Dear colleagues,
With constant attention to our mission, the in-Training Board regularly brainstorms new ways to reach our peers and serve the medical student community. As we reflect on the content that in-Training writers and editors produce, one major theme consistently appears in our published pieces: medical students’ inadequate training in, and lack of engagement with, important topics such as social justice, medical innovation and health policy.
We have all heard the cries to reform medical education, which is still largely based in the Flexner Report of the previous century, but have seen little concrete change occur. Thus, we felt a calling to begin development of the in-Training Classroom, a “centralized virtual hub that provides educational and action-related resources for the 21st-century health professions student.” The in-Training Classroom differs from most resources for medical students, with an emphasis on topics that are often overlooked in our traditional curriculum. All content is curated by those currently living the medical school experience.
It is with great enthusiasm that we now present the first complete section of the new in-Training Classroom. In this section, you can learn more about the roots and context of current social justice movements, especially as they relate to medicine and healthcare, see what’s currently trending in the world of social justice and medicine, post your own reflections, and get involved with committed organizations such as the student-run WhiteCoats4BlackLives and Systemic Disease. We encourage you to use this section to drive advances in Social Justice at your institutions and in your communities. We thank Livy Low, a medical student at Albert Einstein, and Maya Sandler, a graduate student in the History of Medicine Department at Yale, for their effort in developing this Section.
We hope that this new centralized online portal will help to drive innovation in medical education. The Classroom is a living organism, and we will continue to let our audience know when new Sections are available or any changes have been made.
If you have feedback or would like to be involved in developing one of the outlined Sections, please check out our Get Involved page or contact us at editorinchief@in-training.org.
Yours-in-training,
Ria and Andy
Former Editor-in-Chief (2017-2018) and Former Managing Editor (2015-2017)
Medical College of Wisconsin
Andrew Kadlec is an MD/PhD student at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee. He received a BA in English literature at the University of Wisconsin - Madison and enjoys all things related to the medical humanities.
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.
