.
📍 I want to do something with my life that is in line with what I've been through as a person. So I was just looking for ways to do something that had more to do with people. And all the tools that I needed to serve in the way that I wanted to with the human connection that I wanted so badly was in medicine. I didn't know anything else at the time.
Through my role as faculty advisor for the Minority Association of Pre-Medical students at the University of Washington, I have served as preceptor to a growing number of pre-health students through shadowing in the International Medicine Clinic. These students often told me there are two types of stories on the internet.
One type of story is about the incredibly successful pre-health student who aced the MCAT and has been accepted to a prestigious medical school. The other type of story is about a pre-health student who seemed to have done everything right, but was not accepted to school, and felt that their dreams were dashed.
It is my hope that you can find a third type of narrative in this series of interviews, the story of the person who discovered a field of medicine encountered adversity and ultimately prevailed, although perhaps the success they found was not the one they had initially been seeking.
These interviews are not intended to serve as how-to guides. They're intended to demonstrate the breadth of experiences that individuals from diverse backgrounds like you have encountered on their way to ultimately finding a career in medicine.
Thank you to the health professionals and students who have shared their stories
Here we start with Dr. Kimia memoir, who highlights the unique challenges of an international student and the unexpected insights gained from personal experience that ultimately led her to change her field of study and pursue a career in mediciNe
my name is Kimia and that's K I M I A. My last name is Memar.
So I'm from Iran, wasn't born here, came here with my student visa, and I was studying electrical engineering , and that's when I decided to go to med school.
I went on and got my electrical engineering degree. with a minor in mathematics, and then I wanted to do clinical research before med school . So I went and got a master's in bioengineering at the University of Kansas, and then I went to med school. K U M C.
Where in Iran are you from?
So my hometown is right next to the capital, Tehran. It's called Semnan, S E M N A N. It's a desert city, not a town. It's a city now. there's not much going on there.
And what do your parents do?
So, my mom is a retired high school and university instructor. And my dad is also retired right now. He's taking care of his mom.
He used to have his own shop where he did, like, with,, aluminum doors and windows actually takes a lot of skill.
And he had a store in the past with his brother, I believe
they were both back there for at least the past two generations, but I know that each of them, their ancestors are from other cities. It's actually relevant because my last name in Farsi, it means architect. And my dad actually, part of the work that he did was also, he was really good at building houses. He had built my childhood house himself. And his dad also did the same thing, and I think their ancestor was from this city called Isfahan, which is the center of architecture in Iran. My mom's ancestors are from another city. It's called Shiraz. It's kind of a cool city as well.
What were you interested in and how did you end up in the US?
Yeah, so I just, I think that I was raised a very ambitious person. I can't tell you how. I don't, I can't tell you what my mom and dad did for me to be I just kind of have that kind of mindset, but somehow I always knew that I was gonna go to another country. I always knew when people would ask me what you want to do, and this is before I was five, six years old, I want to go to college.
And then a few years later, they would ask me what you want to do, I would be like, I'm going to move to the U. S. I had no plans. I had no idea how to get there. I just had these ideas in my head. I think that my parents were really good at mathematics I feel like they taught me well and just knowing mathematics and physics, I feel like it made everything easier for me.
I've always had aspirations of ,this is what I'm going to do, I'm going to study, I'm going to learn, I'm going to gain knowledge. I feel like a lot of my childhood was focused on knowledge. So that's what drove me most of the time.
I have a sibling, she is nine years younger than me. So until the age of nine, I was kind of by myself.
So then a lot of your schooling just focused on knowledge acquisition, and you're really motivated. You had good teachers at home and inspiration at home, excelled in all these things, already had big plans to travel somewhere else already.
So then how did all of that line up?
When I think back, I just, the older I get, I realize how strange life is. I don't know if I just somehow, things that happened, just kind of planted these images in my head that I really wanted to, it was like this image that I wanted to get to. I just, I never knew how to do those things, but I figured, I knew there was a way, and I knew it was there for me.
And it wasn't a matter of, oh, I might not get there, or I might not. not have enough time or not enough money. I do feel privileged in a way because of just the way my parents were raised, especially my mom. Her dad Was this really just successful person, just kind of made a business for himself literally with his two hands without a rich family or any advantage or anything.
And I think he just raised her with that mindset that you are just going to build your own path and then you are going to Walk on this path that you built for yourself, and that's how you're gonna live. And I think that's what my mom taught me indirectly,
So you graduated secondary school in Iran, and then what happened?
