“Lean into your interests and strengths, and in doing that, you’ll naturally find ways that you can lead and be successful,” Campbell says.
Talia Campbell is a fourth-year medical student at the University of Alberta and the recipient of the Alberta College of Family Physicians’ 2025 Student Leadership Rising Star Award.
Prior to medical school, Campbell worked as a physiotherapist in a “large multidisciplinary practice,” but medicine was something she was always interested in. She sought out “a broader scope of practice and had a lot of support from [her] family to go back to school.”
She reflected on how working in physiotherapy was a good bridge to “test out the health-care world before entering medicine.”
Campbell was interested in family medicine upon entering medical school, and she explained that she initially thought she would end up in sports medicine due to her previous experiences working with sports medicine doctors.
Throughout her clerkship experiences, Campbell said she really enjoyed everything she did, and there were a lot of experiences she liked more than she anticipated. She “fell in love with every specialty” she tried, and then she could “never imagine doing only one, so [she] kept on coming back to family medicine.”
Campbell was “so honoured” to be the recipient of this award. She reflected on her dedication to family medicine, including clinical experiences geared towards family medicine, leading a Family Medicine Interest Group, and conducting research about the specialty.
The recognition of this award meant a lot to Campbell, considering that she was recognized amongst many “other people in medicine that [she] really admire[s].”
During her first year, Campbell was the junior lead of the Family Medicine Interest Group, and later she transitioned to the senior role, she explained. Through this experience she cultivated meaningful relationships with faculty members.
She shared that she went into the interest group with “such a desire to do things differently than they had been done in the past.” With these intentions, she aimed to “make more people interested in family medicine.”
“A couple of years ago there were a lot of unmatched residency spots,” she recalled, meaning there was an “all time low for people’s interest in family medicine.”
It is “exposures and the people you meet” that influence people’s experience with the specialty, according to Campbell.
The research Campbell took part in was a large scoping review, “kind of like a literature review,” she explained. The goal was to “determine what literature was out there opposed to analyzing statistically what is found,” she explained.
Her role was to look at a “subset of that data that was all involving family medicine and primary care medicine,” Campbell said. They were looking at “factors that influence medical students to choose family medicine as a specialty.”
There were very few articles that discussed this area, meaning “the research in general is lacking,” Campbell said. From this research, their intention was to “learn more about what those factors are that draw people to family medicine, so that they can be implemented to promote the specialty.”
When reflecting on what Campbell thinks makes a good leader, she shared that she is a big believer in “leading with your heart.” She thinks it is important to do things that are “already of interest to you.”
Her philosophy is to “lean into your interests and strengths, and in doing that, you’ll naturally find ways that you can lead and be successful.”
When asked whether she would change anything if she could, she said “sometimes I think I should have gone into medicine earlier, but then I wouldn’t have had all of the life experiences that have led me here.”
She tells people to “make sure to explore everything because it is great to be able to have those experiences.” She explained that it is useful to seek out clinical experience and shadowing opportunities so that you “don’t close the door on anything too soon.”
