Contributing Writer
Georgetown University School of Medicine
Sara Wierbowski is a forth-year medical student at Georgetown University School of Medicine in Washington, D.C. class of 2023. In 2019, she graduated from The University of Scranton with a Bachelor of Science in neuroscience and Bachelor of Arts in philosophy. She is currently a member of the Literature and Medicine Scholarly Track, which allows her to continue to enjoy the humanities while in medical school. After graduating medical school, Sara plans to pursue a psychiatry residency.
Before starting medical school, buried in a list of to-do tasks, I was asked to submit my Meyers-Briggs personality inventory. I was no stranger to this string of four letters, as I had performed the assessment many times in my life. I didn’t need to take the test again to know what I would get: INFJ.
I gritted my teeth as I stretched my pinky finger across the fretboard of my acoustic guitar, reaching for the last note in a D-sharp chord. My unconditioned hand was cramping from the fourth chord progression that I was trying to learn, and after straining a little bit more, I huffed in exasperation and slammed my tutorial book closed.
Columnist, Medical Student Editor and Former Managing Editor (2017-2018)
OU-TU School of Community Medicine
Ashten Duncan is a third-year medical student at the OU-TU School of Community Medicine located in Tulsa, Oklahoma. A 2018-2019 Albert Schweitzer Fellow, he recently received his Master of Public Health (MPH) with an interdisciplinary focus from the University of Oklahoma Hudson College of Public Health. Ashten attended the University of Oklahoma for his undergraduate program, completing a Bachelor of Science (BS) in Microbiology and minors in Chemistry and French. An aspiring family physician, Ashten is currently on a National Health Service Corps scholarship. His research interests include hope theory, burnout in medical education, and positive psychology in vulnerable populations. Ashten is passionate about creative writing and what it represents. He has written pieces that have been published on KevinMD.com and in-Training.org and in Blood and Thunder and The Practical Playbook. Ashten is currently serving as Associate Author for the upcoming edition of First Aid for the USMLE Step 1.
The Lived Experience
As medical students, we sometimes lose sight of our purpose for going into medicine and feel that we are exerting ourselves excessively with little feedback from our environment. It is important that we remember that, while we are living through the experiences that come with our training, our future patients are also living through their own experiences. The focus of this column is to examine topics in positive psychology, lifestyle medicine, public health and other areas and reflect on how these topics relate to medical students, physicians and patients alike.
