Living His Dream

With a love for both politics and medicine, Tyler King (D.O. ’20) says he’s “living the dream,” working as a family physician as well as serving as a city council member in Laredo, Texas.

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“In my medical work, I love helping people achieve healthy lives and watching my patients succeed in their health goals,” says King, who is also a captain in the U.S. Army Reserve. “As a city council member, there’s nothing I enjoy more than to help improve people’s quality of life and preserving the quality of residential communities. It’s rewarding.”

While on a pre-med track, King earned a political science degree from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and later, he earned a Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine (D.O.) degree from New York Institute of Technology College of Osteopathic Medicine at Arkansas State University (NYITCOM-Arkansas). He recently completed his residency training in family medicine at Laredo Medical Center and continues to work there as a primary care physician.

King has been serving others in many capacities throughout his life, even before becoming a doctor. After earning his undergraduate degree, he was selected to become a corps member with Teach For America, an organization that recruits talented young individuals with a commitment to improve educational equity in low-income school districts across the country. After four years of teaching at IDEA Public Schools in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, King was accepted into the inaugural class at NYITCOM-Arkansas, where he served the university, his classmates, and fellow medical students across the nation—which, in turn, gave him a valuable set of leadership skills for his future endeavors as a physician leader in his community.

Among his many accomplishments, King helped found the local chapter of the Student Osteopathic Medical Association (SOMA) at NYITCOM-Arkansas and he worked his way up to become the national president of the 15,000-member organization, the student affiliate of the American Osteopathic Association.

“I was proud to help put NYITCOM-Arkansas on the map in the national D.O. space only three years into the campus’s existence,” he says of becoming national president of SOMA. “I also loved meeting with legislators and learning how to talk to them. They don’t respond to robotic reciting of statistics. They respond to personal stories that are relevant to normal people’s lives.”

In addition, he founded a Medical Spanish Committee at NYITCOM-Arkansas with the intention of helping students learn, for example, how to talk about body parts and ask questions about pain in Spanish, allowing them to have a conversation with a Spanish-speaking patient. More than 40 students enrolled in the course in its first year.

“Speaking medical Spanish is beneficial to any physician, no matter where you are in the country,” King says. “I know my patients will feel more comfortable when they come into my exam room and have a doctor who speaks Spanish. They can express themselves in the way they know best.”

Opportunities like this—proposing new courses and establishing student organizations at the university—were one of King’s favorite parts of being in the NYITCOM-Arkansas inaugural class.

“The Arkansas faculty was open to new ideas, and we were pioneers, setting the standards for the future,” he says. “They allowed us to do the big things we wanted to do, along with learning medicine, and I’m grateful for that.”

By Ashley Festa