About Us

Hi, I'm Shari Schabowski MD

Medical Education in Minutes Founder

 I am a retired Emergency Medicine physician who treated patients and trained residents, medical students and physician assistants for 30 years at JHS Cook County Hospital.  I loved my time teaching clinically and many of my students said that I was able to simplify concepts in a way they could easily understand, remember and apply.  When I was getting close to retirement, I was excited to have time to myself and do things I did not have time for while I was working and raising my children.  I always wanted to know what it was like to have a whole weekend to myself without any responsibilities.  It turns out it is pretty great but I never wanted to have week after week without responsibilities.  I realized that if my interaction with students ended abruptly I would feel like all the information in my brain would become obsolete.  I started to plan for my retirement before I stopped working clinically.  I began working as an adjunct professor at Dominican University teaching histology and pathophysiology in the post baccalaureate program for medical sciences and I truly love it. 

I believe my own experiences transitioning to and through medical school reinforced by my daughter’s experiences motivated this move.  I was a D1 athlete in college and I studied on the train and on the bus going to meets.  Luckily for me I had a friend from high school who was an extremely diligent student.  You know the one who always gets the highest grades in all the classes.  No shade on her, she worked her butt off for everything she achieved and is incredibly successful now.  She had to teach to reinforce what she knew and I am an auditory learner so it was a perfect match.  We ultimately got into medical school together but I lost my teacher since she had to spend a lot more time studying on her own to get the highest grades so I floundered.  I had never learned how to study traditionally and now I was overwhelmed with more information than I had ever imagined could be shoved into my brain.  I was disorganized and really struggled the first year.  I did not even know what the word histology meant on the first day while people in my class where naming structures on H&E slides.  I never had any of the medical school classes in college and I was competing with people who were teaching assistants and some with PhD’s in the subjects.  It was incredibly disheartening until I got to the second year and met the pathology teacher.   He was a charismatic and conceptual teacher not just someone rattling details and lists of things for me to study at home.  He turned the world around for me.  He made me understand why I needed to study all of the subjects and how they were all integral to clinical medicine on some level.  The rest is history.

Fast forward to my daughter’s experiences.  She struggled in a different way.  She prepared and went to medical school in the COVID years.  She was disappointed with the instruction in her master’s program and medical school.  Her education was not motivating.  I felt so bad that she did not have her own outstanding pathology teacher - but she had me.  It was her remarkably expensive and not overwhelmingly positive experience that compelled me to teach at the university and to make this course.  I want to be the inspiration for people who are pursuing medical professional careers.  I want to be the motivation and guiding light that produces the next generation of medical professionals.  Using the brain that God (or whoever you give credit to for yours) gave you to help others is the most incredible experience!   I want you to be the best medical professionals you can be and I hope I can take away some of the frustration and replace it with motivation so you have a much more positive experience in school.  Let’s face it, medical professional education costs way too much for it to feel like a do it yourself project.