Editor-in-Chief and Former Writers-in-Training Intern
Geisinger College of Health Sciences
Eshiemomoh Osilama is a medical student at Geisinger College of Health Sciences in Scranton, PA, Class of 2024. He graduated from Columbia University in 2016 with a Bachelor of Arts in biology. He enjoys reading and writing poetry, baking, theater, singing, museums, traveling, beaches and oceans, photography, and being an extraordinary guncle. Momoh is pursuing a career in psychiatry.
In order to honor these works as well as celebrate the start of the New Year, we asked each of our editors to share their ‘Editors’ Pick,’ a must-read piece from 2023 that showcases the talent and breadth of our contributors.
We are very excited to commence the 2023-2024 academic year with you all! As the years go on, medicine and medical education, inevitably, continue to evolve.
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.
Editor-in-Chief Emeritus
University of Illinois Chicago College of Medicine
Emma is an incoming first-year resident at the University of Illinois College of Medicine in Chicago, Illinois in the Department of Otolaryngology. Her research interests include advancement of vestibular function testing, particularly in the pediatric population, as well as optimizing and improving medical education. She graduated from Northwestern University in 2015 with a bachelor of arts in biology and a minor in religious studies.
