feature article

Picking the Right Medical School Program

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medical school rankings

There’s a popular phrase, “If you’ve seen one medical school… you’ve seen one medical school.” Every school is completely different, so it’s a good idea to thoroughly research what programs would be best for you before you start the application process.
What are you looking for?

Source: The Official Guide to Medical School Admissions, AAMC 2015
Source: The Official Guide to Medical School Admissions, AAMC 2015

When you’re deciding which medical schools to apply to, consider some of the same factors you weighed when applying to college: Are you looking for a public or private university? Do you want to attend school in your home state or out-of-state? You may also narrow your choices by considering the specialties offered or even which clubs and organizations are available to med students.

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20 Questions: Mary Lupo, MD, Dermatologist

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Mary Lupo, MD, is a practicing dermatologist and clinical professor of dermatology at Tulane University School of Medicine. Dr. Lupo began using combination protocols for her patients that included collagen fillers, light chemical peels, and topical products such as Retin-A and alpha hydroxy acids with sun protection. She received a bachelor’s degree in biology from Newcomb College of Tulane University (summa cum laude, 1976). She received her MD from Tulane University School of Medicine (1980). She then completed an internal medicine internship at Ochsner Hospital (1980-1981) before entering the dermatology program at Tulane University School of Medicine (1981-1984), where she served as chief resident in her final year.
Dr. Lupo is a member of the American Academy of Dermatology (former committee member); American Dermatological Association; American Society for Dermatologic Surgery (former board of directors and committee member); Women’s Dermatologic Society (former president and committee member); Eastern College of Health Vocations (medical advisory board); TopMD Skin Care (medical advisory board); Strathspey Crown (founding member and operating partner); Annenberg Circle of the Dermatology Foundation; and Stegman Circle of the ASDS Dermasurgery Advancement Fund. Dr. Lupo is the author of more than 60 published articles and book chapters, and she has been a speaker on various dermatological topics at nearly 250 national and international meetings and seminars. She serves on the editorial board of Prevention Magazine, Current International, the Journal of European Academy of Dermatology and Venereology, and Cosmetic Dermatology. Dr. Lupo has been published in Journal of Drugs in Dermatology, Journal of Clinical Aesthetic Dermatology, Cosmetic Dermatology, Journal of Cosmetic Dermatology, The Skin Cancer Foundation Journal, Dermatological Surgery, Plastic Reconstructive Surgery, Dialogues in Dermatology, Journal of Dermatological Surgery Oncology, Postgraduate Medicine, and Archives of Dermatology.

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Those Who Can Do, Teach….and Lead: A Conversation with Mark Walton, MD

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At this past year’s UC Davis Pre-Health Conference, Stanford Health Care’s Chief of Staff, Dr. Mark Welton headlined three popular sessions. His talks centered on what a chief of staff is, how you get to be chief of staff, and what we need to do to maintain health care costs.
No one would have guessed that back in the 1970’s, on this same campus, the distinguished physician and leader was told he’d never make it through UC Davis’s pre-med program, let alone get into medical school.
“I struggled through some of the classes,” Walton, who is also the Chief of Colon and Rectal Surgery, admits. Lucky for the medical profession, he not only managed to make it through pre-med, but successfully finished medical school at UCLA and completed a fellowship in colon and rectal surgery at Washington University. After teaching at University of California, San Francisco for 8 years, Walton transitioned to Stanford in 2001 and has been there ever since.

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Breaking Bad (News, That Is)

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My stomach sunk. The results of the biopsy were back and it was not good. I had met Ms. Jones eight days ago when she was admitted for a pneumonia that antibiotics couldn’t seem to shake. Once hospitalized, we’d brought out the big guns and she had been clinically improving on that well-loved duo of vanc and zosyn. (Med students take note: vanc/zosyn is almost always an acceptable answer when pimped about which antibiotics to start – they may be overkill, but you’re unlikely to be wrong.) Despite her improvement, things had not been adding up – we kept putting 2 and 2 together and getting 6. A young woman in her late 30s, she had no good reason to have this month-long pneumonia and her chest x-ray looked, in a word, terrible. Even I as an intern could see that what had been a right middle lobe infection when she first presented a month ago was now also in her upper lobes and – oddly – her left lung was looking increasingly cloudy.

