Christopher Kinsella

Hi everyone.

I was born and raised in Saint Louis, Missouri, went to college at John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio, and after two rounds of applying to medical schools in the US and a year as a Patient Care Tech, I arrived in Grenada.

Before coming to the island, I was in the dark about Grenada and what it was like to be a student here. I found the information about SGU to fall short of what I needed to feel comfortable and, in my mind, I was taking a risk. Fully expecting to ride a mule from the airport to my dorm, arriving on the island was a pleasant surprise. Wishing that someone had already done it for me, I decided to sit down and write a guide for the school.

I wrote the first “Welcome to Grenada” letter during the end of First Term and sent it to the SGU offices in Bay Shore. That year it was sent out to every accepted student and the response was incredibly positive. Later, I was encouraged to expand the guide to cover the first two years on the islands. I contacted Jessica Kramer (a good friend of mine and the President of the Student Government) to tell her about the project and to ask for her help in promoting it. As it turned out, she was already working on something similar. We decided to combine our writing into its current form, Jess found support for the project within the Dean of Students office, and we put the information into this online format. The rest is history.

SGU has been good to me. While here I became involved with research under the mentorship of Dr. Marios Loukas, met some enthusiastic teachers that piqued my interest in Physiology and Anatomy, and even managed to have a paper published.

After finishing my second year with SGU, I transferred to Drexel University in Philadelphia, passed Step 1, began working with Tao Le of the First Aid for the USMLE book series as an author/editor for the 2008 Edition, and created the First Aid Team website. These days, I am grateful to everyone that has made all of this possible for me and dream of becoming a Plastic Surgeon. Without SGU, none of this would have happened. I believe now what I believed then: no regrets.

Cheers, topher.