Happy New Year! We hope you all had an enjoyable holiday with friends and family as we say goodbye to the dusty, long hours of 2015 and welcome the shiny, new year of 2016.
As we begin our fourth year of existence, we would like to take a moment to express our deepest gratitude to all of you — our loyal readers and writers who provide lifeblood to the corpus that is in-Training. We truly have become the agora — the Grecian intellectual center — for the medical student community, with over 400,000 views of the website this year. Thank you for sharing your stories with us and with your colleagues worldwide.
This was a year of milestones for us: publishing our 800th article, graduating our first cohort of interns from the in-Training Writers-in-Training Program, holding the first ever in-Training Mental Health Week, speaking at Stanford Medicine X on creating grassroots communities for medical students, and amassing over 12,000 social media followers with the dedicated efforts of our social media team.
However, it is time to move beyond the past year and look to our future.
Our first announcement of the year is a big one, and deeply personal. As of today, January 1, we are no longer the editors-in-chief of in-Training. In our efforts to keep the publication by and for medical students, we have spent the past six months training our new editors-in-chief: Vikas Bhatt, Class of 2017 at Drexel University College of Medicine, and Joe Ladowski, MD/PhD candidate at Indiana University School of Medicine.
As we prepare for the end of our medical school careers and begin to transition to residency, we officially welcome Vikas and Joe as they embark on their journey to carry in-Training into a new era as the premier online voice of the medical student community.
Fortunately, we won’t be entirely removed from in-Training — we haven’t moved on to residency quite yet. Our next project is the publication of in-Training: Stories from Tomorrow’s Physicians, a book compendium of over 100 pieces that we have published over the past four years. The book is in collaboration with the Arnold P. Gold Foundation and will serve as a self-reflection guide for medical students, as well as a curriculum resource guide for students and educators in the medical humanities. Keep an eye on your inboxes for further details as the book nears print publication.
We would also like to introduce our new managing editor, Andy Kadlec, MD/PhD candidate at Medical College of Wisconsin, who has been instrumental in streamlining the editorial process and managing the huge load of articles that we receive from writers every day.
And finally, although we have medical student writers at 111 of the 172 medical schools in the United States — as well as seven in Canada, four in the Caribbean, and schools in Pakistan, India, Ireland and the UAE — we seek to expand our community to as many of our medical student colleagues as possible. Our goal for 2016 is to reach all of the medical schools in the United States and Canada, and to begin outreach to other parts of the globe. We ask for your help in this endeavor, by sharing our articles with your colleagues on email and on social media, and by encouraging prospective writers to join the in-Training team.
As always, please do not hesitate to contact us with any article ideas, questions or comments for the publication. We rely on your feedback to continue evolving as an organic publication that meets the needs of the medical student community.
Thank you for all that you do, and here’s to a great new year!
Founder and Editor-in-Chief Emeritus
Albany Medical College
My name is Aleena Paul, and I am one of the founders of in-Training. I am currently a General Internal Medicine and Academic General Pediatrics Fellow at Hofstra/Northwell Health, where I am pursuing a Masters in Health Professions Education. My research interests include the use of the humanities for medical education, women's leadership in medicine, addressing health disparities through advocacy, and providing quality primary care medicine. I graduated from Albany Medical College in 2016 and subsequently completed a combined internal medicine and pediatrics residency at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.
I currently serve as the editor-in-chief for in-House, the online publication for residents and fellows, and as a founding member of Pager Publications, a 501c3 non-profit literary corporation that curates and supports peer-edited publications for the medical education community.
In my free time, I enjoy skimming through The New Yorker, catching up on science fiction shows, wandering through museums and forests, and long conversations with friends.
Founder and Editor-in-Chief Emeritus
University of Colorado School of Medicine
My name is Ajay Major, and I am currently an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Colorado School of Medicine specializing in lymphoma and myeloma, and a physician-publisher in the medical education and narrative medicine spaces.
My journey into publishing began in April 2012 when I founded in-Training, the online peer-reviewed publication for medical students, and served as editor-in-chief for four years. Since that time, we have founded several additional online publications for the medical education community, including in-House, The Palate, Mosaic in Medicine, and Intervene Upstream.
To support these publications, we founded Pager Publications, Inc., a 501c3 non-profit literary corporation that curates and supports peer-edited publications for the medical education community, in 2014. Since our inception, Pager Publications, Inc. has published six print books, with all proceeds used to support our constituent publications.
