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Student Profile, Tammy Lin FarberStudent Profile: Tammy Lin Farber

After learning such basics as drawing blood and writing prescriptions in an elective global medicine class at Temple, in 2014 Tammy Lin Farber spent four weeks with a global medicine team—an attending physician, a resident and 10 other Temple students—immersed in hands-on medicine in Ghana.

She took medical histories and conducted physical exams at a rural, mobile health clinic; examined newborns; walked six miles with psychiatric nurses to make house calls; shadowed a military hospital neurologist; and followed pediatricians at a children’s hospital who were treating children devastated by kwashiorkor protein–energy malnutrition. She had learned of it in biochemistry class, but had never seen it.

This past summer, as part of an academic medical rotation, the third-year student spent three weeks helping treat trauma patients in the emergency department of a hospital in southwestern India. 

“I’ve really had to step up my game,” says Farber, a Duke University graduate from Fairfax, Virginia, who is considering family medicine. “Thanks to my Temple experiences, I’ve been able to travel and learn more about health conditions not only in North Philadelphia but elsewhere in the world. It’s definitely deepened my medical knowledge and ability to communicate with different types of patients from different cultures.”