Nick Seeliger has had a passion for international medical relief work since he was a freshman at FSU, when he began witnessing dire medical needs in countries like El Salvador, Haiti and Peru.

Through the medical student outreach organization FSUCares, Seeliger later traveled to Panama and Mexico with a group of medical school faculty and students to provide care in communities lacking in health-care resources. Then, just months before graduation, he headed for Ghana, where he worked with American doctors and medical students and the local public health authorities on vaccination campaigns.

 “I felt it was time to see for myself what Africa was all about,” said Seeliger, who has studied the work of Harvard physician and medical anthropologist Dr. Paul Farmer, founder of Partners in Health, one of the world’s most effective international public health organizations.

“In a place like Africa, you can really see how public health changes lives,” Seeliger said. “We aren’t talking about one or two. We are talking about tens of thousands.”

Another group of FSU med students departs the United States on July 19 for Ghana as part of Students Interested in Global Health (SIGH). Like Seeliger, they are paying their own way for an independent opportunity to gain valuable experiences as aspiring physicians.

“The purpose for SIGH is to provide medical students with a global perspective on health-care delivery in developing countries,’’ said second-year student Uchenna Ikediobi, who will be joined on the trip by classmates Irmanie Eliacin, Eboni Malkia, Dolly Penn, Shannon Roberts and Christine Rojas.

Dr. Daniel Van Durme, professor and chair in the department of family medicine and rural health, will accompany the students.

"The health-care system in the United States is badly broken in many different ways - lack of coverage, lack of consistency in delivery, lack of equal access,'' Van Durme said. "When they see how health-care delivery works in other countries, even in a developing country, it can open their eyes to seeing that the United States doesn’t have the perfect system and can learn something from other countries, even from a developing country.

"Also, for students it improves their doctoring skills when they don’t have access to expensive imaging equipment and labs. It’s a tremendous opportunity to develop their history-taking and physical examination skills. … and Ghana is an English-speaking country, so they don’t have to rely on an interpreter.

"After returning from an experience such as this, students learn to appreciate what they have at home after seeing how difficult getting care can be for the profoundly poor people of Ghana.''

Seeliger said the experience changed his life.

“I really have moved from wanting to work solely in primary care in a local community to wanting to have a broader scope of practice in public health,” he said. “I fully intend to do a fellowship in preventive medicine and obtain a master’s in public health focusing on international health.”

The Air Force, which provided Seeliger a scholarship while he was in medical school, will give him ample opportunity to further his goals. A native of Crestview, Fla., Seeliger is entering the family medicine residency program at Eglin Air Force base, not far from his hometown. But he expects his career to take him all over the world.

“The Air Force has numerous opportunities to learn, study, and practice tropical medicine, humanitarian aid, and international public health,” Seeliger said. “They offer many deployment opportunities to work in refugee camps and humanitarian disaster areas. The work these doctors do is rarely talked about, but I grew up with a father who served as a flight surgeon in the Air Force Reserve, and I have seen him take trips like these my entire life. It was his work in this capacity that inspired me to become a physician in the first place.”

Residency will be the first time since pre-school Seeliger will be pursuing his education without his lifelong classmate Kara Brooks. A native of Laurel Hill and graduate of Crestview High School, Brooks is also going into family medicine. She will be a resident at Phoebe Putney Memorial Hospital in Albany, Ga. After going all the way through primary and secondary school together, both earned their bachelor’s and medical degrees at FSU. Brooks intends to devote the latter portion of her career to medical outreach work after first practicing close to home.

“We have known each other far too long and have too many of the same dreams, passions and interests, to lose touch,” Seeliger said. “We are fully confident that we will continue to be friends for many years to come. Even better is that our mothers now live about 500 yards away from each other down the same little dirt road, out in the country in Crestview.”