What if the most underrated preparation for medical school isn’t another research lab but a K-12 classroom?

It may sound like a side quest, but it’s so much more. If you’re wondering if you should do Teach For America before a career in healthcare, you’re in the right place. See how our Teach For America alumni prove that teaching in the classroom not only gives you the skills to handle med school. Teaching also sets the foundation for clinical instincts you need in operating rooms, pharmacy, nursing, and public health.

Teaching Prepares You for Patient-Centered Care

Teaching teaches you to read the person, not just the moment. These TFA alumni learned to spot how hunger, fear, exhaustion, or instability shaped a student’s behavior. This same instinct drives patient‑centered care.

​Dr. Tina Loarte (New Jersey ‘00)

As a child of Puerto Rican parents growing up in the Bronx, I was taught that kindness and education matter more than anything. We didn’t have much, but my parents always reminded me that nobody can take away your knowledge. That belief carried me through Cornell University into Teach For America, and eventually into a middle school classroom in Jersey City, where I built close relationships with my students.

Teaching showed me the real social determinants of education long before I had the language for it. I had students coming in exhausted from watching siblings all night or unable to focus because they hadn’t eaten in two days. You can’t teach math when a child’s basic needs aren’t met. So I brought snacks, school supplies, and personal care items and set them out for anyone who needed them. I remember working closely with our family resource officer to understand what was happening at home and how to support families with dignity.

And I’m still teaching. As an author, podcaster, and executive director of the Connecticut Center for Nursing Workforce and the Founder and CEO of Latinas in Nursing, I help people in my field see that health outcomes are shaped by the same forces I saw in my students’ lives: housing, food access, safety, stability. I teach nurses how to speak to their representatives, testify on bills, and use their lived experience to influence policy. I empower underrepresented nurses to tap into their experiences to create better outcomes for their communities. And no matter the setting, I’m still using the core lesson my students strengthened in me—listen first, act second.

Christian Sascha Brown (Rio Grand Valley ’14)

I grew up in Atlanta, raised by my mom and grandparents. With educators in my family and an aunt whose career supported youth involved in the juvenile justice system, I saw early how schools, courts, and money shaped opportunity. At Princeton, I got deeply involved in Students for Education Reform and spent time studying disparities in education and school systems. By the time I joined Teach For America in the Rio Grande Valley, I was familiar with the education system, but still didn’t fully understand the emotional weight behind it.

Teaching changed that. In the Valley, I learned to appreciate how important it was to support student mental health in order to promote growth and achievement in the classroom. When a student shut down, I would pull them aside. Students told me they couldn’t sleep because their parents fought, or that their minds were racing with harmful thoughts. When I moved to teach in Atlanta, the patterns shifted again. Students told me they had to smoke before school just to feel calm enough to walk through the door. Teachers began coming to me for de-escalation because I learned to recognize the moment a student’s energy shifting. This showed me how often kids are in crisis and need someone willing to push the system on their behalf.

Now, as a psychiatry resident, I look for the environmental pressures shaping a teen’s symptoms. The way I once read a student’s energy before they spiraled is the way I now track my patients’ emotional shifts and intervene early. And the frustration and care I felt mirrors the urgency I bring to pushing hospital systems to respond. Teaching and psychiatry taught me to hold both the crisis and the context at once.

Irene Chen, PharmD (New York ’10)

I grew up in Orange County as the child of Taiwanese immigrants, and from early on, education and healthcare shaped my world. I lived with a rare disease, so I always assumed I’d end up in medicine, even if I didn’t know what that would look like. But at UC Berkeley, every path I followed kept pulling me toward teaching. I built a nutrition curriculum for elementary school students in Oakland; I tutored science and math for high school students; and I even taught free swing‑dance classes to the public. Teaching was the through‑line I didn’t realize I was building.

