‘We’ve never had a human medical student before’: A University of Colorado trainee rotates through an animal cancer clinic

Tristan Seawalt didn’t discover he was the very first medical student from the University of Colorado Anschutz School of Medicine’s Fort Collins Regional Medical Campus at Colorado State University to take a comparative oncology course at CSU’s renowned Flint Animal Cancer Center until a day or two after he started the elective course.

“They said, ‘We’ve never had a human medical student before. Can we take a picture?’”

As Seawalt sees it, it was probably a good thing that he didn’t know he was first until after he started the course over the summer. “That would have stressed me out. After learning that, I thought, ‘OK, I really need to be on my best behavior and take everything very seriously,’ because I wanted to make a good impression for future students.”

The two-week elective course at the Flint Animal Cancer Center (FACC) is designed to give students of human medicine a glimpse of how FACC uses medical, surgical, and radiation oncology in a veterinary setting, and also to expose students to the center’s comparative oncology research, which often leads to better treatment for both animals and humans.

Several of FACC’s researchers – including its director, Susan Lana, DVM – are CU Cancer Center members, collaborating on one of the most advanced comparative oncology research programs in the world. They seek to translate research on prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of naturally occurring cancer in pet animals to benefit both pets and people.

The FACC course was a great fit for Seawalt, who is focused on radiation oncology. “It’s been one of the best courses I’ve ever taken,” he says. “It was an amazing rotation. It was just a couple weeks, but the experience will be very long lasting for me. I would highly recommend it for anyone, even if they’re not thinking about going into oncology specifically.”

→ Renowned CSU Research Center Fights Cancer in Both Pets and People

The big driver

Seawalt grew up in the Denver area and earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Colorado School of Mines. His master’s was in Quantitative Biosciences and Engineering. He also did neurology research work on the CU Anschutz campus.

His says the “big driver” of his path into medicine – and his focus on cancer – was the experience of helping to take care of his father, who was diagnosed with early-onset prostate cancer. Radiation was part of his father’s treatment.

“Thankfully, it was caught early and all the right steps were done,” Seawalt says. “But that journey motivated me to advance the field and be part of an amazing medical system. I feel like a lot of people don’t know how much goes on behind the scenes with oncology.”

When it came time to go to medical school, CU Anschutz seemed an obvious choice, he says, “but I wanted a bit of a change of scenery, and my partner was doing her PhD in Fort Collins at CSU, so it seemed like a great opportunity for me to go up there.”

Very connected

Seawalt is one of 12 students in the Class of 2026 at the School of Medicine’s Fort Collins branch campus, only the second class there since the outpost opened in July 2021. The program is housed in the Health and Medical Center at CSU, a university recognized as one of the top veterinary science schools in the nation.

“With the small class size, I’ve felt very connected to the other students. It’s a great community,” he says. “And as for the academic advantage, the professors and education are top notch. With our small class size, we’re able to ask more questions of the lecturers and really understand the material.”

Seawalt already had been doing research work involving FACC through CSU’s Translational Medicine Institute. “It was amazing to see the similarities between animals and humans. So, I was already looped into the system when I heard of their comparative oncology course, and I thought, ‘I have to do this. I have to see what it’s like to treat cancer in cats and dogs and rabbits.’”

A hands-on experience

The course enabled Seawalt to get more hands-on experience with radiation therapy than he had previously. In particular, he was able to do deeper into contouring, the process of outlining a tumor using medical images to more precisely target radiation delivery and protect healthy tissue nearby.

“That had not been something I’d done in human medicine up to that point, but I did it regularly at the veterinary hospital,” he says.

Asked what he’ll take away from the experience, Seawalt says that “the first thing I’ll carry with me is respect for the veterinarian medicine practitioners, because what they do is almost exactly the same as what we do. And in some ways, it may be a little bit harder, because they have to know several different species, and also their patients can’t talk about how they’re feeling, which is such a big part of human medicine.”

Seawalt also is grateful to FACC faculty and staff, who “went out of their way to make it an amazing experience for me,” he says.

As Seawalt nears the end of his medical school journey, he’s applying to radiation oncology residencies – and he thinks his FACC experience will be “a very valuable part” of his application.

“I’m certainly going to bring it up in my interviews,” he says. “I think that’s something that will stick with residencies, that here’s this student who had this amazing experience, someone who’s not just been in the human space.”