Perfect fit

When Stephanie Goike, M.D., recalls her interview at OUWB, a smile beams across her face as she recalls how she felt after the fact.  

That’s because originally, Goike (nee Schley), OUWB ’15, primarily saw it as an opportunity to travel home to Michigan from the west coast and visit family. If the interview went well, then great, she says, but OUWB wasn’t her first choice.

Things changed quickly, though.

She fell in love with just about everything about the then-new school. Such feelings would eventually dictate the course of her career — and her personal life.

“I was so blown away by the experience,” she says. “I always think about coming home from the interview that night and how excited I was and how that’s just led me to this whole path I never could have imagined.”

Today, she is an emergency medicine physician at Corewell Health’s Beaumont Hospital, Troy.

Additionally, she’s an assistant professor of Emergency Medicine at OUWB, serves as the site director for OUWB at Troy, and is a mentor for members of the OUWB Class of 2024 through the school’s PRISM program. 

“OUWB is still growing and changing and evolving,” she says. “I constantly see opportunities to give back to my alma mater and help it continue to grow.”

Paying it forward

Goike grew up near Kalamazoo, Michigan, where she attended Mattawan High School.

Her mother was a pharmacist, and her father was an architect who specialized in health care facilities, which meant Goike “grew up around medicine,” and was drawn to the profession.

Post-high school, she stayed near home and attended Western Michigan University after receiving a merit-based full-tuition scholarship. She earned two bachelor’s degrees: one in French and another for biomedical science.

As she neared graduation at Western, Goike says her parents asked her an important question.

“They reminded me that the scholarship had afforded me a great educational experience and asked me how I was going to pay it forward,” she says.

She admits to being a bit stumped until a friend told her about the Teach for America (TFA) program. According to its website, TFA is a nonprofit that recruits and selects college graduates from around the U.S. to serve as educators who commit to teaching for at least two years in a public school in one of the 50+ low-income communities that the organization serves.

Goike applied and matched at Gompers Middle School, which is in the Watts neighborhood of south-central Los Angeles. Of the students she taught, 100% received free or reduced lunch, about 65% were in foster care or group home placement, and some lived in vehicles. Most of the eighth graders she taught read at a third-grade level or lower.

At a crossroads, Goike says she “wanted to see medicine” before making a decision about which career she would fully embrace. (Photo by Rob Hall)

Goike says she enjoyed teaching. So much so, in fact, that she earned a master’s in education from Loyola Marymount University while serving as a member of TFA.

“My whole life I thought I was going to be a doctor,” she says. “Suddenly, I was teaching and really loved it.”

At a crossroads, Goike says she “wanted to see medicine” before making a decision about which career she would fully embrace.

To fully immerse herself and push her limits, she went on a mission trip to Tanzania, where she worked in a hospital in Arusha.

She calls it her first experience with “real medicine.”

“It was amazing,” says Goike. “It afforded me opportunities to see things and experience medicine in a way that I wouldn’t have been otherwise afforded.”

Among other things, she would sit in on various surgeries and have duties like holding flashlights for doctors when the power went out. She was involved in the treatment of patients with HIV and AIDs, tuberculosis, malaria, and other conditions more commonly found in Africa.

She was there a month, and it was all she needed.

“Seeing the medicine side of everything…I realized that my heart really was into it,” she says. “All along I was right to want to be a doctor.”

‘An amazing opportunity’

Goike returned to the U.S. and her teaching job in Los Angeles, but with a renewed purpose to throw herself into medicine.

She focused on applying to Michigan medical schools with hopes to get back home and be closer to family. OUWB was among the schools at which she interviewed — and it had a huge impact on her.

“I couldn’t stop talking about it,” she says. “It just seemed to align with all the things I had learned through teaching about things that help students excel, and that would help myself excel as a future physician.”

While she says it was a bit daunting to eventually be part of a new medical school’s first class in 2011, it was more exciting to be part of helping shape the school.

“It just really seemed like an amazing opportunity,” says Goike.

The “good energy” she felt from Interview Day continued throughout her four years at the school.

She says faculty and staff seemed “really invested in us, not just as students, but as individual people.”

“They really cared about us and what we can bring back to the community,” says Goike.

Stephanie Goike, M.D., and husband, Joe Goike, have two children. (Photo by Chuck Cloud)

Throughout her time at OUWB, Goike, among other things, helped start the school’s American Medical Women’s Association (AMWA) chapter, planned clinical skills events, and spent one spring break on a medical mission to Nicaragua.

Her favorite memory of OUWB is the overall feeling of family she felt with the other 49 people in the school’s inaugural class.

“OUWB is a family,” she says. “I’m still friends with most of the people I was friends with.”

She even met the man who would eventually become her husband, Joe Goike, through her classmate and now brother-in-law, Jonathan Goike, M.D. (who also would go on to marry yet another classmate, Laurie Bossory, M.D.)

Leaving OUWB

When Goike matched in emergency medicine at Beaumont Hospital, Royal Oak, she says she was ready.

“I felt very, very prepared,” she says. “We had strong clinical, procedural, and interviewing skills for working with patients.”

Further, a sense that learning would continue was instilled in her.

“OUWB works on that sense of humility that you’re constantly growing…and that this is a lifelong learning process,” she says.

“As a mentor now, I constantly am telling my students that this is not a sprint, but a marathon,” she adds.

By the end of her third year of residency, Goike was named chief resident.

The Goikes also had established roots in the area — and had their first child on the way. (They’ve also since had a second child.) The hope was to stay in southeast Michigan.

“We felt a special tie to the area,” she says. “We were here, ready to stay, grow our family and be part of this.”

Goike was hired as an emergency medicine physician at what was then Beaumont Hospital, Troy, where she continues to work. Subsequently, she has taken on additional duties with OUWB that include overseeing fourth-year clinical electives, clerkships at Troy, and serving as a mentor for members of the Class of 2024 through the school’s PRISM program. 

And she thoroughly enjoys giving back to the community that has given her so much.

“Working at Troy and having opportunities to make connections back to OUWB…it’s been the perfect fit,” she says.