From Different Worlds to White Coats: Maxwell Kahn

Editor’s note: This three-part series shares the stories of three medical students and how their unique backgrounds shaped their journeys to medical school.

But he seemed predestined for a career in law.

Kahn’s father was a longtime attorney and managing partner with a prominent Buffalo personal injury firm. “It was important to him that I become a lawyer,” Kahn says of his father. “He definitely wanted me to carry on the family legacy there.”

And so he did.

After earning his bachelor’s degree at the University of Michigan, Kahn studied taxation law at the University of Alabama, graduating from law school in 2017. He soon moved back to his native Western New York and immersed himself in practicing law.

The work meant long days and long nights at the desk; Kahn found that his heart just wasn’t in it. “I was putting in ungodly hours, and it’s not that it wasn’t rewarding, because you do really help people,” he says. “It just always felt like a grind.”

Kahn says he gave law the chance it deserved — now it was time to try medicine.

But there was one problem: Kahn’s undergraduate curriculum didn’t include the prerequisite science classes needed for medical school. So, during the downtime afforded by the COVID-19 pandemic, he became a hardworking attorney by day and hardworking student by night, taking online classes at UB to fulfill premed requirements. 

Now at the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, Kahn says that what he learned in law school has been useful and applicable to medical school. “It teaches you a way to problem solve, think through everything, and be very mindful.”

He plans to train in anesthesiology after graduating, a decision that Kahn’s father also influenced but under more tragic circumstances. His dad was diagnosed with salivary gland cancer and had to undergo a procedure, which would cause partial facial paralysis, to remove a large mass.

Just before the operation, Kahn’s dad began having second thoughts. But, Kahn recalls, it was the medical team’s anesthesiologist who took the time to really explain the procedure’s benefits and ease his dad’s concerns. “He gave him the pep talk he needed to go through with the surgery,” Kahn says of the anesthesiologist.

And that left a lasting effect, even inspiring Kahn’s pursuit of anesthesia as a specialty.  While Kahn’s father passed from cancer in 2012, that procedure afforded him several more years of life.

Kahn hopes to one day combine his medical and legal backgrounds, whether that’s handling medical ethics issues or even helping streamline documentation information. He knows he’ll still have plenty of long days as an anesthesiologist, but health care work will keep him active on his feet rather than stuck behind a desk.

At medical school orientation, Kahn recalls looking around and feeling a little uneasy, being several years removed from college and coming from a much different background than most of his peers; within weeks, those feelings faded.

Now, he encourages anyone considering a later-stage switch to medicine to go for it. “You’re never too old to change, and you really never stop learning.”