‘We’re only laying the foundation for what I’m going to blossom into.’

Madeline Patrick ’26 signed up for “Life Drawing” with Associate Professor Ryan Reynolds the way most students pick elective classes: it fulfilled a requirement, and the name seemed harmless enough. She showed up on the first day expecting a standard syllabus rundown. Be on time, turn in your homework, be respectful.

“And then it was like: ‘Be respectful of the nude models.’ And I was like, oh wait, what?” she recalls.

The following quarter of drawing the human form in all its varieties turned out to be one of the most unexpectedly perfect experiences of her Santa Clara education. As a pre-med student, understanding anatomy wasn’t just an artistic exercise—it was directly useful. Only at Santa Clara, she’ll tell you, could a single art class do double duty like that.

That’s the through-line of Patrick’s four years: the refusal to keep things separate. From Roseburg, Oregon, she arrived at Santa Clara knowing two things about herself: that she loved to paint and that she wanted to go into medicine.

“There’s not a little kid photo of me where I don’t have some sort of art supply in my hand,” Patrick says. “I knew that in STEM you can get very hyper-focused on the competitiveness of it all, so by double majoring in art, I made sure that I didn’t forget that part of myself.”

What she didn’t anticipate was how far that openness would take her. Over four years, Patrick developed film in the University’s darkroom, built a sculpture alongside artist-in-residence Ana Teresa Fernández, returned to a childhood love of ballet, and joined the Mission choir her senior year, making it through the audition process with Father Julian Climaco. She also found her closest friends on a three-day hiking trip through the student club Into the Wild before freshman year even began, signing up without knowing a single person on the trip.

The science side kept pace. Through a campus pre-health newsletter, Patrick connected with MedRAMP, an independent research organization, and published several research abstracts of her work there. In fact, her research on adenoid cystic carcinoma was accepted for presentation at the American Society of Clinical Oncology conference in Chicago this month.

Medical school is next, with reconstructive plastic surgery as the long-term goal. But she’s not rushing.

“We’re only laying the foundation for what I’m going to blossom into.”

On Santa Clara’s culture of bravery

“As long as you keep saying yes, you’ll be welcomed with open arms into whatever you choose to do. It’s such a high reward system for being brave that it’s become one of our university traits because it’s such an uplifting community.”

On what she’ll miss most

“I’ll miss the closeness of it. Some people will complain that everyone knows everyone, but I love walking to class and seeing a friend I haven’t gotten the chance to say hi to, or going into Benson for a quick bite and running into a friend you haven’t seen in a year. I know that adult life doesn’t have that privilege of being so close to people that you’ve formed connections with.”

On what the world needs

“We all need to genuinely listen to each other. Everyone is trying to communicate their own narrative, and there’s so much noise that no one feels heard. So everyone just starts talking louder. And then you add in social media and microtrends, and everything is just a headline—we don’t actually listen, we don’t actually educate ourselves on what our close friends are going through, let alone what strangers are going through.”