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"If I had to do it all over again, I would not change a thing. Thanks Kettering residency program!"

Dr. Alejandro Calvo, Medical Director of Oncology
Sycamore Medical Center

From Resident to Faculty

I have many fond memories of my chief resident year: Preparing morning reports with important teaching points for the residents, working with attending physicians to get a lecture schedule for the year, and being the attending physician for a medical resident team for two or three months of the year, among other things. I enjoyed trying to encourage anxious residents to attend morning reports by giving them tips on questions I would ask them the following morning. I also enjoyed the loud and sometimes belligerent discussions some topics would ignite among residents.

Dr. McDonald had a teaching style I liked very much. He would make you learn without telling you directly what you needed to know. But he would guide you and make you think hard, so eventually you would get it and never again forget what you learned.

The value of being chief resident for me was learning to be organized, how to best transmit complex information in a simple manner and how to deal with different types of personalities.

After moving back to Bolivia I practiced Hematology-Oncology at the “Instituto Oncologico Nacional”, where I resumed teaching residents and medical students from my alma mater UMSS School of Medicine. In 2003, I had the option to return to the U.S. for a position available near Pittsburgh. The worsening political situation in Bolivia at the time made the difficult decision easier for me. I had also met and fallen in love with a beautiful young doctor who was about to move abroad for residency training. I convinced her not only to marry me but also to move to the U.S. to do her residency there.

My residency mentor, Dr. Stuart Merl, invited me to join his oncology group in private practice; I was happy for the opportunity to return to Kettering. I was also honored to join the residency program as key faculty member and enjoy having a resident with me almost every month. Now I work closely with some of my classmates and residents from those days, they are superb clinicians and have become well-respected physicians in our community.

Kettering was good to me one more time. My wife, Ines, matched in the residency program for internal medicine and will be finishing her training in a few months. I have seen her blossom as a senior resident, dealing with difficult times, gaining confidence in herself and learning from morning reports in the same classroom as I did. She has some of the same attending physicians and frequently deals with the same nurses I learned so much from. Even though the technology and knowledge has changed drastically between my resident years and hers, the art of medicine and its teaching continue to be the same. If I had to do it all over again, I would not change a thing. Thanks Kettering residency program!

– Dr. Alejandro Calvo, Chief Resident 1996-1997