Medical students gaining real job experience here

    A pair of University of Nebraska Medical Center students are gaining real life experience with patients in Chase County in clinical rotations.
    Emma Skelton is a Physician’s Associate student in her second of three years in the program, while Phil Holubeck is completing his third of four years in med school.
    Both are seeing patients in the hospital and clinics in Imperial and Wauneta. Skelton is shadowing P.A. Jodi Spady, while Holubeck is being supervised by Dr. David Younger.
    They began their 8-week rotations Sept. 26 and will complete them mid-November.
    Skelton is very familiar with the area, growing up in Wauneta and graduating from Wauneta-Palisade High School in 2013.
    Her parents are Evelyn and the late Troy Skelton. She has an older brother, Colby, in Arkansas.
    It was her dad, Troy, who piqued her interest in medicine, she said. He was an EMT with the Wauneta EMS.
    “He was a paramedic so we were around it a lot and I liked it,” she said.
    She knew in high school she wanted to be a PA someday, she said.
    She attended Fort Hays State University in Kansas, graduating in 2018 with a BS degree in Medical Diagnostic Imaging.
    She worked as an x-ray tech for three years, two of them at the KU Medical Center in Kansas City, and a year as a traveler, working in both Medford, Oregon and Salt Lake City.
    After that, she entered the UNMC Physician’s Associate program on the Kearney campus. She will graduate in December 2023.
    Once in the workforce, Skelton said she’d like to specialize in holistic and preventive medicine, possibly in Colorado. However, she didn’t rule out a traveling position again.
    It’s been fun, Skelton said, getting to see a diverse population and their medical needs in the family practice realm. She said they’ve also been able to be present in the ER, during surgeries and in the specialty clinics.
    “We’ve had the opportunity to work in many areas,” she said.
    She added, “It’s also been fun seeing people I know.”
    Holubeck is an Omaha native, who said his exposure to medicine came early in life, too, when his four-year-old sister Peyton was diagnosed with stage 3 brain cancer. He was seven years old at the time.
    “So a large portion of our young lives was spent in surgeries” and with doctors, he said.
    “So at an early age, I knew medicine was a way to pay back the gifts to my family,” he said.
    His sister recovered and just celebrated her 17th year cancer-free, he said.
    After graduating in 2016 from Elkhorn South High School, Holubeck attended the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, earning a BS degree in biochemistry in 2020.
    He entered UNMC on the Omaha campus right after UNL, and is now in his third year of med school.
    His plan is to enter the orthopedic surgery field, which means a few more years of training—five years of residency and one to two years in a fellowship.
    He’d like to end up in sports medicine, possibly in Colorado with an eye on the skiing industry.
    He, too, said the experience here has been a good one.
    “Imperial has a very good reputation for family practice rotations,” he said.
    “I’ve absolutely loved it,” he added. “It’s been a real growth experience.”
    He’s appreciated the opportunity given him to make decisions on healthcare with supervision and being able to collaborate one-on-one with the providers here.
    Like Skelton, he said the people here have been nice and welcoming to him.