Van Backer visited the hospital nearly every week he was on campus that year, observing and asking questions. After graduating from UVM with a neuroscience degree in 2011, he’s now a second-year medical student at UVM. And the surgeon he worked with as a sophomore undergraduate wrote him a letter of recommendation for his medical school application.

UVM’s Pre-Medical Enhancement Program (PEP) helped make Van Backer’s academic path possible. Founded in 2004, the highly-competitive program matches ten academically gifted UVM undergrads each year with medical student mentors and physician mentors. Through observing different specialties and participating in activities at the College of Medicine, PEP students enter medical school with a deep understanding of the rewards and challenges of the field. Mildred Reardon, M.D., professor of medicine emerita and former associate dean for primary care, describes PEP as a chance for undergraduate students to see themselves in the role of doctor. "This is a wonderful opportunity for an undergraduate student to see what
medicine is like,” she said. Reardon spearheaded the program at its inception; she has since retired and passed the reins to Charlotte Reback, M.D., associate professor of family medicine and director of medical student programs in the Office of Primary Care. Reback says the experiences PEP students bring to medical school stick with them well into their professional careers, helping to shape how they practice medicine. “It makes a strong impact on them when they become physicians,” Reback said. “They have an early understanding of what it means to be a doctor.”

Finding a Balance
Running PEP is a collaborative effort: The UVM Honors College publicizes the program and gathers applications; the College of Medicine Offce of Primary Care coordinates placements with physicians and tracks the progress of PEP students. Students who have successfully completed PEP will be invited for an interview at the College of Medicine. Those who do well during their interviews will be recommended for admission. About half of the PEP students who have graduated in the past three years have entered medical school at UVM.

The relationship between each PEP student and their medical student mentor lasts for the three years PEP students are in the program, and often much longer. It’s a program that requires careful planning. And every academic year, PEP students spend a minimum of 16 hours per semester with their physician mentor; rotating through specialties including everything from primary care and surgery to dermatology and infectious diseases.

Laurie McLean, program specialist in the Office of Primary Care, tracks each undergraduate student’s progress. She watches grades and makes sure students submit written reflections. McLean said her office supports students as they learn how to manage their time and navigate college requirements. Although it’s rigorous, the goal is to make sure students have the academic preparation they need for future success in medical school.

“We want students to stay healthy and find a good balance,” she said. The ten students who enter the PEP Program annually have already proven themselves to be high achievers. PEP applicants are required to have a cumulative GPA of 3.5 after their first two semesters at UVM, and a 3.5 GPA in math and science classes. They must submit letters of recommendation and sit for an interview.

Once they are in the program, students are expected to meet GPA requirements, take required pre-med classes, attend two
medical seminars per semester and log the required time with their physician mentors. The admissions process is governed by a six-member committee, which includes Charlotte Reback; Faith Rushford, UVM’s pre-health advisor; Lisa Schnell, Ph.D., associate dean of the Honors College; and leaders in the College of Arts and Sciences and the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. With roughly 25 applicants from across the university annually, the committee is tasked with determining which students will fit well and benefit most from the program. Academic achievement is certainly important, but so are factors such as maturity level and critical-thinking ability. The committee asks questions that tease out students’ perceptions of medicine, focusing on how applicants relate the field to issues that may not seem immediately pertinent to the doctor’s office.

“We want to see them make connections between the outside world and the practice of medicine,” said Reback. “Medicine is becoming such an integrative discipline; we’re looking for original thinkers.” It’s a sentiment echoed by Rushford. Authenticity and seriousness of purpose are important to the committee, she said. In their work with students in all pre-health fields she helps them seek out opportunities that put them in work settings, getting to know practitioners. PEP is especially beneficial for first-generation college students and others who may be building those connections from the ground up. “Students vary in the kind of network they have to begin with,” Rushford said. “PEP is a great opportunity to develop professional mentors.” The PEP Program is a “big recruiting tool,” said Schnell, and students often hear of it through word of
mouth before the Honors College even sends out notices to undergrads. Although in the past, recruitment has focused on
students in hard science majors, now all first-year students with a 3.3 GPA or higher after their first semester receive information about PEP.

