44 // VARSITY May 15, 2014
A
broken femur is an unusual reason to
change careers, but for fourth-year medical
student Nikki Burish, it was a game changer.
When she broke her leg, Burish was in her first
undergraduate year at the University of Wisconsin-
Madison, where she was studying economics and
competing for the women's hockey team. During her
hospitalization to repair the bone, she started to pic-
ture herself as a physician.
"That was my first exposure to medicine," she ex-
plains. "When I was in the hospital, I was interested
in everything that was going on around me."
Yet, following her recovery, the demands of bal-
ancing her studies while attending hockey practices
and playing more than 30 games per year made it
impossible for Burish to revamp her class schedule
to pursue medicine.
"I was traveling so much to play hockey that my
advisors told me a premedical curriculum was not
an option," she says. "However, medicine was some-
thing that I couldn't stop thinking about."
Finding Her Niche in Medicine
B
urish completed her undergraduate degree in
economics and captained the hockey team to
the NCAA title in 2006.
She started working for an international business
firm in Australia and playing professional hockey in
Switzerland, but then decided to return to UW-Mad-
ison, where she took premedical courses for two
years before entering the UW School of Medicine
and Public Health (SMPH) in 2009.
While pursuing her medical degree, Burish also
completed a master of public health degree at Har-
vard Medical School, which she thinks will bring
depth and strength to many areas of her career. Af-
ter she graduates from the UW School of Medicine
and Public Health, she'll begin a plastic surgery resi-
dency at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai in
New York.
Until recently, Burish thought she would pursue
an orthopedics specialty. However, during a plastic
surgery rotation, conversations with instructors
DAVID
STLUKA
