Students, educators, and physicians writing on KevinMD about medical school: admissions and what they select for, the cost of tuition and the debt it leaves, the curriculum and what students say it does and does not teach, Step 1 and the test-prep industry, pass/fail, mistreatment and depression in training, the match, Caribbean schools, and what should change. Most contributors are students writing while still in school, many of them anonymously. For what physicians have said about paying off that debt and the money decisions that follow, see Physician personal finance: what physicians say about their own money, in their own words. For a maintained record of what students and physicians have said about medical school on KevinMD since 2004, see Medical school: what students and physicians say, in their own words. For what physicians and deans have said for and against affirmative action and diversity in admissions, see Race and medicine: what physicians say, in their own words. For what international and Caribbean graduates have said about the Match and visas, see Immigration and medicine: what physicians say about immigrant doctors and immigrant patients, in their own words.
As a third year medical student, I am as green as they come. As much as I feign familiarity in the hospitals, each day of every rotation brings a host of firsts: first time suturing, first natural delivery, first terminal patient, first 24-hour shift, first code blue. The novelty of these experiences is equal parts exhilarating and overwhelming. As future physicians, we have invested the better parts of our time, …
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May my humanity heal where my science cannot
Studies have varied in their estimates of depression in medical school students, but they all show a similarly startling trend. Medical students have a higher depression rate than their non-medical counterparts. This culminates later in life with physicians with higher than average alcohol abuse problems and higher than average suicide rates, with male MDs 1.5 times as likely, and female MDs twice as likely to commit suicide than their Read more…
Medical students are depressed, but they’re taking the wrong drugs
The holy grail of clinical reasoning is, in a word, assessment. Ought we to measure clinical reasoning as a function of experience, knowledge base, or as a process measure? In medical parlance, there is no “gold standard.”
In 2015, to tell whether your doctor is a great diagnostician is based more on reputation than hard evidence. This gap in evidence is all the more interesting given recent press about the inattention …
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Searching for the holy grail of clinical reasoning
Receiving medical school interview offers simultaneously provides relief, justifies the incredibly hard work you’ve put into your primary and secondary applications, and confirms that you are indeed cut out for medicine.
In other words, you’ve convinced them — at least on paper — that you will succeed in their program and make an excellent doctor.
So why do they even want to interview you?
Consider what schools can only learn about you in …
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Use the power of psychology to ace your medical school interview
The human experience is an exercise in connection. Nothing is seen, heard, or felt in isolation. This is what can make womanhood in a large urban city so challenging. A catcall is not a single comment, heard on a single morning about the tightness of your jeans or the way your hair falls; but instead carries with it every unsolicited thing you’ve ever heard about your body, a shadow of …
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A medical student resents having to make smart choices. Here’s why.
In August of 2002, as a spry young adult, I stepped foot onto the University of Missouri’s campus. Eight years later, I was a double alumnus of my wonderful alma mater, and today, my heart still bleeds black and gold. Although I was happy to begin a new phase in life, Mizzou was not my first choice for college.
After graduating high school, I had spent a summer at Xavier University in …
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What academic medicine can learn from #ConcernedStudents1950
Most people who apply to a graduate school and/or graduate medical programs apply to get accepted the first time of applying. No one wants to have to apply a second time and definitely not a third time. After a second rejection, a lot of people would probably recommended someone picking another field to enter or even giving up altogether. For me, both of my rejections were taken hard and still …
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I got rejected from medical school twice. It was the best thing that happened to me.
Any Stanford student knows all too well that the immense campus, with its seemingly eternal sunshine and endless rows of palm trees, can make it difficult to want to get outside and experience the real world. When it comes to medical education, this creates a very real concern: Is it possible to experience the full diversity of our health care system when you are living in the so-called “Stanford bubble” …
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What medicine is really like isn’t seen in some medical schools
I did some pretty crazy things to get into medical school (don’t worry, Mom, nothing illegal). For several years before applying, I became a medicine groupie. I read books about being a doctor, watched documentaries about medicine, and shadowed physicians for hours on end so I could imagine what it might be like. I watched many a friend go off to med school and graduate … and I waited, I …
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Maybe medical school applications should come with a warning label
As a native New Yorker, I was thrilled when Governor Cuomo announced plans for an executive order that prohibits discrimination against transgender people in areas such as employment and housing. Specifically, this executive order would expand existing anti-discrimination protections to include gender identity, transgender status, and gender dysphoria. There have also been advancements regarding the protection of transgender people from discrimination in health care.
