Walking out of the test center after I had completed the MCAT was a surreal experience. Somehow, the far-off test date for which I had been preparing for months had not only arrived, but had already passed. I was suddenly and thankfully in possession of all of the components of a complete medical school application, as an MCAT score was the last blank space to fill on my impending AMCAS application.
Medical
Learn about medicine and how to become a physician in our articles for pre-medical students (including the MCAT), medical students, resident physicians, and practicing physicians.
How To Make New Friends and Find A Community
If your spouse’s medical studies have recently brought you to a new city, or to a new community within a familiar city, you will need to search for new friends and support groups. Medical school is not about being “strong” and pushing through all the hard stuff. It’s about having people to lean on when the going gets tough.
Building yourself a new community and finding friends, especially those that you hope to be able to share your delightful, as well as dark moments with, is not an easy task. However, it is a necessary one!
The Joy of the Perfect Candidate: A Conversation with Susan Mulroney, PhD
Sometimes, Susan Mulroney, PhD, professor and director of the special master’s program at Georgetown Medical Center, wonders how she got so lucky.
“I wonder- how did people let me get this job? How did I get this career? I was going to be a medical researcher. That was wonderful, and I loved that, but as soon as I started teaching medical students, it was like, oh my God, I love this. This is amazing.”
Osmosis Co-Founders Ryan Haynes and Shiv Gaglani
Ryan Haynes, PhD and Shiv Gaglani, MBA discuss how they went from anatomy partners to the founders of Osmosis, an advanced learning platform that helps medical & other health professional students succeed in classes, on board exams, and in the clinic.
Tell us about yourself
Ryan: I’ve had a longstanding interest in how the brain works. Before attending Hopkins for med school I did a PhD in neuroscience at Cambridge studying decision making. I now live in Charlottesville, Virginia where my wife is a resident in neurology at UVA.
Shiv: I am passionate about developing scalable solutions in the fields of healthcare and education. I attended Johns Hopkins School of Medicine between 2011-2013 and then took a leave of absence to co-found Osmosis as well as complete an MBA at Harvard Business School. I’m now based back in Baltimore where my fiance, Malorie, is an OB/GYN resident at Johns Hopkins.
The Future of MD/DO Residencies Under Single Accreditation
Recently, the Accrediting Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) announced that by 2020, all allopathic and osteopathic residency programs would come together under one umbrella accreditation system. This is a significant shift away from the historical separation between MD and DO programs. DocThoughts’ Host, Nirmal Gosalia, invited Dr. John Potts, Senior VP of Surgical Accreditation at the ACGME and key leader in the implementation of the Single GME System, to clarify the decision and its future impact on graduate medical education.
Internal Medicine: The "Classic" Physician
By Brent Schnipke
If the average reader is asked to imagine a typical medical student, he or she might picture the following scene: a group of frazzled young people in short white coats, scurrying around the wards of a large academic medical center. They travel in hordes, flocking to the nearest attending, who calmly asks them asinine questions and then chides them for their lack of knowledge. This scene is stereotypical of an often-stereotyped field, and might be something one would see in a caricature of the hospital – on a show such as Grey’s Anatomy or Scrubs. Although this is only one example of what medical education can look like, it is helpful for giving a simplified look at the life of a third-year medical student in the throes of clinical rotations.
Q&A with Dr. Alison Stansfield, Learning Disability Psychiatrist
Alison Stansfield, MBChB, MRCPsych, MD is the clinical lead and consultant psychiatrist for the Leeds … Read more
Deprescription: In the context of palliative care
“Why is Mr X on statins?” asked the palliative consultant. “He has been on statins … Read more
Chronicles of a Med Student: The View From the Other Side of Boards
Finally on the other side! This morning I soaked in the luxury of not having … Read more
Q&A with Jonny Kim, MD, NASA Astronaut Candidate
When the 12 members of NASA’s 2017 Astronaut Candidate Class report to Johnson Space Center in Houston, TX for their two years of training, two of them—Dr. Jonny Kim and Dr. Frank Rubio—will leave behind medical careers for the chance to explore the final frontier. SDN recently spoke with Dr. Kim about his nontraditional path to medical school and his transition from emergency medicine resident to astronaut candidate.
Dr. Jonny Kim started his career in the US Navy, where he trained as a Navy SEAL and completed more than 100 combat missions, earning a Silver Star and a Bronze Star with Combat “V”. He earned a degree in mathematics at the University of San Diego and his MD at Harvard Medical School. He is currently finishing the intern year of his residency in emergency medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital. At the end of the two years of astronaut training, Dr. Kim and the other astronaut candidates could be assigned to any of a variety of posts furthering NASA’s mission.
Q&A with Dr. Sarvi Eastell, Surgeon, Entrepreneur, and Digital Health Advisor
Dr. Sarvi Eastell is a surgeon, entrepreneur, and digital health advisor. She is the founder … Read more
How Do College and Medical School Classes Differ?
As a premedical student, you are likely familiar with some of the subjects that are covered in the standard medical school curriculum. After all, how different could biochemistry in medical school be from undergraduate biochemistry?
While your premedical courses will certainly provide you with a strong background with which to approach medical school, it is imperative that you understand that undergraduate classes differ substantially from medical school courses in both difficulty and breadth of content. Think of your undergraduate science education as preparation for medical school—not as an opportunity to cover all of the material in one of your medical school classes prior to matriculation. Here are four key ways in which medical school courses differ from undergraduate classes, as well as some tips on how to deal with these differences:
Dear Me, M3 | Love Me, MD
Dear Me, M3:
As graduation approaches and the days of fourth year freedom quickly fade away, the terrifying reality of being a stupefied intern becomes more and more paralyzing. Self-doubt started as a whisper but is slowly escalating to a deafening scream. I have read and re-read the letter you wrote in attempt to silence the negativity— to remember how I felt as a naive third year student trying to navigate the world of clinical medicine— to remind myself of a time when graduation was an unforeseeable future and matching into residency seemed like an absurd possibility. Undoubtedly, your foresight advice will sharpen my self-awareness and hold me accountable to be kind and compassionate, to stay humble. Yet, in order to reassure myself that I will make it, to bury the self-doubt, it is time for some self-to-self hindsight advice— time to remind myself of lessons learned along the way. So here it goes:
Residency: The Interview and Selection Process
Residency applications! The light at the end of the tunnel, and the process that will chart the course for the next 3+ years of your life and your spouse’s medical career. No big deal, or anything! It is an incredibly exciting time, while also being quite unsettling. Here’s what to expect and how to make it as joyful of a process as possible.
How To Stay Afloat As A Premed
Sometimes it feels like prepping for med school really is like bracing yourself against the … Read more
The Year of Privilege, Part 2
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.
Considering Rejection: Lessons Learned From an ESL Classroom
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.
My Own Little Ice Age
Reposted with permission from here. I can finally say I’m in my last year of … Read more
Q&A with Dr. Jennifer Villwock, ENT
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