Medical school is challenging. But a few students have been able to balance medical school with competition at the very highest levels of their sports.
As the 2024 Olympic Games kick off in Paris this week, here are the stories of several medical-student athletes who qualified for the Games in recent years — or came close.
Katharine “Kat” Holmes, 31
MS3, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
2024 U.S. Olympic Fencing Team, Women’s Epee
Katharine “Kat” Holmes originally planned to compete in the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, take her MCAT® exam, and go to medical school.
But then in Rio, the U.S. women’s epee (fencing) team lost in sudden death to the team from Romania, who ultimately went on to win gold, and Holmes and her teammates decided they had to give it one more shot.
Holmes had taken two years off from Princeton University to prepare for Rio, so she returned to complete her undergraduate degree in neuroscience, then worked in a neuroscience lab while competing all over the world — anchoring the U.S. women’s epee team as it won both its first World Cup gold medal and World Championship title in 2018. In addition, she was the back-to-back gold medalist in both the individual and team events at the Pan American Games in Lima, Peru, in 2019.
With the 2020 Tokyo Olympics as her new target, Holmes also applied for and was accepted into the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in March 2020, planning to join the class of 2024 as soon as the Olympic Games were done.
But then the pandemic hit — throwing off both the 2020 Games and Holmes’ post-Olympic plans. (Icahn granted her a one-year deferral.)
When the rescheduled Olympics finally happened in 2021, Holmes and her teammates finished fifth, and she started medical school three days later.
Courtesy of Devin Manky
But Holmes wasn’t done with fencing — or perhaps fencing wasn’t done with her. Throughout her first two years of medical school, she continued to train for two to five hours a day. She then took a research year to prepare for the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris. (The qualification in fencing involves participation in multiple international competitions over the course of a year, plus six to eight hours of training per day. For Holmes, it has also involved research on fencers and their training and injury trajectories.)
Today, Holmes is in Paris, preparing to compete in the U.S. women’s epee event on July 30. Now competing in her third Olympic Games, she is a senior member of the team and has been named chief captain.
“People always ask me if I’m nervous, and I’m really not at all, actually,” she told AAMCNews during an interview from Europe. “I’ve been competing at the highest level for 15 years, and I really feel confident in my skill level. So I’m planning to just enjoy it.”
And then — for real this time — Holmes plans to retire from fencing. “I start rotations two weeks after I get back, and I think it would be impossible for me to continue at this level,” she says. She’s also ready to move on to the next phase of her life. She’s contemplating sports medicine — possibly orthopedics — as a specialty, but pain management and rehabilitation seems appealing too. And not surprisingly, she wants to continue to do research on athletes and their injuries.
“Regardless of how I do in Paris, it is my proudest accomplishment that I was able to make an Olympic team while being in medical school,” she says.
Jake Foster, 23
MS1, Dell Medical School at The University of Texas at Austin
2024 Olympic Trials, USA Swimming
If you ask Jake Foster what he considers to be his biggest accomplishment in swimming, it’s not the three Olympic trials he has competed in, his nine All American titles, or even his last year competing as a professional swimmer, where he swept the 100- and 200-meter breaststroke events at the 2023 Pan American Games and won two gold medals at the 2024 World Championships.
Rather, the achievement of which Foster is most proud occurred in his sophomore year of college at The University of Texas (UT), where he scored 28 points in the breaststroke, individual medley (IM), and medley relay events to help the Longhorns clinch the national title at the NCAAs.
“The All American honors, they mean a lot to me,” Foster says. “But what means the most is being able to bring a national title to Texas and doing it with my teammates.”
Foster had originally planned to give up his swimming career upon graduation from UT in May 2023. He had already been accepted into Dell Medical School at The University of Texas at Austin and was looking forward to pursuing his lifelong passion for medicine. But then he qualified for the Pan American Games and decided to defer medical school for a year — “to end on my own terms,” as he puts it.
Dell Med was “super-gracious and accepting of my deferral,” Foster adds, so he spent a year swimming and traveling to international competitions, and even came back to UT as a non-degree student in the spring to compete with his teammates, using his last bit of COVID eligibility.
Courtesy of The University of Texas at Austin
In late June of this year, he competed at his third Olympic trials, placing sixth in the 100 breaststroke and seventh in the 200 breaststroke. “It went well, and I was able to just soak it in — just the chance to spend some [time] with my teammates and my brother.” Foster’s brother, Carson, is a senior at The University of Texas and will be competing in the 400 IM in Paris.
The week after trials ended, Foster started medical school, and he is looking forward to exploring the career he put on hold to pursue swimming. Dell Med was an easy choice for him; he was first introduced to the school during an athletic recruitment visit (the UT coaches arranged an informational session during the visit with Dell Med).
“Their mission and what they were doing with their curriculum was something I could see myself being a part of,” he recalls, and while at UT, he was able to do some shadowing and volunteering.
Medicine is “something I fell in love with. It’s an interest that has turned into a passion, and now coming here, it’s like a dream come true,” he says.
“I think that any elite athlete has learned certain skills and practices that are very applicable to medicine, in terms of time management, how to work on a team, work ethic, how to interact with people. And I think all those skills are things I’m going to be carrying into medical school and then beyond, into my career as a physician.”
Derek Maas, 23
MS2, NYU Grossman School of Medicine
2024 Olympic Trials, USA Swimming
Derek Maas has always pushed the limits of athletics and academics. Growing up in Michigan, he followed his brother, Kyle, to the University of Alabama (UA), where he competed in the breaststroke and IM events while notching numerous Southeast Conference swimming awards as well as multiple academic achievements.