Recently, the Department of Health and Human …
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Transgender discrimination: Physicians must not lag behind
I wonder how I would’ve felt if Ben Carson had run for president back when I was a kid. At that age, I was wholly inspired (and terribly intimidated) by doctors. They knew everything! They were the coolest people ever! Nowadays, I’m in medical school where I’ve learned that doctors definitely learn a lot, but we’re not the coolest ever, and we are certainly not filled with innate knowledge on …
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What a Muslim medical student thinks of Dr. Ben Carson’s words
To be a third year medical student is to enter a world that few understand. The pressure of constant evaluation, the stress of doing well in the field which you want to enter, and the fear of making a mistake often haunt the very long days and night which characterize the most physically exhausting year of medical school.
Yet quite frequently as I move through this year I find myself feeling …
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A heartfelt thank you to my patients
“She has a pneumothorax. You ever placed one of these before?”
The senior resident handed me a chest tube. An intern who had been standing nearby smiled and quipped, “It’s your lucky day.”
Three weeks into my surgery rotation — my first rotation of third year — I was taking a night shift in the emergency room when paramedics wheeled Ms. P into the trauma bay, frail and bruised, hardly breathing. Oftentimes, …
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The unsettling incongruity of a medical student’s “lucky” day
In May 2014, I gave my Grandma Lou a call to say goodbye before heading to Guatemala for two months of research. She took the opportunity to tell me her cancer had relapsed, and she didn’t think she wanted treatment. I was so anxious the entire trip that that phone call would be my final goodbye to Grammy but she conceded to my family’s pleading to receive treatment that was …
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A rotation in Uganda provides perspective to this medical student
I have a skeleton in the closet. I really do. It is a human skeleton that I acquired when as a first-year medical student at the University of Sydney in 1981.
Back then, just about every medical student would own a half or full skeleton. They had to be real human bones as the quality of plastic models at that time were as good as useless as they often lacked many …
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Is it time to take out your skeleton in the closet?
A few weekends ago, I saw a patient with bloated shins at our school’s free clinic, and I marked in my notes that she exhibited “peripheral edema,” an esoteric phrase that means little to those outside of the medical community. That experience only highlighted the tendency in medicine to inflate common bodily functions into opaque medical jargon. Its use can be frustrating for patients who are trying to understand their …
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The core of the scientific process is how we ultimately serve our patients
“You work here?!”
I nodded, a hint of a smile revealing my bemusement at his incredulity.
“Well … probably not after this.”
The other patients in the psych waiting area of the ER nodded in agreement. In my newly issued brown scrubs, stripped of my belongings, I was no longer a research coordinator at a top hospital, but rather one of them. And sadly, they believed being one of them meant you couldn’t …
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A medical student’s psychiatric hospitalization
Throughout most days of clinic rotations, I envision myself panning for gold. Just like I pretended to do as a young child. I am standing in a river that courses through a mountainside somewhere in West Virginia. It is a warm August afternoon; I roll up the pant legs of my overalls and wade into the water, which is just cold enough for you to keep noticing it. As each …
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Learning to become a doctor is like panning for gold. Here’s how.
Alright, here you go future medical school applicants. Here it is. My personal statement for medical school, written four years ago.
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Strolling down busy, student-filled Rue Mouffetard, I was surprised to turn around and see my friend’s swollen eye as he ran off; he had been punched in the face. Thirty seconds later, his cousin was attacked and pushed against a car. Initially confused and terrified, I sprinted across the narrow …
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Why did she want to become a doctor? Read her personal statement.
