‘An amazing fit’

Events like Match Day and commencement are significant milestones for physicians-in-training, but for Leif Helland, M.D., perhaps the biggest moment was completely unexpected.

The chance interaction happened when Helland, OUWB ’19, was entering a hospital and asked a patient walking in at the same time a couple of questions.

Helland, a fourth-year medical student at the time, describes what happened next as “a crazy moment.”

“He’s a little reluctant and says, ‘I haven’t told this to anyone…I haven’t even talked about this with my wife,’” says Helland.

The patient confided in Helland in a way that still makes Helland emotional.

“It was like ‘Oh my gosh, what a privilege…like who am I that this person opens up to me because I have a white jacket on?’” says Helland. “He didn’t know me. He never met me.”

“But it was a super vulnerable moment for him and made me realize how much of a privilege it is to peek into the life of someone as you’re trying to help them and figure out what’s going wrong,” adds Helland.

To this day, Helland says he thinks about that patient — whether in his newer role as a pathologist at Corewell Health William Beaumont University Hospital in Royal Oak or his role as clinical faculty member at OUWB.

‘Why is the sky blue?’

Helland grew up in Rochester, Michigan, and attended Parkway Christian School in Sterling Heights, Michigan.

The son of a teacher and pastor, Helland set his sights on becoming a doctor by the time he was in third grade.

“I loved the Discovery Channel as a kid,” he says. “I watched a lot of medical mysteries…I distinctly remember a special on separating conjoined twins.”

In short, Helland says he was obsessed with how the world works.

“That’s why I think I was always drawn to math and the sciences,” he says. “It helps us understand what we’re seeing in the world…why is the sky blue, why do I sweat when I get hot, why can I swallow if I’m hanging upside down? These are the kinds of things I thought about.”

Helland knew he wanted to attend “a good college” and as a result, says he was “pretty studious” and “meticulous with my grades.”

Helland was named valedictorian of his high school class before he attended University of Michigan, where he double majored in pre-med and Spanish.

Despite his academic success in high school, Helland didn’t get accepted to every school he applied to for undergrad, which, as far as he was concerned, was a failure.

When he started at University of Michigan, Helland says “there was this huge chip on my shoulder.”

Intent on attending medical school at one of the institutions that had denied him for undergrad, Helland decided “I’ll go even harder in undergrad” so that he could one day prove them wrong.

“There were a lot of Fridays that I stayed in and studied,” says Helland. “I was very serious. I knew what I wanted to do…getting to medical school was the main goal.”

Helland also upped his service hours, which was a continuation of what he had done in high school. Primarily, he says, he volunteered through Circle K International — a student-led collegiate service organization that is a branch of Kiwanis International.

“I spent thousands of hours with (Circle K),” he says. “And I really had a blast.”

‘How awesome’

Set on “getting out of Michigan,” he applied to more than 30 medical schools and in doing so spent about $7,000 — money he had saved by primarily painting houses during summers.

“I depleted my entire high school and college savings applying for medical school,” he says.

“I could have just applied to one.”

When it was time to decide where he would attend medical school, early exposure to OUWB played a big role.

First, there was Interview Day. Helland says he arrived to OUWB’s O’Dowd Hall early and was “probably looking a bit lost.” An OUWB student helped him figure out where he was supposed to be and wished him good luck.

“That was the first interaction I really had with the school…this student went out of her way to help this lost kid,” he says. “It’s super indicative of the type of students that are recruited to OUWB.”

It continued with Second Look, when Helland met many of his future classmates and had “an absolute riot.”

The experiences he had while applying, combined with a generous financial aid package, solidified Helland’s decision to attend OUWB. It didn’t take long for him to realize he had made the right choice.

“In the first week, I just found so many people I clicked with immediately,” he says.

He became super close with a group of friends who always sat together and would spend every Saturday morning reviewing the week’s material.

Helland also became involved in student organizations like Sherlocks of Medicine — a pathology interest group — and volunteered for the school’s signature days of service.

And at the end of his first year of medical school, he was invited by a pathologist at WBUH to learn more about the specialty. Helland says he loved looking at slides as part of the process of developing a diagnosis — and was hooked because it played directly into his lifelong drive to figure out how things work. 

“I thought to myself how awesome it was and that I couldn’t believe people did it for a full-time job because it was so cool,” he says.

Around the same time, he met a woman named Juliana who was a nursing instructor at Oakland University that he would eventually marry and have two children with (so far).

Before leaving OUWB, Helland also would be inducted into Alpha Omega Alpha Medical Honor Society before being asked to be the class speaker at the OUWB Class of 2019 commencement.

“I am so blessed and so happy that I got accepted into OUWB,” he says. “It was such an amazing fit. The four years at OUWB are some of the favorite years of my life…my classmates were amazing, too, and I feel like I was super lucky to have spent four years with them.”

Helland was class speaker at OUWB's 2019 Commencement.

‘Why I came back’

In 2019, Helland matched in pathology at Massachusetts General Hospital. He served as a chief resident during the 2022-23 academic year, before a one-year cytopathology fellowship at Mass Gen.

He says a big draw to returning to southeast Michigan was the opportunity to have a general practice and be tied to OUWB.  In October 2024, Helland was appointed as a clinical faculty member by the Oakland University Board of Trustees.

“Becoming a resident and going to a different health care system and seeing the pros and cons of different training really made me realize what we have here (at OUWB) is amazing, which is why I came back,” says Helland. “The people that you’re working with are fantastic educators and they prepare you very well to be a practicing physician.”

Additionally, Helland says he feels like it is a calling to pass on what he has learned in the last 10 years to the next generation of physicians.

“There’s a mandate to raise up the people behind you and allow them to be the best physicians they can be,” he says. “As you learn and as you are given that knowledge, it’s imperative that you pass it on and do your best to raise up the best people and fill the ranks.”

And Helland has no plans to stop trying to figure out how everything works.

“I have almost 10 years of medical knowledge…but I still sometimes feel like I’m at the very beginning of my journey,” he says with a smile.