UC News

Focus on Students with David Moon

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4 minute read March 14, 2013

Focus On highlights faculty, staff, students and researchers at the UC Academic Health Center. To suggest someone to be featured, please email uchealthnews@uc.edu.

Fourth-year medical student David Moon was just named the winner of the Louise Rauh Award, given by the Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center's Women's Faculty Association.

The award is based on excellence in academic performance, leadership skills, community service, resourcefulness and financial need. Awardees are in the top one-third of their class by the end of their third year.


How do you feel with Match Day coming up?
"I’m anxiously waiting to find out where I’m going to be for the next five years. I’m applying for a child neurology residency, which is two years of pediatrics and three years of neurology.

"I used Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center as the model for the kind of residency program I was looking for. I want a place with a high volume of patients and I applied to a lot of big academic centers: a lot of places in the Midwest, and some on the East Coast and out West

"I applied to Children’s, too. I’m originally from Cincinnati, so I would love to be able to stay here. That would be an amazing opportunity. But, unfortunately, the computer is what defines our fate, so we’ll see how things go. I’d be happy to train at most all of the places I ranked and I know I’d get great training at all of them.”

After four years of medical school, do you have any thoughts or reflections on your time here?
"The thing that I love about what happened to me in medical school is that there are so many things that if you told me five, 10 years ago that I’d be doing or that I would be able to handle, I would have never believed it.

"But medical training pushes you up to this area of discomfort—you’re always hitting the end of your knowledge base, every day. And you’re constantly surrounded by people who know more than you, who have more experience than you, and it constantly pushes you to grow.

"That’s the area where you grow the most—where you’re not too uncomfortable, but you have a little discomfort—it’s where you’re pushing yourself and you’re growing. I feel like I’ve grown more in the last four years through that process, not to mention having kids.”

What do you do in your spare time?
"I’m married and I have two kids. The oldest is going to be 4 years old next month and then I have an 18-month-old, so my wife and I are both very busy.

"It’s funny—in the interview process, residency programs always ask you about what you do in your spare time, and a lot of the activities I put down are things I did before I had toddlers. Now, my wife and I kind of live vicariously through our kids. A lot of the things we do you would feel silly doing by yourself as an adult. For example, there are all these great festivals in Cincinnati. Last year we went to a Wild West festival. Things like that are always fun. 

"I also play the guitar. I like acoustic blues music. I’m not very good at it, but it’s the one part of my life where I’m allowed to not be that good. There’s no pressure to be good.”

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