So school for me was rather more tumultuous, if you like, than the average population Because I remember I felt very uncomfortable I felt as a child, most of the time, and some of those feelings I can make sense of right now, even in primary school, when they were teaching us just math and literature and the alphabet and how to write, I felt I always felt there's walls around me and I always felt just this urge to just do something about it and I couldn't.
I had no power. I didn't even know what it was that I was feeling. It was hard being a part of that structure that I did not have a choice in. I felt like some of my freedom was taken away and the more I grew up, through primary school and especially secondary school, this just grew with me.
School was tough. I had good grades in primary school, so that's why I got away with everything. And then in secondary school, there's a school system in Iran that there's exams that you take, and in every city, there's one school called Sampod, they say it's for people who have good score.
I mean, it's called a school for smart people. I don't think that's what it necessarily means, but that's what they call it. So I was in that school, secondary school and high school. It was hard, there was just this criteria of who the person that you had to be to be accepted in the educational system in that country and to be free to move forward.
I didn't have that criteria. I always just kind of fought back and I would just have these arguments about the things that were taught in class. There was a lot of friction for me, I did not feel like secondary school was three years. I felt like it was 10 years of my life. I feel like I aged through those years, and I didn't really have good scores at all.
Terrible, terrible. I mean, just some, some of my scores, it was like a long borderline of passing. But I did survive, and then I finished secondary school, and then high school, you choose a track. So either you do physics and mathematics, the other track is like biological science, health science kind of thing, and then that's how the people who want to go to med school, that's the track that they do.
And then there's another one called art. I naturally picked physics and mathematics tracks because I, even though I had bad scores, I just knew that this was what I wanted. So then I figured that I don't know some of these things if I really thought about it, but I thought about, okay, so what are all these degrees that are available? How can I go to college? And then I looked at the order of all these degrees and I saw the first one, the hardest one was electrical engineering in Iran, with respect to the score that you had to have in the national entrance exam to be able to get into program.
With electrical engineering and then like mechanical engineering, computer, all the engineering were kind of like really nearby and then there were pure sciences. It was first year in high school. I also got into the same school because there was another exam and I figured I'm just going to become an electrical engineer. I think that part of that was because my dad has gotten to college twice. To become an electrical engineer and he had to drop out when I was very young because his dad died, in an accident when I was very young and it just influenced all of our lives really because he's out at a company and he had to just take care of the company that already had gone bankrupt.
Long story short, he had to drop out of college. And I just always felt this. I felt that I needed to be an electrical engineer. I felt it was like his legacy and my grandpa, my mom's dad was also one of the first electrical engineers in his town and he's 93 years old. So that was a really, really long time ago and I really respected what he learned and I thought that a lot of what he gave us in life that helped us really through every single milestone in our lives came from what he learned.
So it was kind of sacred to me to become an engineer.
So how many years of the specialized electrical engineering track were you doing ?
So after high school I did the entrance exam, got into college, one of the universities in the capital for electrical engineering, and I, I ended up leaving and coming to the U. S. In the middle of it. So you could say I did about two years, but I didn't. I wasn't really doing anything. You could say like the first semester I was taking it seriously, and then I just didn't.
I knew I was going to leave. I never, ever knew that I was going to leave before I get my degree.
So what happened?
When I was a freshman in college, that was when I met my now husband. He was in charge of this course that was extracurricular course and for freshmen and I, he was kind of really good at electrical engineering.
So that's how I got to know him. At the time, I felt he was just very interesting to me because he was the exact opposite of who I was. So I just kind of was drawn to him and we were dating and I found out that he's going to the U. S. That was a time when he got his student visa. It was kind of a weird time because we had our families meet each other and we had the serious talks.
Because by the time he got his student visa, we'd already been dating for a year. We had these serious talks in case things. Keep happening for us, but then if it nothing kept happening we also were okay with it I just felt like it was a time in my life when I I actually feel like I was a lot more free than right now I just kind of let things happen Then I felt like that is my window Again, we were really close he left and our families were just in touch and you know I would be there at his parents house some of the time and I was part of the family already and we had planned that I would finish and then I would get admission for a master's degree for graduate school because that's how you can really get a student visa from Iran at least.