PEP: the Vision of “Gifted Leaders”
As one of many programs under the umbrella of the Office of Primary Care (OPC), students in PEP benefit from the OPC’s focus on education and awareness. Founded by Reardon in 1993, the OPC supports the state’s healthcare workforce and links UVM academic healthcare programs with communities, in part through a network of Area Health
Education Centers.

This same spirit of community involvement infuses PEP, said Reback, and is one of the reasons every student shadows a primary care physician for at least one year. As an undergraduate, students can absorb what they experience, and enter medical school grounded in what primary care practice and other specialties are all about.

“The program teaches them to take some responsibility,” Reback said. “It also gives them some autonomy while being accountable.” Each semester, PEP students must attend four clinical sessions and two academic medical seminars.

There are few, if any, models for a pre-medical program as comprehensive as PEP, said Reardon, and that it exists at all
is thanks in large part to the “vision of two very gifted leaders at the University,” both of whom have since passed away.
Joseph Warshaw, M.D., who served as dean of the College of Medicine from 2000 to 2003, and Joan Smith, Ph.D.,
former dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, created the program in an effort to support talented and motivated
UVM undergraduates pursing medicine, and to encourage them to apply to the UVM College of Medicine. They saw the opportunity to shepherd students through the sometimes daunting process of becoming a physician, said Reardon. In the years since its founding PEP has also become a community. “A special attribute of the program is its ability to connect undergrads, medical students and physicians and get them all working together,” Reardon said.

A Day in the Doctor’s Office
During her three years in PEP, Heather Lutton (UVM ’10), now a third-year UVM medical student, witnessed a baby’s birth. She was also present in moments of crisis, and when doctors delivered life-changing news to patients. The gravity of these situations helped her understand the responsibility and privilege inherent in being a doctor.

“I saw patients rely on their doctors and confide in them,” she said. “Seeing them in that moment — as hard as it was — made me realize the special nature of the physician’s role.”

A Cambridge, Vt., native who has no immediate family members in the medical field, Lutton said PEP gave her connections she might not have made otherwise. Participation helped her decide that medicine was right for her. It also piqued her interest in mentoring. As a medical student she helped with another program run by the Office of Primary Care, called MedQuest, that introduces high school students to health careers.

Gwen Fitz-Gerald (UVM ’08), a fourth-year medical student from Vergennes, Vt., learned a lot from her medical student mentor. She remembers her surprise at walking into her mentor’s apartment for dinner to see a group of her classmates chatting and relaxing. Some of the mystique of the medical school — that they are lled with super-achievers who are supremely focused and always on task — lifted a little.

“Nothing is really preparation for med school until you’re in it,” she said. “But it was nice to have a bit of the anxiety relieved. I could see people not only survived medical school, they could actually thrive there.”

Some PEP students find their intuitions confirmed. Rob Rudy, a senior undergraduate from Palo Alto, Calif., said his time shadowing physicians in neurology/sleep medicine, breast cancer surgery, and primary care gave him the experience he craved. It also turned him on to mentoring. He’s one of the first pre-med peer mentors on campus. Combined with international public health volunteer work, he’s on his way to finding his calling.

“PEP makes you really confident in what you’re getting into,” he said. “It’s only made me want to do this more.”

Tyler Van Backer developed a similar passion that has stayed with him into medical school. After enjoying his time with the trauma surgeon while an undergraduate, he joined the Surgery Interest Group as a medical student. This led to an opportunity working in the research lab of Professor of Surgery Peter Cataldo, M.D. Van Backer credits PEP with helping to steer his focus.

“There is no way I would have gotten where I am today without help,” he said. “I want to continue to give back.”

Van Backer has already started to return the favor. He’s served as a MedQuest counselor and now he’s a PEP mentor himself, paired up with sophomore UVM engineering major Greg Roy. Roy, a Rutland, Vt., native, has attended labs, Grand Rounds, and a panel discussion that introduced him to the ethical dilemmas involved with in vitro fertilization. He spent time shadowing a physician at Burlington’s Community Health Center, where doctors see many recent immigrants and refugees. One afternoon, Roy watched as his physician-mentor communicated with a patient from Thailand through a translator. Roy said it opened his eyes to the nuances of primary care; in fact, he enjoyed the Community Health Center so much he is planning to spend additional time there in his  final semester — beyond the required 16 hours.

