Bulletin Board

Author

Matt Ellsworth

Recent Posts by This Author | See All >

You'll find the Flinn Scholars community in every nook and cranny of the Internet.

For starters, visit the Flinn Foundation page on Facebook, follow @flinnscholars on Twitter, and--if you're a Scholar yourself--join the Scholars group on LinkedIn.

Want a quick answer to a burning question? You can reach me via email at mellsworth@flinn.org.

And who is this writing, anyway?

Since 2007, I've been a part of the Flinn Foundation's communications team, writing about all of the Foundation's initiatives, including the Flinn Scholars.

I'm also a Flinn Scholar alum myself, from the class of 1993. After my undergraduate years in Arizona, I completed an MFA in creative writing at George Mason University in Virginia. Now and then, I do type things not entirely true.

Jul 30, 2008
Matt_badge-author Matt Ellsworth

Choose your own adventure

Tags: 95, medicine, raphael see

Back in 1995, a few of us were at the Flinn Scholars Recognition Dinner, eyeing the dessert table and listening--more or less--to the incoming Scholars introduce the teachers that had influenced them most.

Usually, the 45-second stories that the new Scholars tell are pretty good--sometimes kind of funny, sometimes touching. More often the latter; there's usually some real gratitude to express.

Raphael SeeMost of the way through, Raphael See (95) stepped up to the microphone to introduce his "Honored Educator." And with a relatively quiet voice and dry sense of humor, he brought down the house.

We can't actually recall what he said; probably, it was kind of funny and touching. What we remember is the reaction of everybody at our table: We turned to each other and said, This is the funniest guy we've ever seen.

It was the crowd response you'd expect the very first time a great comedian takes the stage. And so we thought, sure, Raphael says he's going to be a chemical-engineering major. We know he'll be doing the stand-up shows in Vegas in a few years.

We still believe Raphael could have struck gold as a comic, but it's fortunate for everyone that he chose a different adventure.

After graduating from ASU, he went to UT Southwestern for med school and residency. Now he's at Vanderbilt Medical Center, about to start the second year of his clinical fellowship in cardiology.

Along with his work with patients, Raphael has found time to engage in some great research. For a year after he finished residency, he was part of the big team working on the Dallas Heart Study. And now he has his second major publication, in the May 26 edition of the Archives of Internal Medicine.