Q&A with Silvia Hugec '24GS

Former professional figure skater and future doctor Silvia Hugec ‘24GS grew up close to the medical field: both her parents are doctors. Besides her family expertise though, Hugec’s medical dreams have been shaped by a series of important experiences during her time at Columbia GS, from volunteer work during the heart of the COVID-19 pandemic, to a summer internship with health technology nonprofit the Jacobs Institute. Hugec shares stories from these formative moments, and how she has successfully made the shift from full-time athlete to pre-med track student.

What was your journey to GS? 

My parents immigrated from Slovakia and settled down in Minnesota where I grew up. I started figure skating basically since I could walk, and I figure skated internationally representing Slovakia, taking part in the Youth Olympic Games, the Junior World Championships, and even participating in a figure skating festival in North Korea. 

When I originally applied to GS, I was planning on continuing my skating career. GS was the perfect place where I could both skate and pursue academics. However, the summer before I entered Columbia, a lot of things happened in my life where I ultimately made the decision that it was best for my mental and physical health to stop skating and focus on this new chapter of my life. Now, I’m majoring in psychology with the goal of becoming a doctor.

What was it like transitioning to Columbia from being a full-time athlete?

I graduated high school early, at 17, so I took a gap year and focused on skating during that time. So, when I got here, it was honestly a harsh transition, going from doing a year of no school at all to being at one of the hardest schools in the world. I was also at a stage in my life where figure skating wasn’t my main identity anymore, and that used to be the thing I used to introduce myself and what everyone knew me as, and I needed to find a new identity. 

With all of that, it was a rocky start at first, but what really helped me was I built a routine for myself and I found a great group of friends. Resources like the Academic Resource Center (ARC), my academic advisor, and my professors were awesome too. I’m such a high achiever and I’ve always been someone who is too scared to ask for help, but the study patterns I used in high school, they weren’t going to work for college. I needed something different because college is completely different, so I got support and I reworked my habits.

Your time at GS has also coincided with the COVID pandemic and you were a frontline medical volunteer during the pandemic. What was the impact of that experience?

During distance learning, I went home to Minnesota to be with my parents. It was definitely hard, because since they are both doctors, it’s not like they could stop working. When they got COVID too, that was particularly tough. 

During that period though, my mom worked with a company, Twin Cities Physicians, that traveled to nursing homes, and nursing homes were experiencing huge caseloads of COVID. The company ended up having a need for people who could administer COVID tests and I said, you know what, I can do that. My mom checked with me to see if I was sure, because there were risks involved. But I felt that since I was young, I had a reasonable chance that if I did get COVID I would be okay, so if they needed people to test residents in nursing homes, then I’d do it. So, I did that the entire summer of 2020, traveling to nursing homes around the Twin Cities area, testing residents and staff, and managing the patient portal to report test results. It didn’t feel like such an important aspect role in the grand scheme of the pandemic, but it was a small step that I could contribute, and I was grateful to help in any possible way. 

This past summer, you interned at the Jacobs Institute. What did that internship involve, and how has it enriched and informed your long term medical career goals? 

The Jacobs Institute is located in Buffalo, New York and it’s a medical innovation center, working with companies that have medical devices and helping them move through the entire process to ultimately get FDA approval. I received the educational internship there and completed three different types of projects: overseeing their high school internship, organizing a heart health and wellness webinar, and creating a lesson plan around aneurysms for the Institute’s Brain Boot Camps.

The biggest part of that was overseeing the high school internship where they bring in 20 to 30 high school students from the Buffalo area who are interested in healthcare. Together with another intern, I was responsible for planning out basically every single activity in their program, from guest lectures, to opportunities to learn about medical school admissions. It was so fulfilling to see how the kids transformed over the two weeks, often starting out not really knowing what they wanted to do within medicine, and coming out a lot more informed and confident.

It was honestly the best summer of my life, I loved it, and it helped me think about medicine more in the sense of community. I think for pre-med students, it is easy to focus on resume builders and what is going to make your application stand out most to medical school admissions committees. But this experience reminded me that why I want to be a doctor is about wanting to help people, about looking for the answers to how can I help the community, and how can I do something that matters. 

Last but not least: what is one fun fact about you?

My mom and I have the exact same name, we’re both Silvia Hugec! And it’s the same for my brother and my dad, they are both Vladimir Hugec. So sometimes when you look us up, you’ll find our parents instead. It’s kinda incredible, what my parents decided to do!