I just realized that I can't do that anymore. It wasn't just that. Oh, I missed him. And I felt like it was make or break. That was not the only thing. I, I thought about it and I felt that I just don't think I can thrive here for another three years to finish my degree because nobody really finishes in four years except like the very smart people.
And I was not a very smart person. And I just didn't want to stay there for three more years. I just felt this natural instinct feeling that my time is now and I'm gonna go.
Was it hard to get your visa?
It was easier than right now. Back then I thought it was really hard, but then it kept getting harder and harder over the years, so I would say it was easy. There's no U. S. embassy in Iran. So I went to Ankara, Turkey with my mom and requested the visa. And then after two months it was approved that I went with my uncle to pick up the visa.
So they would put it in my passport.
And where did you go for undergrad?
So Reza, my husband, he was doing his PhD in Missouri University of Science and Technology. The funding that you get as a graduate student, it's hard to live on. We decided that I would find whatever program that is closest, and I would go to that program.
And then I was going to apply to the same school, but then we learned that community college exists. and it's cheaper. So we were very happy and excited. So I applied to the only community college in Rolla, Missouri. It was called East Central College in Rolla, Missouri. Right away after I applied, I learned that I have to go travel to Union, Missouri for classes.
I started there and I feel like that was the beginning of my career in the U. S.
I did three semesters there, got my associate degree, then transferred to Missouri University of Science and Technology
were in the same place with Reza for the first time.
for the first time. Yeah, but I only ended up doing one semester there. Because he finished his PhD and so that's how it works for a student visa.
Once you finish your studies, either you get a job so that you can change your visa or you have to go back. So he got a job at SIU, Southern Illinois University as a faculty. A very young faculty in the, electrical engineering and computer engineering department. So I transferred there.
So the next two years of my undergrad, I did it at SIU.
Wow, and his Ph. D. was done in, what, four years?
Yeah, really, it was done in less than that, but just for the paperwork and for them to let him get the degree and go get a job. He's a very smart person.
So then you went to Southern Illinois University. What were you studying in undergrad? Were you motivated then, or was it still constraining,
the time I was very, I think that by that time it had already been three years that I was in the U. S. I see immigration in phases because first you go to a new country and you are just a change of scenery and the things you have to do, you know, you get really busy and you get a little bit dissociated from your past, very temporary and superficial dissociation, but you do get the separation.
I feel like all those years and just,
Just being away, like, it suddenly, like, started to hit me I'm away from everything that I know.
So then I think that was a time that I started feeling like I want to do something with my life that is in line with what I've been through as a person.
So I was just looking for ways to do something that had more to do with people. And then I tried, I just would look for these projects and I started research still as an electrical engineer. But it was never enough human interaction for me. It was never enough.
I had a special connection with almost every faculty in that department. Not always good. Not always positive. It wasn't that people liked me, but it wasn't enough. I did teach mathematics to a class of 50, 60 people, and I was really good at it. , not enough human connection. Around the same time, I was just Thinking back and as if like the door to the past has now opened and I have to process Everything I've been through the pain the good things the bad things
and then I learned about this celebrity who it just so random. Oh the celebrity who had overdosed I think it was Lamar Odom. Then I remember I just ended up looking into his life and I learned that he was kind of alone, was struggling with addiction, and just nobody knew what had happened right before his overdose. So that's how lonely he was. And I just, like, it really pained me to have to, like, think of someone going through a disease by themselves and then to overdose and now be in the hospital and he was unconscious
just I kept feeling the pain and then I realized like
the reason I feel this pain is because This was the pain that my dad felt,
because he had a struggle that I knew of. And now, my dad was this person who was away from me, like, I had no access to help him now. But, I suddenly realized all the things he needed that I could never give to him because I was a child. When I came from Iran, I was not even drinking age, I was like 20 or something. And then two years before that, I moved to the capital for school, so it's really that all the time that I was with my dad in our home, I was, I was not an adult yet.
I just kept like digging more and more. I just was like obsessed with Lamar Odom's life now. With his story, what happened, how did he get there? Because it was really that I wanted to know more about my dad. And it was just too painful to just, directly think about my dad or talk to him.
Because we would talk on the phone from time to time.
So that was when I learned that addiction is treated very differently in the U. S. I know the stigma existed, but not as much as it existed in Iran. People got help. There were systems for people to get help, or at least to ask help, even if they're not given that help.
