Featured Testimonial About Creighton University
During my interview, I could tell it had strong values that I aligned with — service, humanities, cura personalis.
What began 20 years ago as one-month rotations in Phoenix for Creighton medical students has blossomed into a health sciences campus, a centralized medical quarter and a robust four-year medical program, which celebrated its first graduates in May 2025. In recognition of this milestone, we profile the experiences of four of these graduates.
By Glenn Antonucci
Completing her undergraduate years at Arizona State University’s highly regarded Barrett Honors College, Shana Ofori, MD’25, already had a leg up when it came time to consider medical schools. She felt Creighton’s pull early in that process.
“I really felt that Creighton was going to be a very supportive environment,” she says. “During my interview, I could tell it had strong values that I aligned with — service, humanities, cura personalis.”
Plus, Creighton’s 195,000-square-foot campus in midtown Phoenix was close to her roots.
“That was important to me,” Ofori says. “This is my home.”
Her Creighton experience proved to be a rich one.
First-year highlights included rotations at Phoenix Children’s Child Protection Team, as well as that hospital’s developmental pediatrics department, part of the Barrow Neurological Institute — “opportunities you typically wouldn’t get at another school.”
She cultivated a deep-set interest in diversity issues in medicine, through campus speakers and a network of department chairs from St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center and providers from across the state.
It was so great to meet and have that solidarity with these physicians, well-known people in the field, and make those connections, Creighton facilitated all of it.
— Shana Ofori, MD’25
Medical school, of course, comes with its own set of challenges. Getting accustomed to the academic rigor of Creighton’s program topped the list. But that rigor and pressure, she says, were offset by the University’s Academic Success team and fellow classmates.
At Creighton, academics go together with community service. Ofori’s favorite service experience was a summer camp, hosted by Phoenix’s SEEDs for Autism. She worked with young, neurodivergent adults on both motor skills and social skills. “You become like best friends at the end of it,” she says.
“It makes you feel like there are ways you can make a difference, in a world that feels so out of control at times,” Ofori says of her service experiences. “You see how you can touch the lives of people individually. That makes a difference.
“You think about the people who helped you,” she adds. “Now you’re passing that forward.”
These days, Ofori remains at Creighton and in Phoenix. She has begun a three-year family medicine residency, caring for uninsured and underinsured patients at the program’s clinic home — shared with Valleywise Health — in the city’s south-central district.
