Q&A with Dr. Brucker

Sophie Baldwin, 10/16/24

What is your name and job?

• • William Brucker, MD

  • Clinical geneticist at Hasbro Children’s Hospital 

What is your background?

• • Undergraduate degree at Brown; completed bachelor’s in Chemistry

  • Completed an MD/PhD program at Brown in nine years (5 years spent in PhD, 4 years spent in MD)

  • Awarded a PhD in Pharmacology

What are your day-to-day responsibilities and typical caseload?

• • See around 45-50 patients per week

  • Day starts around 6:30 to 7 am

  • Clinic during the day from 8:30 to 5:30

  • Work on case analysis and notes at night until around 10 pm

  • A lot of my work is making sense out of lab patterns, seeing how test results line up, and come up with a diagnosis

What is most exciting about your job?

• • Meeting people with a lot of challenges and rare conditions

  • Figuring out how best to help them

  • Were are able to change someone’s life with gene therapy using molecular biology and genetics

  • We can figure out what disease someone has before it gets too bad and being able to change the course of their life

  • Lots of advancements are being made in the field

Why did you decide to pursue medicine?

• • It seemed like it was a good job!

What is one moment in your career that made you appreciate medicine?

• • You remember the good cases when you have more challenging ones; when things work out, you never forget it

  • Hard work and attention to detail have saved people’s lives

  • It is easy to get caught up in group thinking (when everyone thinks the same way about something), but thinking outside the box is important

  • Perfection/achievement in medicine is prized, but you should still take on chances and hard cases, getting into them when you have the chance

  • Mistakes make you better; they force you to grow and are not a sign of weakness

  • Things that seem really serious actually are not in the grand scheme of things

  • You recognize patterns the next time you come across them

  • You never really reach the end of medicine: you are constantly learning new things

  • You always pick up skills and must keep training with hard cases

If you could go back and choose a different specialty, would you? Why or why not?

• • I was a good piece analyst

  • This specialty found me

  • I originally wanted to be an adult cardiologist or toxicologist

  • Maybe would have done pediatric primary care, but my mentors encouraged me to do a fellowship 

  • You can always fall back on your residency even if you do a fellowship

What was the most difficult aspect of your journey to medicine?

• • The hardest part is the loss of self-image and getting imposter syndrome (you don’t feel like you are the person you need to be)

  • Medicine is a challenge to your identity and you realize you have a loss of control

  • People are used to doing well and being smart, but tests could be harder than you can do

  • You may not do as well as you wanted on a test or not be able to solve a case- can lead to feeling badly about yourself

  • Fatigue

  • You must met those moments and get back up and realize that you just want to do good; that is the best you can do

How are you able to manage a work-life balance?

• • Make time for fun

  • Hiking

  • If you work all the time you’ll be burned out

What is your advice to students interested in pursuing medicine?

• • Only do something if you like it

  • Medicine is very diverse; people have different ideas of what they want to do

  • You have to really like it

  • Let the tide take you where it does- it will be who you really are

  • Embrace the challenges to your identity

  • Medicine is not quite like Grey’s Anatomy; it is a lot of nitty-gritty, blue-collar work

  • You can be anybody within the field: you don’t have to conform to anything

  • Be a pilgrim/wanderer: walk along the road of medicine

  • You can change your path if you need