Medical Student Editor and in-Training Staff Member Emeritus
University of Florida Fixel Movement and Neurorestoration Institute
Nita Chen is a current movement disorders fellow at University of Florida Movement and Neurorestoration program. She is Class of 2017 medical student at Albany Medical College. To become cultural, she spent her early educational years in Taiwan and thoroughly enjoyed wonderful Taiwanese food and milk tea, thus ruining her appetite for the rest of her life in the United States. Aside from her neuroscience and cognitive science majors during her undergraduate career, she holed herself up in her room writing silly fictional stories, doodling, and playing the piano. Or she could be found spazzing out like a gigantic science nerd in various laboratories. Now she just holes up in her room to study most of the time.
One of the things that I have learnt Ever since I have embarked on this long, long journey Is that with endless responsibilities Comes the increasing importance of prioritizing and letting go What matters most And what matters less Always in some sort of dynamic balance between Marching towards a tangible goal and Melting down in a binary world of studying and not. Twelve years, sounds like a long time So many years of …
Author’s note: Every spring, the University of Louisville School of Medicine holds a Convocation of Thanks to honor those who donated their bodies for our gross anatomy lab and to express our appreciation to their families. Students are invited to perform in a variety of ways: via music, singing, or reading pieces to express their gratitude. The following is my submission for this year’s Convocation. In the four years prior to medical school, I served as a …
By this the time of year, most first-year medical students have finished with anatomy. Anatomy: for most of us, this course is our first time seeing a deceased human being in an academic setting. And for some of us, the first cut we make on the first day of anatomy is the first cut we make on a person’s flesh. Sound scary? It did to me. But it also sounded amazing. To me, anatomy seemed …
When we pulled back the crimson tarps, other than his abnormally impressive endowments, Mr. S did not strike me in the profound fashion I had anticipated upon witnessing a cadaver up close for the first time. After some reflecting (and a brief self-doubt as to whether I possessed sociopathic tendencies), I concluded that this was due to the acceptance that death is a very natural part of life and seeing its consequences ceased to stun …
From my personal experience as a first-year medical student, medical school so far can only be described as a strange suspension of conflicted time-space ironies. During short increments of approximately one-and-a-half months each, we powered through full themes with overwhelming amounts of information—new pieces to memorize, new conceptual dots to connect. To provide some context, our medical school curriculum is divided into organ-based themes lasting approximately five to six weeks, coupled with the appropriate anatomical …
“Would you like one meatball or two?” The words stumbled off my tongue as I smiled sheepishly at the people I was serving dinner to. Throughout my first few weeks of medical school, I had frequently experienced the same acute awareness of my own inadequacy. From long hours spent in the gross anatomy lab in a mixed state of amazement, perplexity and reverence, to the scrutiny of seemingly cryptic pink shapes in histology lab, I …
How can doctors-in-training face the fears and failures they may experience in medical school? Nicole, a medical student taking time off after a difficult first year, candidly describes how the roadblocks she confronted were “blessings in disguise.”
We are not just students. We are medical students. I never thought there was a distinction between these two terms. To be a student, one is actively learning the material presented to them. They are engaging their minds to pick up the knowledge and store it away for later. I believed being a medical student involved the same process.We are presented a plethora of information for us to meticulously store away in our internal hard …
From the pectoral region dissection on August 1 until our final practical in December, we have undergone one of the most intimate and transformative experiences in medicine: dissection of our cadavers. Shared by only the select few who have taken this journey in medicine before us, our cadaver donors—our first patients—have given us a glimpse of what it means to be a doctor. Our donors are the first completely vulnerable set of bodies with which we …
We had our white coat ceremony on the third day of medical school. Each student was given a rose to give to someone who helped during their journey to medical school. As soon as we started school, we had lectures to attend, books to read and frequent tests to study for. Everything started off with a bang! Before we knew it, we were nose deep in books, and we quickly forgot what life was like …
How can doctors-in-training create authentic community with their fellow classmates? Joe, a second-year medical student in Ohio, discusses the challenges of first year, and speaks about discovering the power of feeling seen by and connected to others.
Okay. So, I am in medical school. As in, really in medical school. Let’s take a moment and let that sink in. Tilt your head back and think about it. There aren’t many people that get into medical school. I won’t simply say it’s competitive; that belittles that fact that medical school has a significant lack of enrollment opportunities compared to the much-talked-about demand for future physicians. But really, I am a first-year medical student. …
Contributing Writer
Georgetown University School of Medicine
Aisha Harris is from Flint, Michigan and is a Class of 2017 medical student at Georgetown University School of Medicine in Washington, D.C. She earned a BSE in chemical engineering from the University of Michigan in 2011. Her current health interests include pediatrics, family medicine, and health policy. Outside of medicine she is a full time Michigan Wolverine fan and loves performing arts, especially spoken word.
