Medical School: The Last Frontier

by Laura Bailey 

The path to medical school wasn’t pretty or glamorous for Navy Ensign Benjamin Taylor - unless making glue in boiling vats of french fry grease is now trending.

Fill out countless university applications – click, copy, click, paste. Repeat 40 times or more. Pay as many application fees as you can afford. Obsessively check emails for the "Congratulations you’ve been accepted" letter; or the other, more frequent kind, that tells you to "kick rocks, kid!" Grip and grin with admissions staff at various universities until it hurts.

For as long as he can remember, Taylor has wanted to be a doctor. His dream began as a boy growing up in Fairbanks, Alaska. Forever known as the Last Frontier, Alaska is where the vast Arctic tundra is found. Treeless and often bitterly cold, it’s an ecosystem of great beauty and abundance, shaped by the dramatic change of seasons, much like Taylor’s path to medical school. It’s a place where only the hardiest of shrubs and the mightiest mosses can live. Above soil that is frozen hard as concrete, life is sometimes bleak and seemingly impenetrable.

When the call came that he had been accepted into the F. Edward Hébert School of Medicine at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences (USU), there was only one obvious answer.

“I was done at that point,” said Taylor. “I got into my dream school. I’m so happy. This is all I’ve ever wanted. I’ve been working for this since 1994, so I was super stoked.”

Now, he’s in beginning his second year of studies at USU and still taking it all in. Every now and then he wakes up in the middle of the night and, for just a second, he thinks his life at USU is a dream. Then he realizes it’s not a dream – it’s a dream come true by way of perseverance.

In 1997, with his undergraduate studies barely underway, he dropped out of Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.

“My attitude toward studying wasn’t really where it needed to be,” said Taylor. “Being away from Alaska and going to college was just too much fun. I wasn’t ready to go to medical school.”

Benjamin Taylor (left) participates in helicopter evacuation training
with an Army colleague.  (Image credit: Benjamin Taylor)

Adventure was calling to his inner nomad. He shoved his dream deep into the bottom of a duffel bag, packed with what little he owned, and headed to Big Sur, California. Ironically, Big Sur was also once known as the United States’ last frontier, until 1937 when a highway was built through it. During his time there, Taylor became friends with a group of wild, doomsday-prepper Marines who were stocking up on canned food and kerosene for a disaster that would never come. He listened to their colorful stories about the Far East, war, travel, and adventure that they served up like whiskey sours.

“Because I was always interested in medicine and helping people, these Marines would say to me, ‘Hey, have you ever thought about being a Navy Corpsman?’” said Taylor.

A Navy Corpsman is an enlisted medical specialist who may be stationed with the Marines, among other assignments. They are not doctors, but they are sometimes called ‘doc’ by Marines under their care.

Taylor joined the Navy. Little did he know it would change his life forever and be the catalyst that would lead him to USU.

When he visited a Navy recruiter, they dangled an enticing $90K signing bonus in front of him if he would agree to enlist as a “nuke,” he said. A “nuke”– short for nuclear technician -- often spends weeks at a time inside a submarine with a bunch of other “nukes”, who may or may not be wearing deodorant. It’s a notoriously rough job meant only for the bravest of souls, when one considers the limitations of living 400 feet below the surface of the ocean inside a metal tube; sometimes only coming up for air and supplies every three months.

Taylor did not become a “nuke” and, instead, he enlisted as a Hospital Corpsman. Being a Hospital Corpsman was a step towards being the doctor he always wanted to be, but in the back of his mind he wondered if he had made the right decision. He was 22 years old when he enlisted in the Navy.

Benjamin Taylor prepares for a dive.  (Image credit: Benjamin Taylor

“I got ‘tortured’ endlessly, but it was fun,” said Taylor. “It was one of the best things I ever did.”

Taylor’s career as a Navy Corpsman took him from coast to coast, across oceans and hemispheres, just as he had hoped.

“After dive school I was sent to Consolidated Divers' Unit, San Diego, where I was part of a hyperbaric medical department. There I met with some pretty significant obstacles,” said Taylor. “I was there for about two months when all of a sudden the [Independent Duty Corpsman] running the department got mad at the [commanding officer], handed me the keys one day and said, ‘here you go, you’re in charge now.' He just left and never came back.”

A job meant for a well-seasoned, salty Chief Petty Officer was put in the hands of Taylor, a newly-minted E-5.

“I was learning on the fly and making a lot of mistakes,” Taylor said. “I felt good about the work I was doing, but it was a problem because even though I was doing the work of an E-7 or E-8, I wasn’t getting all the other things that an E-5 needs to compete for promotion – things like getting your warfare qualifications, becoming an expert at what you do. I was too busy trying to run a department to do anything else.”

