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Cory Edwards grew up in a town with less than 1,000 residents situated on the banks of the Ohio River. He's about to graduate from the ÃÛèÖÊÓƵ Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine and will be heading to OhioHealth Riverside Methodist Hospital in Columbus where he will be doing an internal medicine residency. Edwards, a graduate of Morehead State University, hopes to pursue additional training as a rheumatology fellow after his residency.

What are you most excited about as you take your next step in your career?

I’m looking forward to gaining the confidence and autonomy to be able to handle acutely ill patients on my own, and to be able to urgently identify which interventions need to be done to help patients get back to a state of health. I’m also looking forward to learning more about some of the internal medicine specialties that I didn’t have a chance to see much of as a medical student – such as gastroenterology, hematology/oncology, and others. Additionally, I'm looking forward to working with medical students in an educational role. Before medical school I briefly worked as a 10th grade biology teacher, and I was a tutor during my second year of medical school, so helping people out in that capacity is always something I've enjoyed.

If you could go back in time and give yourself advice, what would it be?

I think it would have helped to find a mentor who has an understanding of what medical school at your particular institution looks like from a logistical perspective, that way you have a greater idea of what to expect during your time there. As the first physician in my family, I didn’t really have a mentor or contact who I could get a full picture from regarding what my preclinical years would look like, what rotations look like, what to expect from board exams, etc. This led to me tackling a lot of these changes by myself as they came up – which isn’t insurmountable – it just would hav