Contributing Writer Emeritus
Baylor College of Medicine
I am a Class of 2015 medical student at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, TX. My planned future specialty is child and adolescent psychiatry. I enjoy reading literature, photography and traveling.
I was recently granted one of those rare, quiet Sunday afternoons we experience in medical school, and decided to spend it reading short stories. The story I picked up was “I Want to Live!” by Thom Jones. The story focuses on a cancer-ridden woman, Mrs. Wilson, reaching a meaningful place in her life amidst the throes of death. As I read the journey of Mrs. Wilson, my eyes flooded as my emotions finally caught up with me. The story …
Recently, the university I attend switched from the traditional didactic format to a “flipped classroom.” A flipped classroom shifts class time away from a lecture format to a more discussion based, allowing exchange between students and professor, as well among students. Ideally, the flipped classroom format allows students to come to lecture with a broad knowledge of the subject at hand, and during the lecture hour, the professor helps to hone this knowledge and contextualize …
Keep in mind first and foremost that I graduated from medical school in 1976. Therefore, all recollections of those positive instances have been greatly embellished over the decades and the obvious corollary is that all memories of negative incidents have been far more exaggerated. Nonetheless, I do well remember absolutely hating the first year of medical school.
On March 29, 2014, the Asian Pacific American Medical Student Association (APAMSA) hosted the “Becoming Physician Leaders in APIA Health” Regional Conference at Rush Medical College in Chicago, IL. Medical students from multiple medical schools in Wisconsin, Illinois and Kansas attended the conference. The conference was to raise awareness and advocate the most pressing health issues APIA population in the United States face today, and to promote leadership among Asian Pacific American medical students. The …
Becoming a doctor takes time, but those outside of medicine do not always realize how convoluted the process can be. Central to the perversion is the National Resident Matching Program (or “the Match”). After college and the two years of classroom-based training in medical school, students are ushered into clinical training through third year core rotations in predetermined specialties. In the spring of their third year, students must decide on their career specialty, often without …
At any given moment in this hyper-connected era, we are beckoned by our smartphones, iPods, iPads and laptops to participate in the multiple spheres in which we exist. These “spheres” — our physical surroundings, families and friends, social media, blogs, e-mail — are simultaneously concrete and confabulated, yet they equally contribute to our identity. Navigating these arenas enriches and edifies our current existence with memories of old friendships and ever-increasing networks of new contacts while …
Art has been one of my passions ever since I could hold a pencil — an important outlet for expression, relaxation and reflection. However, I never found an intersection between art and medicine until I discovered medical illustration in college. This is the field in which artists take medical school classes alongside medical students to become experts in anatomy, histology and pathology, the field which is responsible for providing the textbook and anatomy atlas illustrations …
Room One Wendy Smith had thinning hair, penciled-in eyebrows, and a frame so thin that you could see, in painstaking detail, bluish-grey veins emanating from beneath her pale skin. Cancer had taken so much from her that she almost didn’t look human. But the feeling in the room was extremely human. Fear — palpable fear. Fear made all the more palpable because this was an aggressive, rare form of cancer. Fear made all the more …
For students at West Virginia University School of Medicine, studying anatomy now consists of more than just furiously comparing textbook images to a cadaver. In addition to their traditional dissection-based coursework, they also learn anatomical structures from a living patient using ultrasound technology. Pioneered by Dr. Joseph Minardi, director of the emergency ultrasound fellowship at the WVU School of Medicine, the MD curriculum has begun integrating ultrasound education into all four years of its program. …
The Neurobiology of Learning With residencies becoming increasingly competitive, medical students today find themselves often juggling far more than simply staying on top of their course load. Students are getting involved in more research, mentorship, volunteering and outreach, leaving them with little time to study and master material outside of class. Furthermore, schools are placing a greater emphasis on small-group learning, podcasts and flipped classroom paradigms that put an even greater onus on students to …
Every current fourth-year medical student in the country marked March 17, 2014 and March 21, 2014 on their calendars a long time ago. The first date tells students if they matched into residency and if they will begin their training program this July. The second date tells students where they will ultimately live, breathe and work for the next three to seven years as a member of the hospital’s housestaff. My personal journey to March …
Medical training prides itself on being an art, never simply a black-and-white field where answers to increasingly complex health questions are merely algorithmically derived. It follows then that the only way for medical knowledge to transcend this rigid, computational process is through the accumulation of clinical experience, which over enough time should inform our intuition to the point where we become masters of navigating a sea of grays. This archetype is classically understood to be …
Contributing Writer Emeritus
Rocky Vista University College of Osteopathic Medicine
I am a Class of 2016 medical student at the Rocky Vista University College of Osteopathic Medicine interested in ethics, politics and medical anthropology.