Juggling too many things at once, including a failed marriage that ended in divorce, brought everything crashing down, Taylor said. Going to medical school was feeling like less of a priority.

“It was tough. My life fell apart pretty quickly and it was because I had all these things in the air at once. I walked away for one second and that was all it took for everything to fall apart,” said Taylor.

After a year of being the top dog in a medical department, with more than 100 Sailors in his care, his command changed course and sent him to go repair submarines with a local dive crew.

Benjamin Taylor (left) and his Navy dive colleagues head out for an assignment.
(Image credit: Benjamin Taylor)

“It was funny because this whole time I had been the guy in charge, and now I was the lowest guy on the totem pole,” said Taylor. “They had me doing every god awful thing except diving. I had to cook – from scratch – underwater glue that they call bintsuke which they use to repair ships. Oh man it was disgusting. It’s made out of vegetable oil. In order to get the vegetable oil I had to drive down to this little café on base at 32nd street where all the E-3s and E-4s are eating hamburgers and all of their old french fry grease would go in the back of my truck. I’d drive it back to the command and I’d put it in this giant vat to heat it up until it was boiling and then I would put paraffin and beeswax into the grease to make it into this nasty goop. It was an all-day process.”

He was covered in fry grease and beeswax. It was a terrible job, he said, yet he couldn’t have been happier.

“I once worked three part-time jobs all making minimum wage just to get by and I was hardly ever home,” said Taylor, who is fiercely independent. “At least making bintsuke in the Navy, I got to go home.”

In 2008 A.B. (After Bintsuke), he was sent to work as a corpsman with the Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) Mobile Unit 8 in Sigonella, Sicily. Sicily is the largest Mediterranean island located just off the "toe" of Italy's "boot” and it is home of the largest active volcano in Europe, Mount Etna. In Greek Mythology, the deadly monster Typhon was trapped under the mountain by Zeus, the god of the sky. In Taylor’s mythology, he was anything but trapped.

“I got stationed in Italy and it was really the best thing that could have happened to me at that time,” said Taylor. “I worked for a great bunch of men and women; it was a great unit. I finally got some good mentorship, had some really cool deployments and I started putting in applications to medical school.”

More than 20 medical school applications later – and 20 firm rejections – Taylor was disappointed, but it was OK, he said.

Getting into medical school in the U.S. is statistically hard. The average acceptance rate for reported medical schools in the U.S. for the 2016-2017 school year was 5.8 percent. That rate dropped to 2.6 percent at some medical schools. Only the best of the best are accepted in either case.

“I just figured if medical school didn’t want me then I was going to keep kicking ass in the Navy,” said Taylor. “So I volunteered to go to Afghanistan. I went and it was a great deployment. It inspired me even more to become a military doctor and, if anything, made me more determined to get into medical school. I definitely thought medical school was going to come along eventually. My chiefs all wanted me to go to IDC school, but I said ‘didn’t you hear me? I want to be a doctor! I want to go to medical school,’ but they still insisted I go to IDC School or I would never make chief.”

Independent Duty Corps school, or IDC school, is the ultimate career path for any enlisted corpsman. In a sense, it is the pinnacle of their career and therefore another coveted box to check for a very select few. The idea of a corpsman NOT wanting to go to IDC school would seem to anyone else like insanity.

Navy Ensign Benjamin Taylor (right) poses with former dive colleague, Navy Senior
Chief Garth Sinclair (left) after a ceremony.  (Image credit: Benjamin Taylor)

A battle of wills ensued – higher-ups championing IDC School and I-Want-to-be-a- Military-Doctor Taylor went toe to toe. He voluntarily separated from the Navy in 2013 to go back to school and focus on his pre-med studies.

It wasn’t easy, he said. He compares his separation from the Navy to the feeling of grief one experiences with the loss of a loved one, but it paid off. He finished his pre-med program in 2015. Oh, and by the way, he also made chief right before he separated. He never did go to IDC School.
“I applied to 47 medical schools in 2015 including USU,” said Taylor.

He was accepted into several programs including the Mayo Clinic, a world-renowned medical school that has only a one percent acceptance rate, but he knew there was only one school for him.

“USU was always my first pick,” said Taylor. “I knew right away I had to say no to all of the other schools because I was so in love with this place [USU]. The Navy is where I belonged. I’d never been a part of something like I had been while I was in the Navy and that was more important to me than anything. I had a Recruit Division Commander in basic [training] that used to say, ‘It’s not your Navy. It’s my Navy,’ because he earned it. He felt that he had given so much of his heart and soul to the organization that he was part of something that he helped to build. I wanted that. I wanted to be a part of something that I had invested in and had improved and worked for. More than anything that’s what inspired me to keep going. The Navy is my organization. USU is my school.”