03/01/2022
Meet our March Student of the Month, Gage Calhoon MS3
"Hello! I grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma and lived my summers in a tiny panhandle town known as Beaver. After high school, I attended college at Oklahoma State University, where I majored in Finance. At Oklahoma State, I discovered some of my greater interests in life, such as philanthropic leadership and organizing initiatives to make higher education accessible to the underprivileged. At the same time, I continued to build on my high school mowing business, and throughout college, up until its sale at the end of my second year of medical school, I owned and operated an industrial grounds maintenance company that serviced contracts for telecommunications and electrical companies in western Oklahoma, Kansas, and Texas.
After college, I took a gap year, became an EMT, and served with a Tulsa-based health mission known as Good Samaritan Health Services. Additionally, I eloped with my one true love – skiing and traveled the western US and Canada for 2 months chasing snow. To cap off the year, I invested all my remaining time and energy into entirely renovating, painting, and adding a bathroom to a 98-year-old, droopy home in OKC.
Ever since I can remember, I have wanted to be a physician, in my youth, it was secondary to observing the sense of fulfillment my grandfather derived from serving his patients, in high school it was attributable to my grandiose dream of curing lower back ailments, of which my family was particularly afflicted. By the time I applied, I knew I wanted to work in the field because it was a place full of diverse opportunity where I could unite my passions for business, science, teamwork, relationships, and leadership to work toward a deeply heartfelt objective – bettering the length and quality of others’ lives.
I chose to pursue my medical education at the OU College of Medicine, as it is a place that truly empowers, supports, and cares for its students as they learn to empower, support, and care for their future patients. My biggest passions on campus are improving students’ knowledge of business as it relates to medicine and access to scholarly and quality improvement projects. Outside of school, I enjoy woodworking, creating unnecessarily complex excel spreadsheets, do-it-yourself-projects, skiing, hiking, road-biking, and reading ultra-dry non-fiction books.
I owe everything to my friends that build me up, the wonderful faculty that support me, my father that has invested in and guided me, my mother who has and will uproot her entire life to help me keep my head above water, and my stepfather that serves as an exemplary model of kindness and generosity."
Thank you for sharing your journey to med school, Gage!
Gage is class of 2023*