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Q & A: Pharmacy Admissions Insider

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Applying to professional school can be one of the most daunting challenges of a student’s career. The pharmacy admissions process is no exception, and students may find it overwhelming at times. The Student Doctor Network recently sat down with Jeff, a member of a pharmacy school admissions committee, who shared his perspective on the process and some advice for students.

SDN: What advice would you give an undergraduate student just starting to explore the field of pharmacy? How can they tell whether pharmacy is right for them?

Jeff: The two things that someone who is interested in pharmacy should do are to make sure that they have a good understanding of the roles and responsibilities of a pharmacist in a variety of settings, and that the degree they are seeking is aligned with their career objectives. Many individuals are drawn to pharmacy school based upon nothing more than their perception of what a pharmacist does, with the perception based upon their visits to community pharmacies as customers or the television commercials produced by the national drugstore chains to promote their pharmacists. As you would suspect, their perception of what a community pharmacist does on a daily basis is usually wrong. Others make it to their admissions interview day and tell their interviewers that they want to work as a hospital pharmacist so they can work with patients to discover the cure for breast cancer or diabetes; a noble goal to be sure, but one better suited for a doctoral degree in pharmacology or medicinal chemistry.

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Refuse To Take No For An Answer: How I Got Into Dental School After 6 Tries

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reapply to dental school

By Travis Barr, DDS

This article is reprinted with permission from the American Student Dental Association. It originally appeared in December 2014 issue of ASDA News.
ASDA_250
For me, the road to dentistry has been more like a grueling endurance race. The ride consisted of three DAT tests, 19 drafts of personal essays and six application cycles in a row—not to mention three-and-a-half years of chair-side experience as a dental assistant, umpteen semesters of graduate courses and some intensive on-the-job training in the roles of husband and father.
I was not what you’d call an ideal candidate. I started college on a football scholarship as a defensive end in Peru, Nebraska, and I was more concerned with making weight, winning games and having a good time than I was with books and grades. Even after I transferred to the University of Northern Colorado, it wasn’t until my junior year that I started thinking seriously about my future and my academic performance. By the time I graduated the following year, I was proud of how far I’d come. I’d turned my performance around, raising my GPA from 2.0 to 3.2 and earning a biochemistry degree while holding down a full-time job and a tutoring position on campus. I had met the girl of my dreams, and I had set my sights on what seemed to be a perfect career for me: dentistry.

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Thriving in School? Integrating Stress Intervention Practices

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Mark Twain “The physician who knows only medicine, knows not even medicine.”
Ahhh, spring! A time to shake off winter cobwebs and cabin fever, a season for rejuvenation, long walks in the park, hooking up with friends and family, falling in love, etc. Well, this may be so for “normal” folks, but not for those poor souls who have voluntarily submitted themselves to the unimaginable workload of medical school or pre-health education!   Spring for many students just means more seemingly unending psychological and physiological stress. Things such as MCAT, USMLE, COMLEX, DAT, PCAT and, yes, those pesky applications and letters of recommendations around the corner at the end of spring are all things student can look forward to (not to intentionally add more stress). Medical and pre-health students know from experience that this relentless stress can and often does wreak havoc on their body, mind and spirit. It does not come as a surprise that these experiences can result in anxiety disorders, chronic fatigue, depression, and immune deficiency. Students suffer from perpetual fight or flight sensations, as if being chased by a tiger, symptoms which escalate around exams, applications, or interviews.

