My Experience at the 2026 APA Spring Leadership Summit

I recently attended the 2026 American Psychiatric Association Leadership Summit in Montgomery, Alabama, from March 5 to March 7. This was my first time attending since being accepted into their fellowship program. This post is a reflection on the program, the summit, and how it all connects to my goals.

I originally applied to this fellowship a day before the deadline. I did not expect to get in because I had no experience in psychology. I was not even a pre-med student at the time. I stumbled on the application by accident while going through a very tough time last year. I was looking into mental health resources, which led me to the APA website to learn what psychiatry actually is and what psychiatrists do. That is where I found the application.

The program has been incredibly helpful in my preparation for medical school. We have a speaker series featuring everyone from psychiatrists to lawyers, plus study resources like a one-year Kaplan MCAT guide and a current medical student mentor. The APA also generously covered all our expenses for this trip, including flights, hotel stays, food, Uber rides, the charter bus, and lunch on the days of the conference.

My trip started with a flight from Los Angeles to Charlotte. The security line at LAX was super quick, though I had to walk almost 25 minutes to reach my departing gate. From Charlotte, I boarded the smallest plane I have ever been on for the final leg to Montgomery. I arrived very late, around midnight, and it was hard finding an Uber at the airport at that hour.

During the day, downtown Montgomery felt like a city without a lot of people. I barely saw anyone walking around, though locals told me people come out more at night. It definitely had a different vibe than other American cities I have visited, like Los Angeles or Baltimore. It felt mostly like a tourist town to me, with more hotels and restaurants than any other kind of business.

While exploring, I tried a local Thai restaurant. The portion size was huge, but the food was underwhelming in taste and a bit too greasy, and the Thai tea was small for the price compared to bigger cities. Surprisingly, a Mexican restaurant I tried later was really good. It had great portion sizes, high quality taste, and even a free bag of chips, all for a relatively cheap cost. It was a quiet start to the trip, but I quickly learned that beneath the quiet streets, Montgomery is a city heavily shaped by its deep civil rights history.

The theme of the summit was changing landscapes and informed mental health policy. We heard from clinicians, healthcare researchers, and lawyers with health policy degrees. These talks spanned two days and closed with three book signings. This conference validated a lot of what I have written about in the past. My aspiration to become a psychiatrist grew significantly during this trip. It confirmed my belief that many of the problems we face in the mental health space are rooted in inadequate social, political, and economic policies.

While most of the talks centered on the political and social determinants of health, they also focused heavily on wealth. There is an undeniable economic side to mental health and well-being. This was fascinating to me because I just finished an introductory class on the U.S. healthcare sector. Much of what the speakers discussed matched what I learned in class. I remember using the mental health parity law as an example of how the government tries to improve healthcare for all populations through policy.

Outside the conference room, we toured The Legacy Sites. We observed a moment of silence for Bloody Sunday, but The Legacy Museum made the strongest and most emotional impression on me. It was deeply troubling to see how people were priced alongside animals and described in ways to increase their value to slave masters. I saw ads for public lynchings where thousands of people would gather to watch.

The most disturbing part for me was learning about the repossession of enslaved people as collateral for loans, the physical maiming, and how all of this was perfectly legal. Even after the abolition of slavery, the exploitation continued. The separation of families was driven by pure greed. People wanted constant free labor to produce cotton, sugar, and tobacco, and to build public projects.

Seeing this level of historical trauma and economic exploitation firsthand connected directly back to the summit lectures on the social determinants of health. It became incredibly clear that the brutal economic practices of the past laid the groundwork for the wealth gaps and mental health disparities we still see in these communities today.

This experience also pushed me to engage in a racial topic for the first time in the 10 years since I moved to this country. Prior to our group debrief, I typically stayed out of racially charged conversations. Because I was born in Africa and only came to the U.S. a decade ago, I always felt my experiences were different, even though I am very sympathetic. Before we even entered the museum, a Black American attendee asked me if I had experienced racism. I told him I had not, or maybe I just did not know how to spot it. He told me that was interesting because another African student in his class had said the exact same thing.

Another major highlight of the summit was the people. I interacted with many medical students, residents, and fellows. They were incredibly helpful and told me all about what it is like to be a medical student and their different pathways to getting there. I met traditional and non-traditional students alike, and they even shared free study guides to help me prepare for the MCAT.