In 2022 he won the NCAA Elite 90 Award, presented to the student athlete with the highest GPA participating at the NCAA championships. “It was an incredible honor to win the award, especially for Alabama,” Maas says. “It just felt like it was a testament to the focus that the University of Alabama has put on academics in the past, you know, 10 to 15 years.”
It also was a reflection of Maas’ commitment to his own academics. Not only did he earn a 4.0 during his time at Alabama, but he was part of an Accelerated Masters Program that allowed him to earn both his undergraduate degree (in biology) as well as an MBA in four years. After graduating in 2022, he then entered medical school at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, where he continued to swim and compete throughout his first year of med school (he had a fifth year of NCAA eligibility because of COVID).
Courtesy of NYU Athletics
Swimming for NYU “wasn’t quite the same time commitment [for me] as it was at Alabama,” he says, noting that he probably averaged 10 hours a week of swimming, compared with 20 hours a week at UA, due to his academic schedule in medical school. But that didn’t stop Maas from propelling NYU to a best-ever fourth-place team finish at the NCAA championships, winning national titles in the 100 breaststroke, 200 breaststroke, and 200 IM while setting a new Division III record in the latter. He also got close to his best times at the Olympic trials this summer, where he competed in the 100 breaststroke, the 200 IM, and the 100 butterfly.
Now that his swimming career is done, he’s starting to think about what medical specialty he might want to pursue. Thus far, he has been drawn to dermatology. “The incidence of skin cancer in swimmers is much, much higher,” he notes, due to all the time spent outside in the pool, particularly in southern states.
But he’s also excited to experience other aspects of medicine. As a fluent Spanish speaker, he volunteered as a medical interpreter in college and recently took a Spanish certification test, which will allow him to use that language in the hospital as a medical student. “We’re still working on increasing the number of doctors who can speak Spanish,” he says.
And he knows that the discipline needed to excel in swimming will come in handy as he continues his career in medicine. “Just like in medical school, you can’t really learn everything there is on Step 1 in a week. You also can’t make it to the Olympics or the Olympic trials with a week of hard training. You have to be persistent, in swimming and in medicine.”
In addition to Holmes, Foster, and Maas, at least two other current medical students competed in their respective sports during the 2021 Olympic trials.
Megan Clark, 30
MS4, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences
2021 Olympic Trials, USA Track and Field, Pole Vaulting
Growing up in a military family, Megan Clark and her siblings moved almost every year, but one way they learned to make friends quickly was by playing sports. Clark started out as a gymnast, then moved into competitive cheer, but once she entered high school, she decided to sample track and field.
“I tried every event, but I fell in love with pole vault,” Clark says. At the time, her family lived in Virginia. They then moved to New York, where there was a pole-vaulting club — the Hudson Valley Flying Circus Pole Vault Academy — “which is as crazy as it sounds,” she adds, laughing.
Not only was she passionate about pole vaulting, but Clark found out she was really rather good at it too. During her college career at Duke University, she earned numerous accolades, including being named the Athletic Coast Conference (ACC) women’s field performer of the year in 2015, as well as indoor and outdoor ACC champion.
After graduation in 2016, Clark realized she could compete professionally, so she moved to the Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista, California, where she lived and trained for three years, competing domestically and internationally. She then moved to the University of Arkansas, where she trained and ultimately competed at the U.S. Olympic trials for track and field in June 2021.
That fall, she matriculated at UAMS, in their MD/MPH program. “I started medical school thinking I wanted to do sports medicine. Obviously, those were my people. I had been injured. But when I started doing sports medicine preceptorships, I realized that the things I loved about sports medicine were actually emergency medicine. It’s the high acuity. It’s not knowing what’s next. It’s being able to take care of everyone.”
Retired now from pole vaulting, Clark is busy doing rotations and getting ready to enter The Match®. But she will be traveling to Paris for the Olympic Games this month — to cheer on her boyfriend, Ryan Crouser, as he defends his gold medal in the shot put.
Meridith Kisting, 30
MS1, Carle Illinois College of Medicine at the University of Illinois
2021 Olympic Trials, USRowing
Meridith Kisting had never rowed before joining the club team at the University of Illinois. But once she got into a boat, she realized how much she enjoyed the sport. She also earned a few titles — American College Rowing Association (ACRA) second team All American and ACRA All Great Lakes Region in 2014 and 2015.
But it wasn’t until Kisting walked onto the women’s team as a graduate student at Duke University that she recognized she had not even begun to realize her athletic potential. While earning her master’s degree in biology, she finished second at the PAC 12 Challenge and helped the varsity eight to a second-overall finish in the ACC championship, Duke’s best performance since 2006. She finished her graduate season at Duke with an 18th-overall finish at the program’s first NCAA championship appearance.
All of that led to an invitation to join the national team at its training center in Princeton, New Jersey, where Kisting trained with the team and ultimately ended up at the 2021 U.S. Olympic trials for rowing, competing for a slot on Team USA going to Tokyo.
While she didn’t end up making the team, Kisting did enjoy the break from her studies, and after retiring from rowing, she started exploring her next steps. With an undergraduate degree in biochemistry, and a master’s in cell and molecular biology, she moved back home to the Midwest, where she got a job as a radiology researcher in Madison, Wisconsin, and ultimately applied to medical school.
Now, as she embarks on a career in medicine, she’s looking forward to watching the U.S. rowing team as they compete in Paris. “I’m excited to just watch the Olympics and enjoy it and just appreciate all the sacrifices that everyone who is competing made and is continuing to make,” Kisting says.