When I joined Teach For America in the South Bronx, that theme became clearer. My students taught me that behavior is often communication—you just have to pay attention. Some students’ entire demeanor, their ability to concentrate and engage in meaningful conversation, shifted depending on whether they had access to their medication. Another student constantly asked to go to the bathroom, and only years later did I realize she may have had an undiagnosed illness. Those moments taught me to look beyond what’s said and see how environment, access, and instability shape health long before a patient meets a clinician.

I also had to break down dense ideas for different learners—the foundation of my career in pharma. As a medical science liaison at Johnson & Johnson, I turned new clinical data into digestible stories for oncologists, pharmacists, advanced practice providers, and internal teams. Now, as a medical director, I keep patients at the forefront of my work as I develop the medical strategy for new drugs.

Teaching Makes You a Care Architect, Not a Bystander

Healthcare’s weak points show up in real lives. Limited access. Monolithic practitioners. Patients left without support. These TFA alumni saw those failures long before medicine, and teaching prepared them to recognize those cracks and build processes and talent pipelines to fill in the gaps.

Dr. Benjamin Hartley (New York ’09)

I didn’t realize it then, but my problem‑solving instincts were built in a crowded eighth‑grade science classroom. I grew up in Oregon and was loosely considering medical school, but I wasn’t sure. Teach For America felt like a meaningful way to test that path, so I moved to New York and suddenly found myself teaching forty‑plus eighth graders and a health class that exposed gaps I’d never imagined.

Teach For America was harder than med school, residency, even neurosurgery. It forced me to grow fast and adapt in real time while still caring for the human being in front of me. I was trying to hit daily objectives while also fielding the real issues that shaped kids’ lives. One of the most defining parts of my classroom was the secret question box. My students weren’t comfortable talking about reproductive health out loud, so they’d slip anonymous notes into this little locked black box. I’d read them to the class and build lessons around what they actually needed. It took more time than grading, but it taught me how to break down complex, sensitive information with clarity and care.

Now, as a neurosurgeon, I do the same thing with patients. I create mini‑lessons on anatomy and treatment plans so they know what's going on. The skills I learned in the classroom transformed my practice and my patients. Even PRIMES, the mentorship program I founded, is built on TFA’s systems that helped hundreds of underrepresented college students find a foothold in medicine. Teaching made me resilient and taught me how to build systems that create trust, stability, and opportunity for people who need it most.

Dr. Tyler Mains (Baltimore ’09)

My path to medicine wasn’t linear. I grew up a theater kid in St. Louis, and acting taught me about how identity helps people navigate life, including myself. I pursued theater at USC, but once I started auditioning, I realized the work wasn’t fulfilling. I shifted to biology and began studying psychology and law, where I learned about the intersection of mental illness and the criminal justice system. Around that time, a TFA recruiter suggested teaching as a way to put what I was learning into practice. After graduation, I moved to Baltimore to teach high school biology.​

Teaching reshaped how I think about medicine. In my first week, a student told me his goal was to live to see 30—and he was 17. My students had seen so much loss that they regularly made t‑shirts for friends who’d been killed. Those moments pushed me to look past assumptions about “disengagement” and pay attention to the systems shaping their lives. At the same time, many of my students wanted to be doctors, nurses, and public health professionals. Their aspirations inspired MERIT (Medical Education Resources Initiative for Teens), the health‑career pipeline I co‑founded alongside a fellow TFA corps member and TFA alum, which still supports teens of color pursuing medical careers.

Today, as Chief Medical Officer for San Francisco Jail Health Services, I oversee clinical care, design protocols, support staff, and advocate for patients navigating trauma, chronic illness, and systemic neglect. The work demands the same instincts I honed in the classroom—seeing the story behind behavior, understanding the pressures shaping people’s choices, and building systems that give them a real chance to thrive.

Take a Closer Look at Teaching

Your medical career won’t be defined by how fast you get there, but by who you become on the way. If you want a career in medicine that’s grounded in humanity, clarity, and real‑world leadership, teaching might be the most powerful foundation to become the health advocate patients trust in some of their most vulnerable and pivotal life experiences.

Strengthen the skills your future patients will depend on.