Jump Starting Your Job Search While In Medical School: Part 1

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When you are in medical school, your job search may feel like a project that’s light years away. While it’s true that your number one priority is succeeding in medical school, it’s a good investment of your time to get educated about what your job search will look like. If you’re knowledgeable about what the job search process is, you can take small, but meaningful steps now, like cultivating great relationships with potential references, attending conferences, and gaining clarity around what kind of work environment is a match for your preferences and goals. Consider these steps to jump start your job search while in medical school, and integrate these steps into your process as you learn and prepare for your career.

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The Year of Privilege, Part 2

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In my last article, I wrote about my perspective on the third year of medical school and how it has evolved over the course of this year. Medical education is unfortunately sparse with free time, which makes it difficult to reflect; writing these posts has been one way for me to slow down and process all the things I’ve seen, the knowledge I’ve gained, and the relationships I’ve built with patients. It was the process of doing this that led to last month’s article, highlighting some of the amazing things I’ve gotten to do this year and some general themes about the clinical side of medical school.

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Considering Rejection: Lessons Learned From an ESL Classroom

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I was seated on a child-sized plastic chair along a wall in the classroom when the teacher summoned me to the front of the room. She handed me a sheet of stickers and, in broken English that was heavily accented, indicated that my task was to watch the approximately twenty children in front of me as they practiced their English vocabulary and reward those who performed the best. This was several weeks into my six-week adventure of teaching English in China during a gap semester after graduation; this was nine months after beginning my application cycle for medical school that remained an open-ended endeavor yet to discover its fate.

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Q&A with Dr. Jennifer Villwock, ENT

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Dr. Jennifer A. Villwock is the current Rhinology and Skull Base Fellow at the University of Kansas Medical Center. After graduating in 2011 from the Michigan State College of Human Medicine, she completed her ENT residency at the State University of New York (SUNY) Upstate Medical University. Dr. Villwock is active in the American Academy of Otolaryngology and serves on the Ethics Committee of the American Rhinologic Society. You can reach her on Twitter @docwock

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Q&A with Dr. Abeyna Jones, Occupational Medicine

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Dr. Abeyna Jones is an occupational medicine registrar at King’s College Hospital and the Medical Director of Medic Footprints, a social enterprise for doctors and medical students promoting alternative careers and wellbeing. She is also a Fellow with the NHS Clinical Entrepreneur Fellowship, devised to support UK doctors develop their enterprises whilst in clinical training and practice.

Dr. Jones received her medical degree from the University of Nottingham (2006) and a Postgraduate Certificate in Medical Education from the University of Edinburgh (2011).

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Popular Specialty Areas – and What Med Students Should Know About Them

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popular specialty areas

For medical school students, perhaps one of the most difficult choices to be made in the course of their education is what area of medicine to specialize in—or whether to go into general practice. Part of this problem is the wide variety of specialties to choose from: the AMA lists around 200 medical specialties and sub-specialties.

Part of it also may be that there are a variety of factors–from expected income to the demand for certain specialties to the personalities and preferences of the individual medical student–to be taken into consideration before a decision can be made. Understanding all of these factors can take some time, but it can also make this very important decision a little easier.

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Four Tips for Completing Your AMCAS Application

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amcas application

The 2018 AMCAS application cycle has started! If you plan to apply to attend medical school starting in Fall 2018, the application is now open for you to begin working through the nine different sections of the application. While the application is straightforward, it can be easy to make simple mistakes that can delay the verification process. To help you fill out an application that may be processed faster, we asked for tips from the AMCAS Verifications Team, as they review and process thousands of AMCAS applications each year. The Verification Team provided us with some important tips to help you avoid making mistakes and ensure your application gets successfully verified.

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The Prospective Physician’s Guide to Medical School Interviews

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You have a great MCAT score, a strong GPA, and have represented yourself and your ambitions to the best of your ability in your medical school admissions essays. Now it seems like the only task standing between you and admission to medical school is interview season—and you have some questions.
When will you be offered a chance to interview? If you are lucky enough to be chosen for an interview, what should you wear? What about transportation to and from the interview, as well as hotel costs? And perhaps most important of all, how can you prepare to impress in different interview formats? Here is your short guide to medical school interviews:

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20 Questions: Tyler Edwards, MD, Family Medicine

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Dr. Tyler Edwards is an attending physician who specializes in family medicine, practicing for almost 15 years. In addition to his duties as a family physician, Dr. Edwards also works as a hospitalist at Frisbie Memorial Hospital, the same hospital in which his outpatient practice is affiliated. After graduating from Pennsylvania State University in 1995 with a bachelor’s degree in biochemistry, he matriculated at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine, subsequently earning his M.D. degree in 1999. He thereupon moved to Ogden, Utah, to complete his McKay-Dee Family Medicine Residency program, which lasted three years. Dr. Edwards has been married for 18 years and has four children. As a keen advocate for exercise, he enjoys physical, outdoor activities, such as cross-country skiing, running, swimming, and hiking.

