Students, residents, and educators writing on KevinMD about how physicians are made: medical school, the match, residency, duty hours, supervision, assessment, mistreatment, and the path from student to practicing physician. Many contributors write while still in training, and many write anonymously. For a maintained record of what students and physicians have said about medical school since 2004, see Medical school: what students and physicians say, in their own words. For what residents and attendings have said about residency itself, see Residency: what residents and attendings say, in their own words.
I recently received a call from a physician resident in the Northeast U.S. who had been notified that she would be terminated from her residency program for a “weak knowledge base.” There would be no contract offered to her for the coming academic year. She reports that her scores are no worse than several of her colleagues and that her accredited program has a history of arbitrarily dismissing residents. She …
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Medical residents and academic due process: Know your rights
Want to hear a crazy story?
Typical medical school students can relate tales of a college experience that includes summer research or hours spent reviewing for the MCAT. I didn’t even take the MCAT. Read on for the oddest medical school acceptance story you’ve ever heard.
I was driven in high school. I’d heard for years about smart kids going off to the Ivy League, and I wanted that experience — to …
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I was accidentally accepted to an Ivy League medical school at 17
I believe there’s no such thing as work-life balance. I think this every morning when I leave for work, watching my two-year-old son press his face against the front window and wave at me as I back down the driveway. It comes up again at work, as I guiltily feel relieved when a patient cancels and I have an unexpected half hour to work on a behavioral science presentation for …
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There’s no such thing as work-life balance
One of the best bits of wisdom I’ve ever received is that you can tell a lot about someone by looking at how they spend their time. In medical school, time is our scarcest resource. We’re at this strange and exciting point in our lives, during which we’re responsible for learning an enormous amount of information in hopes that someday we’ll be able to quite literally save lives.
Many of my …
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A medical student’s reflection on time, the scarcest resource
For the over 6,500 candidates who applied to Canadian medical schools this cycle, the term “admissions” has taken on a whole new meaning. For some, the word has become a kind of divine judgment — a determinative force defining the individual’s value or worth. For others, a long road of struggle has led them to acceptance of the next step in their career. To most, however, the word has morphed …
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Trust the process of medical school admissions
Hello, premeds!
There’s so much advice out there from so many sources. Your aunt, cousin, and grandpa think they know what to do to be successful in your pursuit of medicine. All of your friends are experts — and why aren’t you a doctor already?
I know, I know … This time in life is hard. You are comparing yourself, and you are hearing so many messages.
So, I’ll make it simple.
Here are …
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Premed? Here are 3 things to consider.
Artificial intelligence, or AI, is a term that is often associated with robots or computers that “learn” by having material introduced to them. Different people have different reactions to the idea of AI, especially with its potential use in medicine. AI can perform many tasks at the same time and in the same way producing results that will always be precise, but not necessarily accurate. This is relevant to fields …
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This medical student wants to be a radiologist. Does the field have a future?
A few days ago I learned about a different manifestation of imposter syndrome. The “usual” one, of course, shows up as, “I shouldn’t be here because I’m not qualified or smart enough to be here.”
The one that was confessed to me a few days ago, however, went like this: “I shouldn’t be here because I don’t know what I’m doing here.”
They explained how it seems that everyone is filing away into …
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Facing the pressure to choose a specialty
Being a medical student is a piece of cake. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
If someone says medical school is too demanding, then they shouldn’t be here in the first place. I can tell that you’re different. I can see that twinkle in your eye. You’re gonna make a great doctor someday. You need to cut these negative people out of your life; they’re only going to drag you down. …
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How to be a medical student
Like most medical trainees my age, I step into the hospital with the entire knowledge base of the world in my pocket. I have apps on my phone to look up disease symptoms and diagnoses, reference drug doses and side effects, estimate the 10-year risk of having a heart attack, determine the correct timing and type of vaccine administration and screening tests, and even display the risks, benefits, and statistics …
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Bridging the gap: medical training in the digital age
Residency training is an opportunity to get a good feeling of the specialty that interested you when thinking about what to pursue in the future. You may think that after applying for premed college, medical school and residency, applying for fellowship would be a piece of cake for you. Let me tell you: applying for fellowship is probably the hardest one among all other applications you went through so far. …
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How to match into a fellowship
The common critique of surgeons from their medical colleagues is the scant amount of time spent with their patients. As the argument goes, surgery is more impersonal than other specialties and those who practice it see their patients in one dimension.
In some sense, they aren’t wrong.
For those who wield the scalpel, speed and efficiency are a priority. It’s a philosophy perfectly illustrated during morning rounds, the daily tour of patients …
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The doctor will see you now. But only for a minute.
Since graduations will soon be upon us, this is a graduation speech that I’d like to give one day:
Hello everyone, and welcome. To the practicing doctors in the audience, I hope you can look back on your own graduations. To the med students, I hope you can look ahead. And, hopefully, everyone can look forward to what are some heartfelt insights.
To the graduating class: As you’re sitting here ruminating about …
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Advice for graduating medical students
After a semester of studying and taking written exams, we had our first OSCE in medical school. An OSCE — or an objective structured clinical examination — is the real deal. Instead of filling out multiple choice boxes, we instead work with a real human being, which for me is a welcome change.
The actor is given a script with their unique condition and story — it’s a simulation of what …
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My first objective structured clinical examination
A 76-year-old gentleman with a history of kidney failure, myasthenia gravis and recently diagnosed with esophageal cancer presented for evaluation of melena and hypotension.
The patient was my first admission to the medicine team as an intern, and he was as near to an ICU admission without actually being admitted to the ICU as one could come. After examining the patient, I briefly staffed with the busy attending physician, placed the …
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A medical intern’s 3 greatest fears
One late evening on pediatrics call, a frantic young couple brought in their few weeks old baby. She had spiked a fever which refused to go down and was fussier than normal. The cause of her symptoms could have been anything — at best, a mild respiratory infection, in which case we would simply watch her and manage her symptoms, but at worst, it could be meningitis, an infection attacking …
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The art of medicine is slowly being pushed out. Is that a good thing?
Learned helplessness. It’s a psychological concept marked by a perceived loss of power, and it’s prevalent in medicine. We are taught early on how little we are in this colossal world. We are told what to do, when to do it, and what we will get for it. Our objections go unheard or—worse—ignored.
Let me quote a paragraph from The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz:
They were conducting a series of experiments on basic …
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Physicians and medical students: Unlearn helplessness
Working in a clinic as a medical student is the best of all worlds. We have the opportunity to expand our knowledge and skills by working with some incredible patients, all while knowing that we have the support and backup of our fully trained, expert attending physicians every step of the way. This apprenticeship type of system is absolutely essential to medical training, allowing us to get our feet underneath …
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Taking off the training wheels and becoming a real doctor
Her: “So what do you do?”
Him: “Well, I’m applying to medical school. If I make it, I’ll spend the vast majority of my time studying for the next four years. You and I will be able to go on cheap dates occasionally, but even then I’ll feel guilty about not studying. I won’t have any money, so you’ll have to support me on your income. Otherwise, I’ll have to take …
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First date with a medical student
It’s a question that reverberates in the minds of premeds around the country.
If you have a choice between multiple medical schools, should you go to the cheapest medical school available, or should you go to the more prestigious, more expensive medical school?
MD vs. DO vs. Caribbean
I think it is worth the investment to go to a U.S. allopathic (MD) school if at all possible.
It’s an unfair bias, because every medical …
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Public vs. private medical school: Which should you choose?
