“When you’re applying to medical school, it’s remarkable how much four years or more of intense work can come down to one single day. The medical school interview is high stakes: studies have found that interview performance is the most important factor in admissions decisions.
While your MCAT score and your GPA …
Sometimes I ask myself why I chose medicine when things get tiring, and we do the same thing repeatedly with a career with such high demands. I think about how we are missing out on our 20s or 30s, and it’s been making me question life, especially when I feel more like a robot rather than a human. During such times, I often reflect on how I felt during the …
I certified my rank order list (ROL), but …
What if I messed up?
What if I don’t match?
What if my list doesn’t get processed?
What if I should have ranked programs in a different order?
What if, what if, what if …
These thoughts, and their associated feelings, are 100 percent normal. Please re-read that last sentence.
You are no longer in control of one of the biggest decisions of your life and your human …
An excerpt from Raising Doctors: The Med School Admissions Success Guide for Parents of Future Physicians.
Let’s look at how you as a parent can help your child succeed at applying to medical school.
Legitimacy and verifiability matter
Applying to medical school, I learned what types of activities, accomplishments, and qualifications were valued and what weren’t.
For example, medical schools may restrict …
As an aspiring surgeon, I at times contemplate whether being creative has any effect on my future career. On one hand, if you see surgery as an “art,” then possibly a creative personality is beneficial. On the other hand, surgery often seems objective and clear-cut, qualities often deemed uncreative. Perhaps even my goals of surgery and my interests in artistic creation are independent, noncommunicating personality features that are unrelated and …
Social media platforms lit up when sponsors of the U.S. Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE) announced Step 1 score reporting will change from 3-digit numerical scores to pass/fail by January 1, 2022. First-year Harvard Medical School student LaShyra Nolen tweeted, “this could reinforce the hierarchy among med schools,” arguing the score change could encourage residency admission directors to favor applicants from prestigious medical …
“To become successful, you need to be excellent and likable,” said a local Black physician giving advice to young underrepresented students facing the usual challenges of medical school.
“Black excellence is the only way forward. The system and the institutions are racist, but we just need to work extra hard. If we do, we will get what we deserve,” said another prominent African-American doctor trying to inspire graduating Black physicians.
Both of …
An excerpt from Cured: A Doctor’s Journey from Panic to Peace.
Dead bodies surrounded me. They lay on their backs, supine in medical terminology. I imagined some staring at the white plastic sheets that covered them completely, others glaring at their closed eyelids. Their smell, a mixture of formaldehyde and …
“Checkmate,” she whispered. A silent wave swept across the tournament area. Players turned their heads in our direction, eager to see who had lost 30 seconds into the round. It was me—I had fallen victim to the infamous four-move checkmate.
My opponent, a five-year-old girl who could barely reach the other side of the chessboard, extended her hand to shake. My seven-year-old self was mortified. In the chess world, nothing is …
One of my most impactful experiences during my third year of medical school was spending time with my patients and getting to know them. I went into medicine because I believed in the special relationship between doctor and patient. As I was shadowing in college, I was amazed by how within minutes, a stranger would reveal physical and psychological details about their life they might not even share with their …
Patients often comment on my attire other than my white coat, particularly my impractical footwear, until I finally broke down and purchased Danskos to avoid being called out for my truthful impracticality. It is amazing how patients care more about my orthotics than remembering the reason they scheduled a visit with me, and God bless them for that.
I am in family medicine, and I thrive on personal and genuine relationships where …
Years and years ago, everyone always walked up a mountain of snow and ice barefoot while dragging a carriage behind them to get to school, and their stethoscopes were made of bamboo. They were hard, hard times, and it was a time-honored tradition to hear the talk from our attendings about how hard training used to be and always elicited an internal groan. The follow up refrain frequently heard in …
He studied at Turin, worked as a chemist until the age of 24, and in 1943 he resisted Nazi occupation of Italy with a group of countrymen. Italian fascists arrested him, turned him over to the Germans, and sent him to Auschwitz in 1944. He arrived on a train packed with six hundred and fifty people. He was imprisoned in the concentration camp for a year. Later Read more…
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Stacks of flyers ranging from local free dinners to legal services collecting in a box or filing cabinet are familiar scenes in student-run clinics (SRCs). To anyone who has worked in social services, maintaining organization and keeping up-to-date resources can be a frustrating and common challenge.
Across the nation, SRCs generally serve homeless, at-risk, and low-income populations for free or at little cost. Primarily run by medical students, SRCs also provide …
I began pursuing a career in medicine with the fervent desire to become a neurosurgeon one day. When someone asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I answered neurosurgeon without missing a beat. I chose neurosurgery in high school after falling in love with the nervous system and watching Gifted Hands. I wanted to be like Dr. Ben Carson before his political debut. At that point, …
There should be no grades in medical school. Forty-something percent of applicants get accepted to one or more medical schools. To even apply to medical school, one needs to have not only graduated or be on track to graduate college, but also needs to have passed the MCAT and have the support of a pre-medical application committee. I am no mathematician, but I do not think that it is a …
I go to medical school with a girl who is universally disliked, perhaps more than anyone I’ve met before. It began innocuously enough: She was too active in the group chat, too pushy about ordering class jackets, this and that.
In lecture, she barked out obscure answers like “Saturday Night Palsy” with physical force; her petite body careening forward in her chair, her class-jacketed hand spearing into the sky. But did …
Multifaceted diversity continues to be a challenge to achieve in medicine, which is concerning given the irreplaceable value that a diverse community of clinicians provides to research, patient care, and medical education. Current initiatives to expand diversity are centered around academic mentorship models, in which striving to teach more students the life sciences and frontiers of biomedicine as early as elementary or middle school can provide critical exposure and pique …
As communities of color continue to be disproportionately decimated by COVID-19 and the brutal impact of racism and other longstanding systemic inequalities, academic medicine finds itself at a critical inflection point in defining its role in addressing social injustices not only for its patients but also for its academic workforce. In the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing, many medical schools and teaching hospitals released statements condemning racial injustice and vowed …
On those brisk walks across the hospital, I briefly look over at the instillations from local artists. Those pieces ignite a chain reaction of creative empathy and even critique from both patient and provider alike. In the briefest moment, we mentally collide into the artist’s creation, catching glimpses of their point of view. The result is our engagement in the vital need for our own creativity.
Hospital art fosters a welcoming, …
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