Farjahan Chowdhury, MD

My name is Dr. Farjahan Chowdhury. I graduated from Avalon University School of Medicine, and I am one of the first, 10 internal medicine residents, that was selected for this residency program at San Antonio Regional Hospital. It's a dream come true to be here. Honestly, you know, we worked so hard to get to this point and, can't express enough, the gratitude and, you know, how grateful I am to be here. It's a dream come true. A great deal of medical school was about, you know, memorizing things from the books and coming through our clinical rotations and applying it into real world clinical practice. And then now playing the actual role of being a physician, you realize how impactful you are, you know, to the lives of these people, how directly impactful you are.

Somebody can come in with an acute illness. At one point, they're not feeling well. They're very sick. Within a matter of days, you have the ability to treat them and to help them make them feel better. The gratitude that I have, from being able to do that for people when they tell me how happy they are, how grateful they are, that I was there to help them, take care of their health. I think that's the most important thing more than anything else is having the ability to do that through all of the teachings, through all of the hard work in medical school to finally see it translate in real life, you know, with real people, to see the effect that I'm able to have here. You know, it's everything finally has come together and, it fully makes sense now why I had had gone through all of that hard work so that I could be in this position right now and be able to help people and be able to give back. My origin story into medicine is actually, I was 12 years old.

My father used to have me write book reports and I was reading an article about a gentleman named Dr. Balamurali and thought he may not know because the youngest physician ever reported in history became a doctor at the age of 17. I remember I read about him and wrote this report, my father and I was really excited when he saw that, you know, I had, wrote a report on this. And then that's the first time I started thinking, I was like, you know, like maybe this is something that I'd like to go into. When I was volunteering at a hospital, I remember how, engaged I was, how energetic I felt, something that's effortless.

I think that's what passion is all about is when you're doing something and it's effortless for you, you can keep going and keep going and it doesn't feel like time is going by. It's a dream come true, to be here, you know, at this program, of course, given the rich history that this hospital has, it's amazing, you know, that I get to be one of the first, 10 residents that will, basically create a roadmap for all of the residents that are to come. You know, this comes with a great responsibility and we understand that and each and every one of the residents are truthfully, truthfully amazing, not just in their profession, but as individuals, you know, as clinicians, you know, just as people, you know, all together.

And I think all of us bring such a unique, special trait, you know, to the table that collectively, you know, this makes for an amazing inaugural class. And I think we're gonna be doing amazing things here.