Taking time off between undergraduate and medical school turned out to be one of the best decisions for 31-year-old, Montana-born Kevin Sullivan, a fourth-year medical student at the UND School of Medicine and Health Sciences. For six years after graduating from the University of Montana, Sullivan continued a job he started in college: fighting wildfires.

Those years were anything but a waste, he says. They proved to be indispensable. Hand-in-hand with the blazes were lessons giving him leadership and teamwork skills he knows are crucial in the medical world. He had to interact constantly not only with his crew and the public, but also with fire, for him a comparably living organism. His experiences with the unpredictability of wildfire gave him valuable insights.

“It breathes, it eats, it moves, and it’s unpredictable a lot of the time, much like patients. You can’t always predict what it’s going to do, and you have to always be on your toes for any kind of change,” he says.

Although facing fires is unnerving, it gave Sullivan the ability to handle high- stress situations and to deal with difficult people in those stressful situations. It all boils down to being mentally mature.

“I thank fire big time for that, and for being able to step back from a process and being able to analyze it when things aren’t exactly the best situations as far as danger and complexity goes,” he says.

And when situations aren’t out of control? Sullivan also believes his time off from school will help him to better connect with his patients. He understands going out and working hard and sees this as a way of relating to, and gain confidence from, patients.

He’ll never regret his choice to continue firefighting for those six years, but has always known medicine was the career for him. The Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE) program gave him the chance to achieve it. Like other students from states without medical schools, Sullivan hoped for one of the few non-resident spots available in other states’ medical programs.

He wasn’t let down. The UND medical school accepted him through WICHE, and he was glad, because the patient-centered learning program at UND turned out to be more beneficial than what many of his friends experienced at lecture-based medical schools.

Although originally intending to become an orthopedic surgeon, Sullivan now plans to pursue anesthesiology. Why? It will allow him to interact with people while still being hands-on by performing procedures, two things he loves most.