Kristiana is a 4th year medical student at Albany Medical College in Albany, NY class of 2021. In 2018, she graduated from Siena College with a Bachelor of Arts in Science. She enjoys scuba diving, hiking, and weightlifting in her free time. After graduating medical school, Kristiana would like to practice outpatient primary care in an underserved area.
There are two main types of advocacy: community-based advocacy – which consists of direct provision of services to marginalized populations – and political advocacy – which involves crafting legislation that affects a large group of people.
I work with four other medical students at the family medicine clinic. I am the only female medical student — our attending is also male.
she is curled on her side like a child — / eyes closed, back exposed.
Many people told me that my third year of medical school would be both the most rewarding and the most difficult. That I would choose my future specialty and discover my specific path in medicine — a task which, as I began the year, seemed both exciting and daunting. Little did I know that during my third year of medical school, I would learn just as much about myself as I would about patient care and the practice of medicine.
This is a reimagination of anatomy from outside in.
When my family saw me painstakingly hand-placing individual sprinkles on the apices of buttercream rosettes at age 15, I justified this obsessive behavior by telling them, “I’m just practicing precision for the day when I get to inject into people’s faces.”
Uppgivenhetssyndrom, also termed resignation syndrome, is a distressing ailment in which patients – often young children – completely withdraw from the activities of daily life. With no underlying neurological or physical disease, these patients lose the will to live, essentially becoming apathetic.
Unlike other specialties, radiology is often an elective rotation that focuses on diagnostics and image interpretation. Such tasks are mainly done by the specialty’s residents with little care for medical students to be involved with.
In medical school, it is said time and time again by upperclassmen that having a mentor is integral to success as a medical student. Mentors are valuable because they can connect you with opportunities, give advice on career planning and also provide reassurance when you need it.
‘Write Rx’ is a narrative medicine column offering ‘prescriptions’ for narrative medicine exercises. Each column entry begins with an introduction to the theme of the entry, offers literary excerpts to expand on that theme and concludes with questions that invite students to explore a corresponding narrative medicine topic. The goal is to offer space for reflection for busy medical students, as well as foster medical students’ communication toolkit in the increasingly complex space of patient care. Topics include cultural fluency, illness cognitions and more.
My decision to return to school to pursue a doctorate degree in medicine came as a shock to many.
I was not happy when I was accepted to medical school, not like I thought I would be. In the hours and days that followed that fateful email, feelings of shock, sadness and nervousness jostled for dominance in my mind as I processed the information.
Contributing Writer
The University of Toronto's Temerty Faculty of Medicine
Brianna Cheng is a first year medical student at The University of Toronto's Temerty Faculty of Medicine in Canada. In 2020, she graduated from McGill University with a Master's of Science in epidemiology. She writes creative nonfiction in her free time and hopes to continue her interests in narrative medicine after graduating medical school.
