Young professionals today are super brave. We move across cities, states, and even oceans - [Julia] This rural mission is brought to you by Michigan State University College of Human Medicine Leadership and Rural Medicine programs. The podcast is funded in part by a generous grant provided by the Herbert H. and Grace A. Dow Foundation. To learn more about the Leadership in Rural Medicine programs, please visit www.msururalhealth.chm.msu.edu. I'm your host, Julia Terhune, and stay tuned for more from this Rural Mission. (bluegrass music) -[Julia] Hello, and welcome back to another episode of this Rural Mission, brought to you by Michigan State University College of Human Medicine. Today we're going to take a little bit of a different route. Today we're going to talk about what it means to be brave. That might seem like a really different topic. Typically we talk about rural health disparities or we talk about social issues in rural America and now we're going to talk about bravery? Well, hear me out for a second We do a lot of brave things in our lives. Some of us move overseas, some of us go out of state to a brand new place to get an education or change jobs and all of those things, every single one of them is extremely brave and courageous, but there's something else that's just as brave and that's going back. Going back to that small town that you grew up in, going back to the place you said you would never return to. (electric guitar music) We're going to talk to a number of people today. Some of the people that we talk to are planning to return to their small town after they graduate. Some are already returning to their small town to get an education, and some swore they would never, ever return but have made a career out of their small town. I encourage you to stay tuned and hear more from this Rural Mission. We've got an interesting road ahead and I'm excited for you to see how brave you really have to be to go back. Daniel Drake, soon to be Dr. Daniel Drake, is a Rural Community Health Program student at the Midland Regional campus. - [Daniel] I mean, I grew up in Caro and Caro is a relatively small town. And so I went up to the UP and I was at Michigan Tech. No one in my family is a physician, no one had gone to a four-year university at all. So I was kind of figuring it all out on my own and when I was at Tech, I heard about an early assurance program that Michigan state did and you took your MCAT early and applied early and so I think I found out it was 2012 when I found out that I was going to go to Michigan State for my medical school. - [Paula] So I'm Paula Klose and I am a family physician, I'm a graduate of Michigan State College of Human Medicine and I trained in the Upper Peninsula campus for my clinical years. - [Daniel] I have always kind of known that I wanted to do rural health, that was always my big thing. Being from a small town, going to undergrad in a small town where I knew I wanted to practice rurally. - [Paula] I wanted to work in a rural community, I wanted to live in a log cabin that I built by hand (laughs). And so when I was applying to medical schools, I chose Michigan State College of Medicine because of the Upper Peninsula medical education program. - [Daniel] With R-CHP, the rural community health program, Midland has a site for that in Pigeon. - [Paula] For the past, let's see, six years, I have been involved with Michigan State again and was asked to be the community assistant dean for the Midland Regional campus. - [Daniel] In Pigeon, it is near the tip of the thumb and Huron County, not far from my hometown at all and it was a place that I was familiar with. I was like, it would be really exiting to go back and just be able to actually practice clinical medicine up there. - [Julia] You grew up here too, didn't you? - [Paula] Yes, yeah. I wasn't born here, but my dad worked for Dow Chemical and never thought I would end up back here again. Pictured myself living in the UP, practicing. A