That students want to spend as much time as they can with their mentors is no surprise to Mary Stanley, M.D., a surgeon who has served as a PEP mentor at various times for more than a decade. She said students have scrubbed in on surgeries and talked about everything from the science of breast cancer to the importance of working as a team in the operating room. The goal, she said, is to make sure students feel comfortable asking all of the questions they need answered.

“They’re like sponges,” she said. “They soak it all up.”

Lindsay Christensen Corse graduated from UVM in 2008 and from the College of Medicine in 2012. She was one of the first PEP students to complete the PEP and graduate from medical school. A biology major and a Spanish minor, her time in PEP helped in unexpected ways. The experiences she had shadowing — in pediatrics, emergency medicine, and oncology — all fed into the choice she made to become a primary care physician. Now she’s a resident at Boston University Medical Center, working in a clinic in East Boston where roughly 70 percent of the patient population speaks Spanish. She’s been on rounds where translators for five different languages have participated.

A Jericho, Vt., native, she hasn’t ruled out coming back to Vermont to practice at some point, although she’s keeping her options open. She knows, however, that primary care was the right choice for her, and PEP helped her see that. “Having gotten an early look at medicine, I knew I wanted to do everything and see everything and work with different age groups. I love the scope of practice and the emphasis on preventive care,” she said. “It was really helpful to have a picture of what daily life as a physician is like.”

Assistant Professor Emeritus Dallas Boushey’s house on Shelburne Road in Burlington stands square and stately, a reminder of a time decades ago when this was a mostly residential district, practically the outskirts of the town. Now, stores and restaurants are mixed in with the homes, and traffic whizzes by at all hours. Behind Boushey’s house sits a black four-door Lincoln that has obviously not been driven in a while. Dallas Boushey is almost always home these days, in the house where he and his late wife, Mary Ann, raised four daughters. At 93, his characteristic vigor is somewhat diminished. He spends most of his day comfortably ensconced in an easy chair in a sunny ground-floor parlor room, with everything he needs in easy reach, including a walker that he now uses to get around. His body may be weakened, but his mind is still scalpel-sharp, and he can trace back the memories of his nine-plus decades as easily as he once tracked the blood vessels of the heart for the thousands of medical students he taught during all the years he spent in the College of Medicine anatomy lab, a tenure that lasted formally from 1940 to 1987, but that continued on with informal stints in the lab well into the 1990s.

VERMONT MEDICINE:
You have some copies on the table next to you of publications, such as Yankee, that have written about you over the years.

DALLAS BOUSHEY:
Now that story in there, in Yankee, doesn’t exactly start where I really started.

VM: Where did you start?

DB:
Most of my family was from here, but I was born in Kampsville, Illinois, in 1919. My parents were separated and at about 6 years old I moved with my family to my grandparents’ house in South Burlington. We had a little house that’s still there, across the street from where Al’s French Frys is now. It was a rural place then. We had a lot of truck farmers out there. We had a neighbor who raised asparagus and gladiolas and used to use a horse and wagon to bring his wares into town in Burlington to peddle them. We were too poor for me to pay tuition to Burlington High School (South Burlington didn’t have a high school back then), but we were not poor enough to go on welfare relief and get free tuition, so I left school, or it left me, after eighth grade. It was the Depression, so I worked lots of jobs for very little. Before I got to UVM I did landscape gardening for a house near the Redstone campus for 35 cents an hour. You didn’t break the bank with that, or fill it up either! And then I got into painting — sign painting for a fellow on Center Street. I was learning gold-leaf lettering and getting a dollar a week at that time. I wasn’t making enough to put parts on my bicycle! So you might say I started out pretty small, and when I got to UVM it increased a bit. My first job there was seven days a week for 15 dollars a week.

VM:
So where did you start at UVM?

