Former Editor-in-Chief (2017-2018) and Former Medical Student Editor (2016)
University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry
Ria is a Class of 2018 medical student. She graduated from the University of Rochester with a BS in neuroscience. Her interests include human behavior, social justice work, art, public health, and mnemonics.
About three months into our roles as editors-in-chief of in-Training, we had created a system. Mondays, I’d come home from the hospital — usually with some ineffective Anki studying, or commiseration with my roommates, or hastily composing a Chopped-style dinner with leftovers — log into our WordPress backend, and start making my way through the latest batch of submissions.
Dear in-Training family: it is our pleasure to welcome you back as we start the 2022 academic year!
The power and beauty of writing rest in a process of active narrative formation. The act of expression helps us make sense of what happened, integrate this into our sense of self, and clarify our values that will influence our next steps. Conveniently, our expression serves as a record of both identity and narrative formation, giving us a glimpse of ourselves more intimately than we typically take time for.
Instead, I was worried that medicine would consume me only to regurgitate me as a mere collection of cells and systems — just like those I would be expected to regurgitate on the test. I was worried that the demands of knowing it all would make me believe that I could know it all, that there is nothing in the spaces between what we know. I was worried that bathing in science would make me stop believing in art.
Welcome! As the 2021 academic year begins for medical students across the country, it brings with it the age-old challenges of studying medicine. As you continue your journey through medical school, we hope that in-Training provides you with a community for discussion, reflection and support when you need it most.
Thank you for your contributions and your readership over the past year. It has certainly been a difficult one, and we are exceedingly grateful that you all used in-Training as a platform to share your reflections, opinions, and solutions. Run by medical students and for medical students, your ongoing support is what makes us a premier online peer-reviewed publication. We look forward to seeing your contributions in 2021, and we’re excited to see where the year takes us (hopefully some place better!).
Our promise to you as the current editors-in-chief is to continue delivering thought-provoking perspectives about this pandemic from our perspectives as students. There is much to say, and we want to enrich the dialogues that are already happening surrounding the pandemic with medical student experiences.
Happy New Year from all of us at in-Training! We are proud to share our 12 most-read articles of 2019.
On Veterans Day, we published a piece from a fourth-year medical student titled “From Hanoi to the Streets: One Prisoner of War’s Path to Homelessness.” It described the story of a patient, shared with permission, who identified himself as a veteran of the Vietnam War. Several comments on the piece, including some by historians working at accredited universities, have since raised concerns about the patient’s story.
Seeking to document the experiences of students in street medicine groups at medical schools across the country, I decided to start with my own institution, the University of Illinois Chicago College of Medicine.
We are excited to announce our official transition as your new editors-in-chief for the upcoming 2019-2020 academic year.
We are proud to share with you our top 12 articles of 2018, and look forward to another year of sharing amazing writing by medical students and many others from across the world.
Editor-in-Chief
Brown University Alpert Medical School
Nihaal Mehta is a member of the Class of 2020 at Brown University Alpert School of Medicine. Originally from Lexington, MA, he also attended Brown for college, graduating in 2014 with a degree in Health and Human Biology and subfocus in Global Health.
Nihaal’s interests lie in medicine and its intersections: with health systems, policy, and the humanities. In college, he worked as a Writing Fellow, a Teaching Assistant for biology and public health courses, and assisted in the design of a course that examines controversies in medicine. Before returning to Brown for medical school, he spent a year working in consulting on health care business, strategy, and policy. He plans to specialize in Ophthalmology, and has conducted research focused on optical coherence tomography and retinal disease.