And the forefront of that, I learned that was medical doctors. So then that was when I was like, I have to go to medical school, because I have to serve. And it wasn't even in my mind, it wasn't that I was going to go to medical school to serve, and exactly do addiction medicine. It was that I learned that all the things that I wanted to do, it just was like I just wanted to serve very badly. And all the tools that I needed to serve in the way that I wanted to with the human connection that I wanted so badly was in medicine. I didn't know anything else at the time. And I know there's a lot of engineers who serve people in really, really deep ways, but I just, I don't think that was for me.
So, I wasn't going to just stop. So I wanted to finish my electrical engineering. I did pre medicine courses at the same time. The minor in mathematics was because I just kept being drawn towards mathematics. And there was a lot of ways to model natural systems if I got a minor in mathematics using that kind of knowledge.
So I just, I did that.
And then I learned later, of course. In medical school, or even right before medical school, that was years later, I learned that it wasn't really that I wanted to only serve people, it was that I thought by serving people, it was that I would heal, it was that my own healing was in serving people. But it wasn't going to be a temporary thing.
It wasn't something that I would do and accomplish and it would be done. It was going to be lifelong. I think that everybody understands pain in their own way. And I feel like once you understand it in your own way, you'll never stop understanding it.
So you'll see it all the time, all around, and you'll want to do something about it because now it's, like, you have these glasses that, you can see it forever. So I feel like that's really why I wanted to go to medical school. Because I knew that I would constantly keep, feeling this pain, but then I wanted to constantly heal myself along with healing others.
So I think that's just why I was so motivated to go through all those years to finally go to medical school because I couldn't really go to medical school before we had a green card. And that took a whole bunch of years since, , the time that I decided to go to medical school.
Duncan summary deleted here:
My relationship with structure is not even complicated. It's just terrible. It's just quite terrible.
I think from the time that I decided to go to med school I think it took at least three years to get the green card, but the process had already started. Two years before that, so just, just took a long time.
I just remember that the time that I was ready to go to medical school, even after taking all the prerequisites, couldn't, that I know, unless I went for a private school, which was very, very unlikely.
How did the application process go?
So the application process, I felt like I hit a wall when I took the MCAT because I was studying for this exam and I learned that one section was CARS. Critical thinking and something, something, and wasn't, my language wasn't English, so it was very difficult. That was not like the TOEFL that I could learn and get a great score.
There was like a plateau. It just would never be higher than that, so I had to make up for that in other sections. I think it was like physics and mathematics and chemistry and another one. I just am mentioning this because I want people to know that I know. That it's painful when you feel like you're at a disadvantage when you're trying to take this exam that is the first step of medical school.
Thank you for pointing that out and maybe there's other sections that people feel that they're at a disadvantage at for whatever reason, ?
Yeah for sure and especially the application process You have to have your own story. And then as an immigrant in the U. S., I feel like you have to be very, very polished and filtered, or at least maybe that's how I felt because I lived in the Midwest.
And again, it's not a bad way, it's just a way that I felt like I couldn't be very raw. with my story and who I was and how I felt. So I polished my story and I just, I applied and it was harder than I thought.
I went to med school at the University of Kansas School of Medicine. I was in Kansas City.
How was that experience?
It was very interesting because I think it was very similar to high school, because it's just this structure, within medical school is so strong. It's sometimes it's all you need. And I didn't have it, so now I was old enough, it's not that I couldn't, this was a time that I was very savvy, this was a time that I was, I felt through enough degrees and enough universities to know how to present myself, but I just didn't want to do that.
And it was Kansas City. I feel like it's a great city, it's a growing city and it did give me The most valuable parts of my education and my master's, and the clinical research that I did and then medical school. But it was just like high school, it was just constantly being stopped on the way and constantly being given resistance and Being told things that I have to do or say or be and I just it was difficult, but it was Still thriving.
And then how did you decide internal medicine then?
So I decided internal medicine because I wanted to know everything I felt like I wanted to know everything to help the most number of people But also it was just that I felt uncomfortable focusing on a specific body part. Like if I was going to neurology, or if I was going to ophthalmology, and I know that in those specialties you still learn about the entire body.
I just felt like for me, it would be hard because it's also my personality too. It's hard for me to stay focused on specific things.
So, happy to match Seattle, happy to come out here?
Yeah, so matching in Seattle, I felt like my entire life, my mission, what I wanted, I feel like this was the first time that I chose a place and this place also chose me. It is a dream come true and I am living the dream.
