Tag: MS4

Valentina Bonev Valentina Bonev (21 Posts)

Columnist Emeritus and in-Training Staff Member

Loma Linda University Medical Center


A Taste Of Your Own Medicine is a column that gives you a taste of medicine. It focuses on important and interesting topics relating to medicine and being a medical student.

Valentina is a general surgery resident at Loma Linda University Medical Center. She graduated from University of California, Irvine School of Medicine.




Choosing General Surgery: Reflections from a Fourth-Year Medical Student

Why do I want to become a general surgeon? The real question is why wouldn’t I want to become a general surgeon? I enjoy the operating room, I find the cases interesting, and I couldn’t see myself doing anything else. Even more than all the usual reasons, I feel like there’s something so unique about surgery that is almost indescribable. Being a surgeon is unlike any other career: you get to operate on people. You improve and …

Mommy MD to Be

I am about to enter one of the most exciting times of my medical school training — my fourth year. This upcoming year is a time filled with Step 2 board studying, elective rotations and, of course, the application process for the 2014 Match. This time is both exciting and scary because I will be working in specialties that I may never do again while at the same time selecting and preparing for a specialty …

Choosing Internal Medicine: Reflections from a Graduating Medical School Senior

“Leadership is taking responsibility for enabling others to achieve shared purpose in the face of uncertainty.” Marshall Ganz The first time I heard one of Marshall Ganz’s lectures, I was astounded. His topic that day was leadership in social movements and was informed by his work experiences, including his contributions to the civil rights movement under the leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr. Ganz used his examples to outline five practices of leadership that we …

Choosing Family Medicine: Reflections from a Graduating Medical School Senior

Family medicine is not something I selected once and took for granted. In contrast it seems that family medicine is a path I chose in the past when I studied public health, am choosing as I begin residency, and will continue to choose as I grow into the physician I desire to be. As with any weighty decision, the act of choosing family medicine along with the events that follow reify this career path thus far …

Choosing OB/GYN: Reflections from a Graduating Medical School Senior

I guess you could call me a late bloomer. I certainly wasn’t one of those people who had known since receiving their Fisher Price doctor bag at age five that they would one day grow up to be a pediatrician. And when I started medical school four years ago, I still didn’t have the slightest clue what type of physician I would ultimately become. In making my third year schedule, I became acutely aware of …

The Incompetence of Competence

It was 3 a.m. in the emergency room. I had the ultrasound probe in my hand and was searching for a 50-something-year-old man’s bladder. He had not been able to urinate for over 10 hours and was in terrible pain. I figured his bladder had to be the size of a basketball by now. I stared intently at the black and white fuzzy screen, trying to interpret the landmarks. I did not see the large …

Andrew Petersen (2 Posts)

Contributing Writer Emeritus

University of Cincinnati College of Medicine


Andrew hails from Thousand Oaks, CA and studied psychology and integrative biology at UC Berkeley. He is now a Class of 2013 medical student at the University of Cincinnati and is planning to match into internal medicine.