Month: November 2024
Performance Punishment, Perfect Punishment?
By Jenna Kwon I heard about it for the first time during a recent meeting with my mentor from the AWS Mentoring Program. As I was telling her I wanted to dedicate more time to research, she advised me to ask my current research mentor if there were additional projects I could join, saying, “since good work gets rewarded with more work.” My immediate reaction during the meeting was, “I hope he thinks I did a good job so I can get more work.” After all, I both wanted and needed research opportunities. After the meeting, as I looked through my notes on a Post-it, I noticed that the phrase about good work being rewarded with more work was circled several times with a small, sloppy “??” scribbled next to it. How lucky would it be to get involved in a research project you are passionate about—and to keep getting...
Sci-Fi to Surgery: The life story of a Latin American surgeon
By: Alix Yurany Baez Ramirez, MD In an operating room, under a mask, you don't know the life story on the other side. What decision has made the person in front of him decide to enter the world of medicine? After all, we are all stories, the sum of our experiences, the sum of the dreams we had as children, the construction of longings or whims in adolescence, and the social and cultural realities that surround us to become and build those adults that we visualized as children. This is mine. To better understand the context of my story, it is important to consider higher education statistics in our region. According to UNESCO-IESALC (2020), higher education in Latin America and the Caribbean has experienced an acceleration in the enrollment process, going from 23% in 2000 to 52% in 2018. This expansion is attributed to three main factors: an increase in...