Preparation, teamwork, communication and the ability to adjust quickly and overcome adversity; these are lessons that Kalan Jenkins learned playing football. And now he uses those skills ... in the operating room.
 
A starting defensive end on Georgia State's inaugural football team in 2010, Jenkins is now a first-year resident in anesthesiology at Baylor Scott and White Medical Center in Temple, Texas, about an hour outside of Austin.
 
"We are the only level-one trauma center between Austin and Dallas," said Jenkins, a native Texan from Midlothian who joined the GSU program after two seasons at Navarro College in Corsicana, Texas.
 
"We've been fortunate here," he continued. "Although our hospital is large, we serve quite a rural population, and Texas in general hasn't had quite the peak in [COVID-19] cases that some other states have had," he explained. "Naturally, we prepared for the worst, but fortunately we haven't had any surge at the hospital to require residents to be on the front line. Our attending physicians are front-lining those cases. Although we prepared for the worst, and we still have plans in place in case we hit a surge, most of the patients I've been taking care of have not been COVID-related."
 
Even in the midst of a global pandemic, babies are still being born, so that's been Jenkins' focus.
 
"As anesthesiologists, we provide comprehensive care for patients before, during and after surgery and childbirth," Jenkins said. "They've cancelled all the elective cases, so the volume of surgeries is a lot less. I've been spending most of my time on the obstetric side, giving epidurals, helping my peers with c-sections, things like that."
 
During his time at Georgia State, Jenkins was an outstanding student. He and Michael Hall, who is a second-year resident in oral and maxillofacial surgery at Howard University Hospital, were the first two CoSIDA Academic All-District honorees in GSU history in 2011. But he didn't always know that he wanted to pursue medicine.
 
"A lot of people decide early on in their lives they want to go into medicine, but I decided quite late," Jenkins said. "I decided to choose a path down medicine my senior year, so I still needed to take a lot of classes - biology, physics, chemistry. I was fortunate enough to get a fifth-year scholarship and served as a student coach while I took some of those classes.
 
"I finished my prerequisite classes at UTA when I moved back to Texas. Then I was accepted into Texas College of Osteopathic Medicine in Fort Worth and did my four years of medical school there."
 
Jenkins also took his time choosing his specialty.
 
"As you go through medical school, you experience a lot of the different specialties in your studies and on your clinical work," he said. "I was hoping something would just pop out to me. I kind of liked everything but didn't really love anything.
 
"Anesthesiology is something you don't get a lot of exposure to in medical school. I was actually on my surgery rotation, in the operating room."
 
That's where his football experiences kicked in.
 
"There is this team environment in the operating room," he described. "You have the anesthesiology team, the surgery team, the nursing team, and you all have to coordinate. You all have the same goal to get the patient through the operation safety. You're all doing different things as part of that team to get to that end point. I really like that environment."
 
Then Jenkins had the opportunity to spend a day with an anesthesiologist, and he was sold.
 
"It's an interesting mix of physiology and clinical pharmacology," he said. "Very rarely in other fields do you give the medications you are ordering. For example, if a patient's blood pressure drops, you assess the problem and treat it on the spot with whatever medication you decide to do that with."
 
Jenkins says that anesthesiology, like football, involves tremendous preparation.
 
"Before the surgery, you work up a procedure. You go through everything that can happen, and you have your Plan A, Plan B, and what you can do to deal with adversity," he explained. "That correlated so well with my time in football. You spend a week before preparing for a game and you only get on shot.
 
"On the field, you have your plan for what you think is going to happen. Then the ball snaps, everything changes and you have to react in the moment, and through it all, keep your composure so you can act appropriately."
 
And in both endeavors, communication is key.
 
As an anesthesiologist, he says, "You have to be able to communicate well with the other teams in the room to make sure everyone's on the same page. That's so much of what football's about. Play to play, you're talking to your teammates, calling out shifts and things that you're seeing, and relaying that effectively to your teammates."
 
At home, Jenkins is not the only Panther in the family. His wife, the former Kellianne Collins, was a goalie for the GSU women's soccer team.
 
"Kase is our 2-year-old, and we have one on the way, another boy," Kalan said. "Future Georgia State alums, I hope. We're very much a Georgia State family."
 
Attention Georgia State coaches, start working on that recruiting class of 2036!
 

 
In addition to catching the Panthers when they play in Texas, Kalan and Kellianne attended Georgia State's first trip to the AutoNation Cure Bowl in 2015, and they returned to Atlanta for last fall's Homecoming football game and reunion. That was the first visit to Georgia State Stadium for Kalan and many of the other former players.
 
"It was cool to play in Georgia Dome, but it never really felt like home," Jenkins said. "To walk into that stadium and see what has been built there, it just blew me away. You could see it on all our faces. Everyone there was super impressed and happy that we now have a place to call our own."
 
Jenkins recently had the chance to relive some fond memories as he watched "Our City, Our Time," the documentary chronicling the first 10 years of Georgia State football.
 
"Probably the most memorable thing that still sticks with me is going to Tuscaloosa and playing Alabama," he said. "We all knew, no matter the outcome, that it would be a once in a lifetime opportunity that we would remember forever. It was a surreal moment being there.
 
"We were watching the documentary, and when Coach Curry's speech came on, my wife started tearing up, and I had a visceral response. It took me back. I remember him giving that speech, and I remember exactly what it felt like. It was so unbelievable."