“I don’t want to get to the end of my life and find that I lived just the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.”
– Diane Ackerman
Nathan picks up a pen from the tray next to the dry erase boards.
“OK,” he says. “Here’s what he showed us.”
The rest of our small group watches. Nathan is one of the more intense medical students I …
Medical students and physicians are forever looking to milestones
On one of my first days on the labor and delivery ward, one of the attending obstetricians asked me what area of medicine I was interested in. When I said that I was applying into neurology this year, she said, “Ah! The other end of the body!” After a pause, she continued, “Well, this rotation will be … different.”
It wasn’t the first, or last, time I had heard a similar refrain during …
A medical student after an OB/GYN rotation: Here’s what he learned
September 2015, a few weeks into my first year of medical school.
Mr. Smith (John) (identifying information and event details altered to protect confidentiality) wore an orange jumpsuit with the letters “COUNTY JAIL” running down his right pant sleeve. At all times, I felt the presence of his police officer sitting right outside the shock room.
As I interviewed John, he had a face void of emotion. I introduced myself as a …
What my first patient in medical school taught me
“You’re going to fall in love with her,” the nurse warned me, as I stood outside my eleven-year-old patient’s room ready to wake her up for surgery pre-rounds at 5:30 a.m.
I offered back a tired smile and knocked on the door timidly. “Naomi?” I whispered.
To my surprise, I was greeted with a chirpy “Good morning!” and entered the room to find a bright-eyed eleven-year-old sitting up in her bed with …
How a young girl helped me find the light in pediatrics
We recently had a patient who arrived on our service in the intensive care unit after a complicated surgery. The surgery left him close to dying, and he was immediately put on life support and given heavy sedatives.
Ventilators breathed for him. Special drugs kept his heart beating. A continuous pump acted as his kidneys, filtering out his body’s toxins and infusing the cleaned blood back into his veins anew.
He had …
Treating the patient’s body is not synonymous with treating the patient
I just had a conversation with a physician and faculty member at my school. He started the conversation like this: “It’s alright if you disagree with me, and I can disagree with you too. Good academic discourse should allow people to disagree with each other.”
He then allowed me to question him and explain my perspectives for over an hour as he explained his answers, helped clarify some points, and gave …
How to foster and encourage genuine, curious learning in a medical student
Our country is at risk of losing an iconic institution that has played a pivotal role in the history of medical education. A school, which has produced some of the boldest pioneers in medicine, could lose accreditation upon the opening of a new hospital that will shunt away 40 percent of their current patients. Scores of our brightest potential medical students will be ripped away from the communities that desperately …
The fight to save Howard University College of Medicine
It was my first day of orientation at medical school. In a hallway stood a coat rack overflowing with white garments. I set down my accumulated papers, reached for a hanger and — for the first time ever — shrugged first one arm and then the other into a white coat.
It was too large, but I had no other options. The unisex coats ran from XXS to XXL, but the …
The day when the white coat can be worn with no hesitation at all
After my surgery rotation, I was in a very bad place. I felt like two months of grueling work hours and relentless studying were wiped away in an instant by a bad test score. That single number somehow mattered more to me than every positive comment I had received from my patients, colleagues, residents, and attendings. I felt like I had put my heart and soul into that rotation, constantly …
A medical student takes a look into the abyss. Here’s what he learned.
“A moment’s insight is sometimes worth a life’s experience.”
— Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Several years ago, an anxious senior medical student was preparing his application for The Match, the clearinghouse through which 37,000 candidates hope to secure one of the 33,000 available residency positions. It is a nerve-wracking time. Each student compiles documents, assembles records, creates lists of activities, summarizes research, catalogs volunteer projects, selects the perfect photo and solicits faculty …
What this physician learned by helping a medical student write a personal statement
Two weeks ago, while I was helping with an emergency medicine course that I’m a teaching assistant for, I started feeling extremely light-headed, and the chest tightness that I had dismissed as heartburn earlier that morning got worse. I was tended to by the emergency medicine doctor who I was teaching with, admitted to the ED with a resting pulse rate of 130 beats per minute, later admitted to the …
A medical student as a patient. She thanks her support systems.
“Where there is no struggle, there is no compassion.”
-Frederick Douglass
Growing up with sickle cell anemia exposed me to the field of medicine. As I go through the pain and complications, it humbles me to the point that motivates me to work harder to be the doctor I want for myself. I want to be a physician-scientist that conducts clinical research targeted toward patients like me. I believe that as a …
How sickle cell anemia influences a medical school journey
It was during the first few weeks of medical school that I realized that I was joining a secret society. Like many physicians, I was called to medicine at a young age. For me, it was Doctor Beverly Crusher from Star Trek: The Next Generation. I admired her — I wanted to be who she was and do what she did. (More or less, my dreams of space medicine transmuted …
The Osteopathic Oath vs. the Hippocratic Oath
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The New York University School of Medicine stunned the nation by announcing tuition for all current and future medical students will be free, irrespective of merit or financial need. Dr. Robert Grossman, dean at NYU, commented: “This decision recognizes a moral imperative that must be addressed, as institutions place an increasing debt burden on young people who aspire to become physicians.” NYU says their scholarship — which begins in the …
Free medical school isn’t necessary a silver bullet
It’s Sunday, and the clock is approaching 8 p.m. Every computer in our team room is still on, and the sound of typing is filling the small space. A spread of snacks, interspersed between stethoscopes and stacks of faxed records, is ignored for the time being.
This scene was a familiar one on inpatient medicine, where call days can stretch long into the evening. Although those days were challenging and draining, …
Embrace the teamwork involved in becoming a physician
After countless hours of hard work and three demanding years of medical school, it’s now time to face the spotlight! If your interview invites have started rolling in and you are feeling intimidated by the thought, follow these tips to land your first choice of clinical residency.
1. Be prompt with your responses to interview invitesÂ
Be sure to set your inbox to automatically refresh every hour during the interview season so you …
8 tips to land the residency of your dreams
“Sondor” is a made-up internet neologism that captures the fleeting but poignant sense of “the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own — populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness.”
I think about this word often when I see my patients. Everyone is the main character of his or her life, and during the third year of medical …
A medical student as storyteller and story-listener
The dawn of 2018 brought new hopes and new promises for me as I began the third year of my medical school journey. This marked the beginning of a challenging era, one that would test my capabilities to the fullest but also one that was the culmination of countless sacrifices and the fulfillment of years of yearning. After all, this was what I had come to medical school for.
Third year …
Here’s what the third year of medical school taught me
Preparing for medical school demands displaying your passion for both medicine and helping others. Like medical schools, other graduate school programs (think: business or law) require strong grades, test scores, leadership experience, and resumes. But medical school requires so much more than that. Good extracurricular activities for medical school are a particularly important part of the application process.
Through your application — personal statement, AMCAS experience list, secondaries, and interviews — you must …
What kind of extracurricular activities do medical schools look for?
There is a saying among students that medical education is like “taking a drink out of a fire hydrant.” The simile evokes the torrent of information and the impossibility of taking it all in.
The type of people who are admitted to medical school aren’t used to being wrong; to call them perfectionists wouldn’t be too far from the truth. Many secured a seat in medical school because they had made …
Being a physician was never the objective. The goal was becoming one.
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