And good for Reza too?
Yeah, because already his work was based in Seattle.
Do you feel like you're at home, in a way?
I do feel like I'm at home in a way. And it's so weird because they also ask in the application process, you have to put a hometown. And I was like, what do I say? Do I put in my own hometown, which is what I was born in? Do I say Kansas City because I lived there the longest? I felt like because I lived here already for a year right after my master's and when I was applying, I felt like this was my home, even though I didn't know anything about it.
So it's kind of like, in a sense. I already felt like this was my home, especially because I did a visiting rotation here last
So it was a medicine sub I. So I was in Harborview and I was on med E team. I was a sub I on med E team. I had multiple attendings, multiple seniors.
How was that experience?
It was really surreal because I, I don't know how to justify that experience, but I really wanted to be there. I, I knew about Harborview being a safety net hospital. I'd read about the population, all the demographics that are served at Harborview, and I just, I was like, I I have to be in this place.
I have to be in this place. And I remember being given the option. I was asked, What rotation do you want to do? These are the options that we have. And I said, I want to be at Harborview. And I was told that not a lot of visiting students wanted to be at Harborview. But anyways, I said, I really have to go to Harborview and I just feel like that entire month brought out a lot of emotions in me for sure.
What's the future look like for you? So you have three years. It sounds for someone who doesn't like structure, I think there's going to be some more structure
well, I think that within the next three years, hoping that I will immerse myself in patient care. I do want to go into cardiology because the research that I've been doing for years. As an undergrad before medical school and in medical school, it's always been focused on cardiovascular health, and it's just, I feel drawn to the heart.
I don't know if it's because of the electrical system so yeah, I want to do a fellowship. I feel like I will enjoy most of the next three years because now I, I have so little expectations, So now I will enjoy even more because I, in a way I've given up on any system or any structure.
I don't expect to be supported. I do expect to move forward on my own pace. And I, I do feel powerful. I think I will be very angry at times the next three years. I want to become a cardiologist and I don't know, as of now, I don't know how to tailor my future practice to fit, fit my goals.
When you say fit your goals, your goals are cardiology, but then there's other goals too, it sounds like, that weren't spoken.
Yeah, I just, I don't.
So I feel like doing this, doing a specialty, I feel like a lot of patients lose access to you because now you're a specialist and I don't want it to be that way. And I don't know how to figure out a way for it not to be that way. I don't know if I can practice as an internist, sometimes, and sometimes as a cardiologist.
I don't know how much say I will have.
Well, thanks for sharing so much. I think for our pre med students, I think you show that a very unconventional path as a physician. As a foreigner born in a different country, without even a clear sense of what you feel you're going into, medicine is still a possibility. It takes years of extra work, but you made it possible.
I was going to say that you provided a road map. I don't think you provided a road map for anyone because it's such a unique path. But I think what I took away from it is that it's very possible. Someone born in this town that I'm not even sure exactly where it is outside of Tehran,
who doesn't like conformity. That gets people's feathers ruffled, ends up in medicine, and ends up in our clinic at Harborview. So we're very lucky to have you. I hope you feel like you're at home here, and thank you so much for sharing your story with us.
Thank you so much for having me. I do feel at home here. Really enjoyed our conversation. I just, I do want to finish with this. I do want to tell the pre med students that there's times that you will think that it will never happen, but it's always closer than you think it is.
It's a fact. There's a lot of noise on your path, and there's a lot of obstacles depends on your background. I feel like having money makes it easier, and that's not what I had, and having people in medicine that are close to you makes it a little bit easier, and that's not what I had.
I'm just saying, no matter what you think you're missing, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. It's just, if you're going into it for the right reasons. It'll happen.
Well, thank you so much.
Thank you.
📍 Thank you for joining us today.
We hope that you gained a perspective of the challenges faced by international students. As well as the experiences that can lead to a career in medicine. We will be continuing our provider Pulse series with additional interviews of healthcare providers.
Here's the voice of Dr. Jennifer Zu, our guest for the next episode.
I feel like I was always navigating East versus West, like that culture identity of, you come from a more Eastern background. Like my parents spoke Chinese a lot in the household. It was hard to navigate the American school system.
Something I'm really passionate about is having a representation of first generation college graduates, people from low income backgrounds.
Be sure to visit our website@ethnomed.org for additional resources.
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