Trish Rawicki, MD, BA ’09, practices family medicine through MyCatholicDoctor and at Pearl Women's Health and Surgery, where she works alongside Ashley Womack as the clinic’s new family medicine physician. Rawicki specializes in holistic women’s health, and she says that her University of Dallas education developed her passion for caring for the whole person.

This passion, which attracted Rawicki to UDallas as a transfer student in fall 2006, is precisely what she pursues now in her work. She and her husband, Bennett Rawicki, BA ’09, transferred together because they saw that the University of Dallas offered a well-rounded college experience rich in the faith, intellectually challenging and full of social opportunities.

“We could make our faith our own,” she says. “There was a pursuit of excellence, but everyone was very fun and authentically Catholic. UDallas helped me grow so much in my faith and my character.”

Rawicki knew from a young age that she wanted to become a doctor. Growing up, her mother was a nurse, and Rawicki volunteered at a cystic fibrosis clinic for children. Entering UDallas as a pre-med student, she recalls that one of the things that sets it apart from other universities is that “you’re not a number.”

In contrast to other universities where large underclassmen pre-med courses are designed to weed students out, she says, “I truly felt very close with my professors. They were really invested in my success, which is so helpful. … I think the fact that I had them in my corner and they really cared about me and my future career helped me push through when things were hard.”

Rawicki went on to UT Southwestern Medical School, graduating with honors in 2013. She says that her UDallas education prepared her with the study habits she needed to succeed at a rigorous medical school. It also cultivated in her the guiding principles of her medical practice.

“Catholic formation … is not just about teaching material that we memorize with our brains,” she says. “It’s about the development of the whole person: emotionally, spiritually, intellectually. I was attracted to this idea of healing the whole person.”

Because of this desire, Rawicki chose a full-spectrum family care residency program at John Peter Smith Hospital in Fort Worth, which allowed her to receive training in many different medical specialties. She took on extra rotations in obstetrics and women's health to incorporate these into her future practice.

“I wanted to work in women’s health, but I wasn’t comfortable compartmentalizing the body,” she says. “I knew that we can’t just talk about our reproductive health. Our whole body needs to come into play here, and so I kept feeling myself drawn more and more to a holistic model and being able to care for the whole person, such as in family medicine.”

Rawicki’s path to establishing her medical career was interwoven with her growing family life. She wants people of all professions to know that it is possible to balance work and family life, even in a demanding career such as medicine. As a wife and mother of five young children, she has kept this balance throughout her studies and career, even taking an extra year to complete medical school and taking entire years off from practicing to focus on her family. She has worked part-time her entire medical career. 

“Look for the right opportunity,” she says, “because I think work looks so different these days than it did 20 or 30 years ago. I am a big fan of asking; just ask to go part time. Work hard, show up and be good at your job, and then just ask for what you think is best for your family, and you never know how it will work out.”

Rawicki has received specialized training through Fertility Education and Medical Management (FEMM), an organization that focuses on restorative reproductive medicine, ovarian aging, and fertility. FEMM seeks to educate women on their overall health and provide them with the tools to achieve their health and fertility goals.

“Our reproductive health is completely dependent on our entire endocrine system, which depends on our immune function and gut health,” Rawicki explains. “And then all of this affects our psychiatric and neurologic health. I think it’s impossible to look at patients from just one medical specialty. We need to see the big picture.”