A graduate’s story: ‘Supporting a mentee takes enormous time, patience and generosity’

My parents met at RCSI and are both doctors, so medicine was familiar to me from a young age. I always enjoyed both English and the sciences, especially biology and chemistry, and I loved problem solving. Medicine felt like a good fit: challenging, practical and centred on helping people. Some of my best memories are from my time at RCSI. It was demanding, and I don’t think I fully understood the workload when I started, but there was a real sense of solidarity in going through it together. I also met my husband, Dr Manuel Calvo-Gurry, while studying there. He now works as an anaesthetist, and his support has been enormously important throughout my career. After graduating, I completed my intern year in Letterkenny and Galway, then basic specialist training at Beaumont Hospital. It was there that I met my mentor, Dr Eavan McGovern, who encouraged my interest in teaching and showed me that education could sit alongside a clinical career as a meaningful pursuit in its own right. I would not be where I am without the support of people like her. Supporting a mentee takes enormous time, patience and generosity, and she spent years reading the first, second and 50th drafts of my manuscripts until they were publication ready. I didn’t get on to higher specialist training at my first attempt, which was difficult at the time but, looking back, helped me grow. I interviewed again I had more confidence, broader experience and a clearer sense of the kind of clinician I wanted to become. That period led me to RCSI’s StAR MD/PhD programme, where Dr McGovern and I worked with academic colleagues to develop the neurology curriculum for final-year medical students. My PhD focused on neurophobia, which is the fear that students and doctors can feel around neurology. I had experienced some of that myself, so I wanted to understand it better and help make the subject more accessible. My mother, Dr Jacinta McElligott, whose work to improve access to neurorehabilitation services for patients has been a great source of inspiration to me, is never far from my mind when I think about why this matters. I hope that in time I can make a similar contribution. I’m now working as a neurology specialist registrar, with clinical interests in movement and cognitive disorders and the potential benefits of exercise and dance, which we are exploring through ongoing research.