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What to Expect as a Med School Spouse: Years 3 and 4

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Medical Spouse

By Amy Rakowczyk, SDN Staff Writer

With Step 1 completed, and hopefully after a little R&R, your spouse is ready to get out there and try their hard-won knowledge in the clinics! Also coming up, your spouse will be selecting a specialty and starting the process of researching residency programs. They will put their application package together, go through the interview process, rank the programs, and wait for the much anticipated Match Day, then graduation! It will be a lot in a short amount of time, so here’s your breakdown of what to expect!

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20 Questions with Dr. Cosima Gretton, Health Technologist

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Dr. Cosima Gretton is a medical doctor and product manager at Karius, Inc., a biotech startup specializing in infectious disease genomics. She is also a Technology Entrepreneurship Teaching Fellow at UCL, where she is currently designing and delivering a new health care pathway which would guide entrepreneurs through the UK healthcare system, and a fellow at the Digital Health Forum, which brings together industry, academic and clinical experts in digital health. Furthermore, she is a mentor for Startupbootcamp’s healthcare accelerator.
In 2011, she co-founded the AXNS Collective, a science communication company which is looking to advance public engagement in neurology and psychology with the help of scientists and artists.
Dr. Gretton obtained a degree in Experimental Psychology from Oriel College, Oxford University (2009), followed by her medical degree from King’s College London (2015). While at medical school, she studied at the University College London (UCL) Mobile Academy, which supports individuals with new business ideas. She also studied at the Silicon Valley think tank Singularity University, where her team founded an at-home salivary diagnostic start-up called Mitera.
She most recently worked as Product Manager at Outcomes Based Healthcare, designing and building a research app to gather smartphone sensor data for diabetic patients; as a technical lead for RADAR-CNS at the NIHR Biomedical Research Center, a project seeking to find predictors of relapses in a number of neurological conditions; and as a digital health innovation consultant.
Dr. Gretton has written a number of featured articles for The King’s Fund, WIRED Magazine, and KQED Science, and has been published in the International Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry.

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Dear Me, MD | Love Me, M3

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July 21, 2015
Dear Me, MD:
Now that you have opened this letter, you may have graduated or maybe you just matched into residency— somewhere, anywhere, hopefully?! As you read this, it should be some time during spring 2017. But, you never know, sometimes the train derails and it takes a little longer than expected, so forgive yourself if that is the case. You learned a while back that the fast lane is overrated so never mind months or years. You now have the degree that you worked so tirelessly for; the one they told you that you would never get; the degree that bears the title I know you will probably never feel is real.

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Five Student Loan Mistakes You Need to Avoid

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student loan mistakes

While student loans are a necessary financial tool for most of today’s future doctors, the process of repaying them can get complex due to the many types of loans and the accrual of interest. If you make the wrong move, you could wind up facing a costly error—one that may take years to recover from. The following five student loan mistakes are a few of the worst errors that you can make. Do what you can to avoid them.

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Financial Literacy for the Newly Minted Physician: Part One

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“Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it…he who doesn’t, pays it.
-Albert Einstein
Your Life Of Abundance
The first thing to note about your life the day after you finish residency is that, despite the fashionable whining of your peers, yours has been an existence of relative abundance: You have likely never driven a nicer car, earned a higher salary, or had greater autonomy.
In 2014, the average resident salary one year out of medical school was $51,000 (Medscape). For perspective, in 2014 the median U.S. household income was $53,657 (U.S. Census Bureau). Given that the median household size was 2.54, a new, single intern fared better than most families that year (Statista).

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Rabbit, Rabbit

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Reposted with permission from here.
The Americans gave each family two rabbits, which we were to care for over the summer and eventually cook. Well, as you might imagine, Tante Ingrid and I got quite attached to the little critters. When the time came for rabbit stew, we were despondent. We begged Mutti to please save them. And somehow — despite having had no meat for God knows how long — she agreed. She must have been so exasperated with us, but she agreed.  

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