I have been to tech hackathons and tech conferences where everyone is super fired up about what they are building. This summit felt exactly like that, but for medicine. It was the highest concentration of doctors I have ever been around in my entire life. Spending that much time with them raised my aspirations higher than ever.

I also gained a lot of clarity on where my engineering background fits into the medical field. During the summit, I learned the specific difference between computational psychiatry and digital psychiatry. Computational psychiatry is more associated with neuroscience and brain research. Digital psychiatry focuses on building clinical applications for use in everyday psychiatric practice. I even met a resident who currently works in a digital psychiatry clinic, where they work directly with software engineers to clinically label AI inputs and outputs. Hearing this was a great moment for me. It made me realize that I operate right at the intersection of both fields.

It was deeply validating to realize I was already on the right track before even arriving at the conference. Speaking with the medical students and residents confirmed my past research. I always knew my engineering skills could be applied to medicine, but taking a job as a mental health worker at the hospital was the best decision I made. It gave me the real mental models and lived experiences I need to build useful tools.

I also talked to the residents about my openness to attending an osteopathic medical school. I liked their holistic approach to medicine, though I originally thought that approach might be more relevant to neurosurgery rather than pure psychiatry. The residents clarified that the type of medical degree (MD or DO) does not really matter for matching into psychiatry.

However, the degree type does matter if I want to pursue a dual MD/PhD program. Most DO schools do not offer a combined degree, especially a PhD in Health Policy. The residents also shared a massive piece of information: I could potentially go to medical school for free if I take the MD/PhD route. They also gave me great tactical advice on applying, like looking into the difference between schools with strictly pass and fail grading systems versus those that grade pass and fail with honors.

I am now strongly considering a PhD in Health Policy instead of Engineering. I already have the engineering fundamentals, and digital psychiatry is not as engineering intensive as computational psychiatry.

During my conversations with the residents, we also talked about life outside of the hospital. I met two residents who are married, and they explained the unspoken timeline of medical training. They told me the sweet spot for getting married is the fourth year of medical school right before residency begins. They also shared that the best time to have children is during residency because that is when you actually get protected maternity and paternity leave.

Hearing this was fascinating. It showed me how even the most personal decisions in a doctor's life are completely shaped by institutional timelines and policies. For me personally, I am not pressed to get married right now, and I am not even sure I want kids. But understanding how these systems work gave me a much clearer picture of what the next decade of my life could look like, regardless of the personal choices I make.

Taking the MD/PhD route in Health Policy opens up an incredible number of job opportunities. After graduation, I could do medical research that focuses squarely on real world clinical psychiatry problems. I could continue to develop and improve AI systems, medical software, and devices.

This path gives me the flexibility to formally launch and lead healthcare startups, or bring new technologies to market through roles in medical technology, biotechnology, and venture capital. I could reshape how care is delivered at medical institutions and actively influence the systems, regulations, and investments that dictate patient outcomes. My ultimate goal as a practicing physician will be to provide transformative patient care in the communities I serve by eventually owning and operating a hospital.

On the day of my departure, I got a very real lesson in exactly why policy matters. There were massive flight cancellations due to severe weather in connecting cities like Dallas and Atlanta. The agent who booked my flight through the APA told me there was nothing that could be done to get me home that day.

When I spoke to the airline customer service agent at the airport, I asked if they would cover my hotel cost since the cancellation was on their end. He initially said no. However, I reminded him of a Biden administration era policy that allows for passenger compensation in these exact scenarios. As soon as I mentioned the policy, his answer changed. He told me he was going to make sure I flew out that night. I was able to get on a standby list and eventually fly home. That is the power of good policy. It changes behavior immediately.

Before attending this summit, I was not sure how my tech background would be received by traditional doctors. Instead of judging me, people wanted to support me. They encouraged me to keep using my tech skills and told me the medical field desperately needs them right now.

This trip completely clarified my next steps for my projects, Psykick and Psychify. Moving forward, I plan to focus on actual policy research right alongside technology development. The truth is, software like Psykick would not even be needed if medical practice was not weighed down by administrative burdens caused by poor policies. These policies negatively affect everything, right down to the behavior of consumers and insurance companies.

I will also focus heavily on the digital clinical side. There are so many applications we can build to help find objective biomarkers for mental illness and actively enforce mental health parity laws. I left Alabama knowing exactly what I want to do, knowing what I need to build, and knowing that there is a community of people ready to support me.