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Barbara Ross Lee: The Beauty of the Broken-Field Run

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There’s no doubt that Dr. Barbara Ross Lee has led a distinguished career. The first African-American woman to be appointed Dean of a medical school, her other accomplishments include participation in the Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Fellowship and garnering numerous awards. But for Ross, the path to success was full of twists and turns.
“At my institution, we call it the ‘broken field run’,” she told Student Doctor Network during an interview at the 2014 UC Davis Pre-Health conference. “It wasn’t as if I (had the typical path and) went to school and did pre-med and then went to medical school and then went into post-graduate training. I went to undergrad, then I got a job, then I got married, had kids, then I went back and got a masters, and then the opportunity arose for me to go to medical school.” And that’s just the beginning of her storied career.

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Opinion Column: A fundamental flaw in the USMLE exams

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There exists a fundamental flaw in the USMLE exams – applicants who pass the exam cannot retake the exam. This means that applicants who score poorly in the exams are prevented from applying to competitive specialties and in some cases even from practicing as a doctor in the US. Why does the USMLE not allow candidates to rewrite exams to improve scores? To understand this, we have to delve into the purpose of USMLE.
The United States Medical Licensing Examination or USMLE as it is popularly known, is a critical set of exams that medical students and graduates must pass before they can practice medicine in the US. The USMLE is a multi-part exhaustive evaluation of a physician’s ability to apply knowledge, concepts, and principles, and to determine fundamental patient-centered skills that are important in health and disease and that constitute the basis of safe and effective patient care. It is highly regarded not just in the US, but also in various other countries around the world. So much so that one can use the USMLE in lieu of that country’s exams.

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Marriage in Medical School: A Memoir (So Far)

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During my senior year of college, I asked my girlfriend to marry me. We had been together for almost three years and planned to get married the following summer, since we were both graduating in the spring. The timing seemed perfect to start our new life together. There was just one minor problem: in the fall, I was planning to begin medical school.
While engaged, we dealt with a mixture of apprehension and excitement about marriage. The typical questions asked by engaged couples–questions like, “Where will we live? What will our source of income be? How will we make time to see family? How will our relationship change?”–were the same questions we asked, except with the additional uncertainty of medical school. We had learned how to juggle our relationship with the demands of college, but we were unsure about how it would change while I dealt with the great challenge of medical school. (Neither of us were oblivious to the “horror stories” surrounding medical school and its required time commitment).

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Of Capacity and Communication

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I am about 45 minutes from the end of my night float shift, that dangerous hour all residents learn to wait through with baited breath, when my pager goes off. Pushing the button to silent its insistent beep, I read the text: “STAT 4-9876.” I am slightly bemused. STAT pages in psychiatry are few and far between. If one of the patients on the psych floor has had an MI, stroke, or something else that necessitates an immediate response, I may be the last to find out, as the nurse will often call a code and bring a medicine team running before letting me know what is going on. Even a consult for a suicidal patient on a medicine floor, considered a psychiatric emergency, doesn’t exactly necessitate the same sort of urgency as anaphylaxis or an acute abdomen. I like pondering and deliberation, making me naturally suited for psychiatry. Rather than engendering excitement, the word STAT makes my blood run a little cold. Besides, I typically assume that if someone is paging me, urgency is implied, and I return the call immediately; the two year old inside me smarts at being told to hurry up.

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Stepping Into the Medical Field and Out of Your Comfort Zone

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Are you ready to become a doctor? Making the transition from undergraduate to medical school student, and on to being a full time doctor can be exciting and intimidating at the same time. There are many challenges and obstacles you may face along your journey, but what is most important is that you face them with confidence. Read on for tips on how to make stepping outside your comfort zone a little more comfortable.
Build Strong Relationships With Your Professors
Start out in the classroom. When you are still studying, whether you are an undergraduate or already in medical school, classes should be much more than simply showing up and doing the work. Take time to get to know your professors, if the size of your university/class allows. They have vast amounts of knowledge and experience, and most likely they are more than happy to share that with you!

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