From Dancer to Doctor

There was a time when Tessa Olmstead spent long hours in a dance studio, training to become a professional dancer. Now she spends her days in a hospital, training to become a psychiatrist. The two endeavors might seem wholly unrelated, but Olmstead (BA, Dance, BS, Bioengineering, 2013; MD, 2022) finds that skills from dance have translated to healthcare in surprising ways.

“My dance training at the UW helped me succeed in medical school by making me observant and in tune with non-verbal patient cues. It also fueled my passion for constant learning and creativity,” Olmstead wrote to the UW Department of Dance in an alumni update.

Raised in Burien, Washington, Olmstead began dancing in grade school with the encouragement of her mother. She briefly considered quitting, but her mother convinced her to give it more time. Soon Olmstead flourished as a dancer, training at Pacific Northwest Ballet School and earning scholarships for summer ballet programs at the Kennedy Center and the School of American Ballet. After high school, she danced professionally with the Evergreen City Ballet (no longer a company but a school for professional ballet training) while taking college courses at Highline College at night.

“I love dance as a form of expression, but the stress of trying to earn money through dance was not something I loved,” she says.

After completing her college prerequisites at Highline, Olmstead transferred to the University of Washington, where both of her parents had earned degrees. An interest in applied science led her to major in bioengineering, but she used her elective credits for dance classes.

“Dancing in college, solely for pleasure, I was so happy,” she says. “I’ve never experienced that joy in any other situation, and I don’t know how to explain it. You’re not thinking about all stresses in life because you’re focused on this one thing.”

A faculty mentor in the Department of Dance convinced Olmstead to pursue a second major in dance, which introduces students to dance history, dance theory, and diverse dance styles. “I learned a lot,” Olmstead says. “I wouldn’t know about dance from the African diaspora without the dance major. And I really liked dance history. I actually interviewed for a dance history PhD when I finished.”

But Olmstead also enjoyed bioengineering, which she describes as engineering to solve biological problems. “Someone with a prosthetic knee or implanted defibrillator — a bioengineer designed that,” Olmstead says. As an undergraduate, she worked in the research lab of bioengineering professor Wendy Thomas, and after graduating, she joined neurosurgery professor Pierre Mourad’s research lab, with a focus on ultrasound neuromodulation. The work was satisfying, but Olmstead could not ignore a simmering realization that she wanted to be a doctor.

“It had always been in the back of my mind, but I thought the pieces would just fall into place and I would one day wake up with an acceptance to medical school,” she laughs. “It turns out it doesn’t work that way.”

After completing additional requirements for medical school, Olmstead applied to the UW School of Medicine. The UW was her first choice for many reasons: its excellent reputation, its manageable in-state tuition, and its proximity to her family.

What challenged Olmstead most in medical school was not the academics but choosing her future path in medicine. She took a pause for one year to complete a post-sophomore fellowship in pathology, which helped clarify that pathology was not for her. She also worked as a co-clinic lead at the Downtown Emergency Services Center in Seattle, working with patients who were unhoused.

“That was an experience like no other environment I’d been in,” Olmstead recalls. “There was just so much need — untreated psychiatric illness, untreated medical illness. You see a lot of things there that you wouldn’t see in the general population.”

During her last two years of medical school, Olmstead completed clerkships, or clinical rotations, in Washington, Alaska, Wyoming, and Montana through WWAMI, the UW School of Medicine’s innovative multi-state medical education program. She gained hands-on experience with various medical specialties and knew she’d found her home after a rotation in psychiatry. “It just felt right,” she says.

Psychiatry requires a four-year residency after medical school. Olmstead is now in her third year at University of New Mexico Hospital in Albuquerque. She has found her dance background surprisingly helpful during her residency, as she did during her clerkships.

“In psychiatry, there's the mental status exam — like a physical exam, but focused on mental health,” she explains. “A big part of that is observing body language. Is the person fiddling with their hands? Unusually tense? Not making eye contact? Dancers are particularly good at noticing those things.”

Feedback is another area where dance prepared Olmstead. In medical school, feedback can be hard to take but important to accept. As a dancer, Olmstead was used to that. “From ballet, I learned that people giving you feedback is a good thing — it means they care. It means that they want to mentor you,” she says. “I’ve had to remind myself of that in medical school.”

Another commonality is ambiguity. More than many other areas of medicine, psychiatrists face situations that are often not black and white. Again, Olmstead believes her dance background has helped her embrace that challenge.

“Psychiatry, it's all gray,” she says. “Even admitting someone to the hospital versus not admitting them is not always clear cut. Dance has some of that as well. It’s ambiguous. It's somebody's artistic vision. There is no right, there is no wrong. You just have to accept that. So thanks to dance, I’ve been able to accept that there are clear issues and then there's a lot of gray and that's okay.”

Despite all the talk of how dance has benefited her, Olmstead is not dancing as much as she'd like right now. With her busy schedule, and being away from her long-time dance community, it’s not been a priority. She may return to dance, and the Northwest, after her residency, but that’s still an open question — as is her choice of subspeciality within psychiatry.

One decision at a time, she says.

“I have a lot of interests and it’s really hard to choose one,” she says. “But I’ll get there eventually.”