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Local resident, done with medical school, heads east to residency

Sarah Brown

After a lifetime of growing roots in the Sweet Home and Lebanon areas, Amanda and Ben Emmert recently uprooted and transplanted themselves to Nebraska.

Amanda, the first Lebanon High School student to graduate from COMP-Northwest medical school in Lebanon, graduated with her doctorate of osteopathic medicine June 1 and will complete her residency at Creighton University in Omaha.

Dr. Paula M. Crone, dean of COMP-Northwest, said she’s been able to get to know all of her students, including Emmert.

“Amanda is one of the most poised, kind, salt-of-the-earth individuals you could meet,” Crone said. “She is quietly soft-spoken and leads by example.”

The Emmerts, who resided in Sweet Home, plan to return to the state of Oregon after Amanda’s season of residency is complete. She will practice child and adolescent psychiatry.

Emmert spent most of her growing up years in Lebanon. She graduated from Lebanon High School in 2007, and received her bachelor’s degree at Oregon State University in 2011.

“I was studying public health (at OSU) because I really loved population effects of health,” she said.

After she settled on the idea of studying medicine, she met Ben Emmert, of Sweet Home.

“Once I met him, I told him right away I’m planning to apply to medical school,” she said.

That didn’t deter Ben, and the couple married in 2014, the same year she entered COMP-Northwest.

It was the only medical school Emmert applied to, hoping she could stay near family and begin building on her new marriage, she said.

Initially, Emmert thought she’d study pediatrics because she enjoyed shadowing Dr. Richard Ames, a pediatrician in Lebanon, when she attended OSU.

“I had so much fun,” she said. “I felt if this was my job, I could do this all the time; I would just love it.”

It wasn’t until her third year that she even considered psychiatry, she said. That discipline was her last clinical rotation at Samaritan in Corvallis, and she requested to spend the rest of her time in the child psych division.

“I really liked it, and I guess that was the catalyst to start thinking why I am interested in pediatrics and what my goals were with that career,” she said. “I kind of realized I’m very much health promotion and advocacy, and that actually aligned really well with child psychiatry.”

She also realized she was drawn to the high-needs kids, those who might have had a rough start in life and needed help beyond sore throats and well checks, she said.

Now that Emmert is officially a DO, she reflected back on her years attending COMP-Northwest.

“The first and second year were vastly different than the third and fourth,” she said.

In general, the first two years involve students attending classes all day, with afternoons and weekends free to absorb and memorize all the information, followed by a test every few weeks.

“It seems like there’s not enough time to learn everything; you’re always studying,” she said. “Sometimes I feel like your friends and family have to take a back seat to going to school.”

Though most of her attention and energy was invested in her education, Emmert said she made it a priority to keep her fitness up.

“That has been really difficult, but I just said for my mental health, for learning and for everything, I just needed to do it,” she said.

Emmert’s favorite class was neurology.

“It’s just really interesting, just thinking about the way the brain works and the different pathologies and how things in the brain can really influence how a person presents,” she said.

She was so captivated by what she was learning that it helped her learn much more easily, she said.

The hardest class for Emmert was anatomy – how the human body is constructed. She took the course at an accelerated pace over the summer in order to become a teacher’s assistant, but it was a bit more intimidating, she said.

“I think the reason it was hard is probably because I did it in that format. I hadn’t taken anatomy before that, so that was rough. It was just a lot of learning in a really short amount of time.”

She had more fun during her third and fourth years, when the students begin clinical rotations. Emmert was able to do some of her third-year rotations locally, doing family medicine in Sweet Home, OB/Gyn and surgery in Lebanon, and almost everything else in Corvallis.

“Fourth year is when it gets really crazy and you’re traveling all over the United States,” Emmert said.

She did a lot of auditions – working a rotation while proving what kind of resident you would be – in places such as Oklahoma City, Las Vegas, Los Angeles and New Mexico. She found that some places were more “rigid” in terms of each person’s role (medical student, resident, attending physician), while other places were more laid-back and allowed her more autonomy and responsibility.

During her time spent in Lebanon, Emmert participated in several volunteer and community service projects. Some of her more favorite ones included doing health screenings, and teaching cooking classes to children at the Boys & Girls Club in Sweet Home.

She borrowed the idea for the cooking class from a similar program she participated at in Yakima, Wash. She thought it was fun and would be simple enough to repeat in her hometown.

“I don’t have a degree in nutrition, but this is basic stuff and I think there’s definitely a lot of room for education on that kind of thing, especially in small communities with the rates of childhood obesity rising, and how we’ve seen how that affects kids when they’re older on.”

The kids wore little chef aprons and learned easy ways to fix healthy meals.

Trying to come up with her most memorable moments was difficult for Emmert, she said, but her first response was praise for the people who teach at COMP-Northwest.

“Obviously the people are what make the school what it is,” she said.

But she also recalled the moment she was nominated as student DO of the year, an honor that is initiated by a peer and chosen by the school.

“I thought that was really awesome because it was a lot of validation that what you’re doing is making a difference. It was just a really positive experience,” she said.

Now that she’s entering her residency in Nebraska as a psychiatrist, Emmert will be able to further narrow down her focus, if she so chooses.

“There are other things that interest me inside that realm,” she said. “There are some things I still want to explore a little more, for example eating disorders. Also substance abuse is something I’m kind of drawn to, so I’d like to see that a little more.”

Emmert envisions a future working primarily with children, with dreams of having a kid’s clinic some day.

“I’d love to be in a smaller clinic with me as a psychiatrist,” she said. “There’s a lot of therapy that psychologists are good at, so I’d love to have a child psychologist, and then maybe work with a pediatrician, as well.”

She hopes to fast track through the psychiatry program at Creighton and finish in five years, then return to Oregon.

“I think in Oregon, in general, child psychiatry is very under represented; there’s such shortages,” she said.

When all is said and done, from the time she started at OSU to the time she completes her residency, Emmert will have spent 13 years preparing herself for her future as a child and adolescent psychiatrist.

Ben Emmert, who has a degree in natural resources and works as a forester for a private timber company in Sweet Home, is looking for a job in Nebraska that will be a good fit for the couple. He will settle in Nebraska in a month or two.

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