iXperience
September 1, 2026
The doctor in the emergency room walked the students over to a patient, made the introductions, and then stopped talking.
Okay, he said. Now it's your turn to get the patient history.
Molly Kuznik had done the American version of this a year earlier. A summer of shadowing back home, doctors narrating their work over their shoulders, students standing at a polite distance and taking it in. On paper, the two summers look like the same line on a CV. In practice, one of them handed her a patient.
That gap, between watching medicine happen and being close enough to be part of the room, turns out to be the whole story of her three weeks in Cape Town.
Molly studies biomedical engineering at the University of Virginia. She is also pre-med. Anyone who has tried to combine those two knows what that does to a timetable.
Her friends had gone on Semester at Sea and come back full of it. So had her parents. She had spent a couple of years quietly filing study abroad under things other people get to do.
"As a pre-med student, and with engineering too, it's really difficult to study abroad," she says. "I've always wanted to study abroad, but I can't really with my major."
The second problem was the summer. Medical school requires clinical and shadowing hours, and there is no pre-med summer that doesn't involve going out and finding them. So the calculation she made was not really about travel at all. If the hours had to happen anyway, and the accommodation had to be paid for anyway, then the only question left was where.
She sent her parents the schedule and the website. They read it and said yes immediately. Once in a lifetime, they told her. One hundred percent do it.
Then she booked a flight to a country where she did not know a single person on the program, and, by her own admission, did almost no homework before getting on the plane.
"I actually didn't really research much before coming, if I'm being honest. So I kind of came in a little bit blind."
The one thing she did check was the accommodation. Gates, keys, who to call. Then she landed after dark at the end of a long flight and went to sleep without seeing anything.
"I remember waking up the first day and looking outside, and the first thing I thought was just how beautiful it was."
There is a phrase that comes up constantly in pre-med circles and almost never gets defined. Scrubbing in. Molly defines it, carefully, without being asked to, which tells you something about who she was thinking of when she answered.
Observing a surgery means standing back. Scrubbing in means cap, mask, gown, gloves, and a place at the table. She is precise about the limits. Nobody is touching a patient. Nobody is doing anything to a patient. What changes is not your role, it is your distance, and at that distance you can hear a surgeon think.
"You can literally peer into the workspace during the surgery."
Undergraduates do not get that in the United States. Molly says as much, flatly and without decoration. "I don't think that's very heard of in the States. That's an amazing experience that you don't really get to do until you get to medical school."
What she found on the other side of those few inches was a spine. Not a diagram of a spine, which she had seen many times, but the thing itself, with a surgeon narrating the muscles and nerves around it and stopping the operation to make sure the students were keeping up.
"They would stop and ask us, what questions do you have. And sometimes even if it's just, what am I looking at right now."
Over three weeks she sat with surgeons, emergency doctors, primary care physicians, an ophthalmologist, an audiologist and nurses. Some of it was four hours on her feet in a theatre. Some of it was a mobile clinic in a town two hours out of the city.
The program is built around a split. South Africa runs two healthcare systems in parallel, one private and one public, and the distance between them is the first thing anybody explains to you here.
A doctor called De Vries gave the students a talk on how that gap opened and how he became a physician inside it. Later they visited a clinic run by medical students who are trying to close it. On Mondays they went out with the GUUD Mobile Clinics, which take healthcare to people who otherwise wait.
What Molly took from that was not a statistic.
"There are people that you might not see, they might not be on headlines, you might not see advertised a ton, but there are these programs and these initiatives that are trying to bridge the gap," she says. "It's one thing to learn about the gap, but then it's another thing to actually see people trying to bridge the gap."
This is the point at which her answers stop being about her own career and start being about a system, and she seems to notice it happening. Ask her why an international experience matters to someone who wants to practise in America and she does not reach for anything about broadening horizons.
"There are things the healthcare system does that is good here," she says, "and that can teach you what to do and what not to do."
Biomedical engineering opens three doors. Industry, research, or medicine. Molly had been standing in that hallway since her freshman year, and by her own account she was still standing there most of the way through her sophomore year.
The research side of the program interested her. It did not settle anything.
"It was less a moment where it clicks and you're just like, this is what I want to do."
The theatre settled it.
"Being able to scrub into a surgery was one of those moments where I was like, okay, I know that this is what I want to do. Because I also do want to go into surgery."
Two years of weighing it up, resolved standing up, in a room she was not supposed to be in for another six.
She answers this like an engineer, which is to say she does the arithmetic out loud rather than telling you how she felt.
Travel costs money regardless. Accommodation costs money regardless. The hours were going to cost her a summer either way.
"I would have been spending my summer trying to get more of those hours anyway," she says. "This allows for a condensed way to get a bunch of hours in a shorter amount of time, while you're traveling."
She is honest about the cost in energy too. Three weeks, packed tight, weekdays gone from early. "It definitely was tiring. That's one thing."
The weekends were hers. Penguins at Boulders Beach and a swim she describes as very cold and still worth it. Lion's Head on her last full day, in the rain, which she calls a little bit treacherous and then immediately calls beautiful.
And when you ask who she would tell to do this, she does not say everyone. She names the exact person she was eighteen months ago.
"Especially for the pre-med students that don't get to travel abroad and don't get to study abroad, and get as much out of it that's actually beneficial. Career experience, and for medical school applications."
She flies home in a few hours. She is not looking forward to the next bit.
"I don't want to go back and take classes. I just want to go straight into working in medicine."
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