P&S Class of 2016: Hasani Swindell

Growing up in Southfield, Mich., Hasani Swindell, MD'16, knew he did not want to be a doctor.

“When I was younger, my father required spinal surgery for an injury suffered in a car accident. I came along for the initial consultations with different surgeons and was turned off the physician-patient interactions. It felt like they struggled to connect and respond to some of my family's primary concerns about the risks, his postoperative course, and the degree to which we would all be affected by this procedure.”

Dr. Swindell instead went to the University of Pittsburgh thinking he would go into film production. But the summer before his sophomore year, another family member needed orthopedic surgery. “This physician treated my family like his own,” he says. “It was the kind of connection I felt every patient deserved and I wanted to emulate that. It was almost the perfect set of circumstances to lead me into medicine.”

Dr. Swindell ran track and field in high school and his interest in athletics led him to work with the sports medicine team at Pitt. In medical school, he was naturally drawn to orthopedic surgery and he was thrilled to match at Columbia and remain in New York. “At heart, I am a true Midwesterner, but you just can't beat New York,” he says.

His goals as a doctor spring from that first positive doctor-patient interaction. “I want to make sure I treat and advise every patient like they were part of my own family,” he says. “I also like academic medicine and want to be an influence in the lives of residents and medical students aspiring to go into orthopedics because I would not have made it to this point without the help of my mentors. If I do that, I can confidently go home every day feeling like I accomplished what I was supposed to do.”