DB:
Well the College of Medicine decided that they needed an animal research laboratory. And the doctor that was in charge heard of my uncle, who was a sheet metal worker, because they needed a lot of cages made for the animals — rats, pigeons, you name it. So the doctor in charge went over to my uncle’s shop, just before you cross the bridge to Winooski.
He was an auto body shop and a sheet metal worker. And my uncle said to him — you got anybody to take care of all these
animals that you’re going to get? And the doctor said no, not really. And my uncle said, well I got just the person for you.
That was me. And that’s where I started.

VM:
And that was in the old medical building, on the corner of Pearl and Prospect?

DB:
The little building next to it. I think now it’s for the Outing Club. And then they put in another building, a Quonset hut, behind it, and they moved the animals into that, but that was after my time. 1937 was when all this happened — when I started with the animal research department. Then in 1940, the job opened up in the anatomy and neurobiology department. They were looking for somebody, and the head of the department at that time was Dr. Newhall — Chester A.
Newhall, M.D.

VM:
We hear a lot of people at Nostalgia Hour at reunions reminisce about Dr. Newhall. Was he a pretty formidable guy?

DB:
Oh yes, but fair. He’d heard that I was a good worker, and when I seemed a little squeamish about the anatomy lab, he
said well, give it a try and if you don’t like it you can have your old job back. That seemed fair enough. So I tried it in 1940,
and I retired from it in 1987.

VM:
I guess it agreed with you?

DB:
I stayed. I didn’t know how it would work out — I used to get queasy in the barber chair! I don’t know what happened,
but I just took to it. And that lasted nearly 50 years.

VM:
At first, what were your duties in the anatomy department?

DB:
Mopping the floors, up on the 4th floor, and then I started working with skeletal material. Painting muscles on them. Red for origin, blue for exertions. At one point in time we had about 50 of them that I had made and painted, so that each
student could have an upper and lower limb, besides a selection of bones, a variety from throughout the body — a clavicle,
a vertebra, humerus, radial ulna, that sort of thing.

After a couple of years, Dr. Walter Stultz saw that I was able to adapt and learn. He said, why don’t you come out in the lab and see how you get along with the students? And I was nervous, but said OK. I had to learn every muscle. I had to know the origin, the insertion, the blood supply, the nerve supply, the lymphatic drainage, the venous drainage, the whole nine yards. And after a couple years of doing that I had quite a lot of that information in my little bird brain. So I went out into the lab. I had a dental probe, and I led the end so it was just a little bit sharp. So when I was out in the lab and looking for a certain thing, if a student said “I can’t find the axillary nerve” I’d say, hang on then, and I’d use the probe and find it and say here it is, and then I’d move on to the next table, wherever they asked me to go. So I kept right on with that. And I was still mopping up the lab and things of that nature.

Of course, once World War II started we had quite a time there with all the shortages. We had an elevator that went from the basement up to the 4th floor that we used to transport bodies that had been donated. But it was only a few feet wide, and it wasn’t long enough for a whole casket or basket, so we’d have to put a body in the elevator and stand it on end to get it upstairs. Well then the elevator broke down during the war, and we couldn’t get parts for it. Well, we couldn’t carry them up the back stairway, because the turns were too short, and we’d have them in heavy wicker baskets. So we’d have to wait till the traffic through the main lobby front door died down, and then grab a student or whoever happened to be around, and carry the basket through the front stairway! Had to do this for the rest of the war. I was gone for part of the war years, in the Navy medical corps.

VM:
Did you gradually over the years take on more of a teaching role?

DB:
Yes, but I always had stage fright, so I didn’t lecture per se. My job was in the lab, finding structures that the students
couldn’t find. And I’d try to find them — I’d find most of them. And then as time went on, in 1972, the fourth-year medical
students gave me the Teacher of the Year award, so the people in charge of the anatomy department at the time, they realized that they didn’t quite know what to call me — a technician, senior technician, a demonstrator in anatomy — what can
we call you, they asked? You don’t have any degrees! That made the administrators think about doing something else for me. So they made me an assistant professor. Then, in 1990, the university gave me an honoris causa, doctor of science degree — me with my eighth-grade education! I don’t think they’ll ever do that again! I stayed at UVM three years longer
than I needed for retirement. Dean Luginbuhl said, “You don’t have to go, you can stay as long as you want.” I stayed because I loved it, and I wanted to round it out at 50 years.

