Tag: transitions

Nita Chen, MD (39 Posts)

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.

Year-End Reflections from a First-Year Medical Student

Published by Nita Chen, MD

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 …

Cackles

Published by Amara Uzoma-Uzo

“This can be a depressing specialty at times; we laugh to stay sane,” my attending explained as I stared in dismay at the cackling residents and faculty after one of them made a rude comment about their patient. This was the first day of my rotation on this service and I was very disappointed. Still brimming with the ideals of professionalism taught in the first two years of medical school, the scenario I witnessed seemed …

One Horse Pill, BID

Published by Elizabeth Stachtiaris

I remember the accident vividly—up until I fell unconscious. I can still feel the wind whirling past my ears, roaring at me, smacking my face, forcing tears from my bulging, dilated eyes. I remember traveling at what seemed like the speed of light, my heart pounding wildly in my chest. I weighed my options in a split second: dismount and lose a leg or remain aboard and lose my life. The pulsating hoof beats hammered against …

Nicole

Published by Annie Robinson

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.”

The Art of Learning in Medical School

Published by Madhavi Bhavsar

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 …

Confessions of a Fourth-Year Medical Student

Published by Valentina Bonev

When I was a first-year medical student, the upperclassmen said that medical school would get better and better. I didn’t feel like that by the end of first year—or during second year. Third year started and it finally picked up. Now, as a fourth-year medical student, I can definitively say that medical school really does get better and better—you just have to be patient (but not a patient). Not everything in medical school is as …

And So It Begins: The Clerkship Years

Published by Jimmy Yan

Not too long ago, I was still in the world of “pre-clerkship”, the realm of lectures, teaching sessions, attendance and classrooms. That time seems so long ago now after entering the wards as a third-year student on clerkships. That world of preclerkship seems so much simpler, and safer, than being in the hospital right now, with its fluorescent lights, long hallways, and patient rooms. Classrooms were a world to which I had become accustomed and …

Just Saying Hello: A Nod to All Those Who Helped Us

Published by Valentina Bonev

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 …

Review of Systems

Published by Karan Desai

With my Fisher-Price stethoscope drooping to my knees, I opened up my first practice as a young boy, working out of my family’s kitchen, my hours fluctuating with my nap schedule. I was a dragon-seeker bent on improbable rescues, and as I would fiddle with my tools, I would imagine a future where patients returned to my office full of life and gratitude. What I did not count on as a five-year-old—or even as a …

On Becoming a Doctor: Excellent Medical Student, Terrible Clinician

Published by Amy Ho

There is a saying that you enter medical school wanting to help people but exit it wanting to help yourself. It may be a cynical view, but a realistic one. The criteria to being a good medical student are far different from being a good doctor. Medical education may be breeding a legion of self-serving, grade-grubbing, SOAP-note spewing machines rather than the “empathetic,” “compassionate” and “caring” physicians of admission essays yore. I was no different. …

No Mom, You’re Not Interrupting Me, I’m Always Studying

Published by Aisha Harris

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. …

I Don’t Know: The Medical Student Motto

Published by Daniel Lefler

It took one day of medical school to kick me off the high horse I rode through the months leading up to it. “Repeat after me,” said one of our administrators as he quieted down the eager students. “I am a first-year, and I know nothing. Remember that.” It was completely true. (A year later, it probably still is.) To all of my family members who keep asking me what that rash is: I don’t …

Daniel Lefler (3 Posts)

Contributing Writer Emeritus

Cooper Medical School of Rowan University

Daniel Lefler is a member of the Class of 2016 at Cooper Medical School of Rowan University in Camden, NJ. He studied neuroscience at The College of William & Mary. His passion is the medical sciences, but he also enjoys the performing arts.