VM:
Can you talk about the models you made? You are well known for these, and they continue to be used to this day.

DB:
I know they use the whole skeleton — we called it “Killer.” I added a lot of wires to it representing the arteries and nerves. And I made over a dozen other models, like the brachial plexus, blood supply of brain, venous drainage of the brain. These were all wire models, using stovepipe wire, and wrapped with gauze strips about a half inch wide and soaked in shellac. When they were dry, I’d put red latex, liquid rubber, over the gauze, and then I’d color the different branches of the bronchial trees, for instance, different colors and then label them. They are still using a lot of my old models. That’s nice to know.

VM:
Do alumni still come back and visit you?

DB:
Yes! Rick Houle, he’s from the Class of ’72, he’s been here two or three times with breakfast. I remember after the lab
sessions were over, I’d still have to do a lot of washing up and cleaning, and I remember Rick several times coming in to
help me — I really appreciated that. So he still comes and looks me up when he’s here.

VM:
You must have always had an incredible memory.

DB:
My memory was pretty good at that time. I’ve got my Gray’s Anatomy here — this is what I learned most from. This is a
special copy the publishers gave me, and they put my name on the bottom. It’s had a bit of use. They sent that to me gratis.

VM:
There’s a story that you oncereceived a phone call from a former student who was calling from an operating room to ask you an anatomy question. Did that really happen?

DB:
Yes, I recall he was calling from out of state.

VM:
You retired in 1987, but you still saw your old colleagues often?

DB:
After I retired I used to go up and cover for the person who took my job, Bruce Fonda. I had about six people up interviewing for my job when I was about to retire, and as soon as I’d mention cadavers, they say “see you later”! And of course I knew Bruce, because he’d gotten his master’s degree in our department. So I knew him quite well. He used to take pictures of my kids’ weddings and was very good to me. So we worked together for about seven years and then I retired and he took
over. He called me the Big D and he was the Little-D-in-training. We had a good association. And he’d come down, and
sometimes Pat Powers, after I’d retired, and we’d get in my old Lincoln, and we’d go down to the Ponderosa for lunch.
Editor’s note: Bruce Fonda died in 2005, and Patricia Powers, Ph.D., passed away in 2007.

VM:
How long have you lived in this house?

DB:
Since 1952. This was my wife’s family’s house. I said “we’ll never fill it up with furniture,” and now I have too many
things! We raised four daughters here. My daughter Suzanne checks on me every day, brings the Free Press and any groceries I need. I’ve been borderline diabetic for years. I stick myself every night and do a blood sample, and if it’s a little bit off I know how much of something sweet to eat, like a Little Debbie cake. I’ve got that all scaled out. That’s so I’ll wake up in the morning! I’ve been in Masonry for 70 years, so that took up some of my time after I retired. I’ve got 70 years in Washington Lodge No. 3, and 50 years in the Scottish rite. I’ve been a member of the Mount Sinai Shriners in Montpelier for 25 years.

VM:
Ever drive one of those funny little cars?

DB:
No, but I’ve owned three-wheel ATVs — owned three of them, and I used to take them up to some land I owned in Bakersfield, up in the boonies. I also did Meals on Wheels for about five years after I retired. I was the runner. Upstairs — downstairs — you name it. That was an experience.

VM:
Well, you’re still fondly recalled at the College of Medicine.

DB:
I hear there’s a plaque on the wall up there. Students must see that today and see “1937 to 1987” and I bet they
think — well, he must’ve died in 1987!” But no, here I am. Still here, for now.

The UVM Board of Trustees, by special vote, approved the naming of Dallas Boushey as an assistant professor of anatomy in 1972. He remains the only UVM professor in modern times without a formal degree. As he notes in his interview, the university presented him with an honorary Sc.D. degree in 1990.