medical students
Match Day: Reflections of a First-Generation Medical Student
By Nancy Lopez As a fourth-year medical student, I am anxiously awaiting the third Friday of March: Match Day. Match Day is an iconic moment for medical students in which the last decade of both successes and failures consummate into a single envelope... an envelope that contains the program at which we will be training as residents. For some, this envelope is simply a job opportunity, but for others it is the manifestation of generations of sacrifice and perseverance. As the first individual in my family to be born in the United States, I was the first to have many opportunities, including the opportunity to obtain a medical education. My success story began a little under one hundred years ago with my grandmother. My grandmother did not have the resources to pursue a career in her country, however, when she heard the news of my imminent birth in a country...
Being Non-Traditional in a Historically Traditional Field
By Jackelyn Moya My first memory of being in a space where I was treated in a “traditional” manner was during my senior year in high school. My counselor was creating my schedule for my final year and deciding whether he should place me in statistics or physics. I remember his words, “I doubt you’ll ever need physics in your life, so I’m placing you in statistics for your fourth class.” Without having any input from my 17 year-old self of what I planned on pursuing after high school, I accepted his statement as truth and thought, “hmm, When will I need physics?” I suppose that for my high school counselor, my traditional path would not require taking physics, so he placed me in what he assumed would be a more traditional class for me. I always knew that I loved science and wanted to be a doctor, but the...
Confessions of an Ill-Equipped Third-Year Medical Student
By Alyssa Brown “Wrong, Wrong, Wrong, Wrong”, called the attending from his swivel chair. It was my first day of third year. I had been placed at the Veterans Association hospital (VA) for a cardiology rotation. It was the last week of June, so our residents were well prepared for anything that came their way. Looking at it from their point of view, they went from having almost fully fourth-year medical students, who were prepared, knew what to do and what not to do, to two fresh out of Step1 third-years, who had no idea at all. I remember googling the night before, what to put in the pockets of my white coat. I scrolled through reddit and student doctor network looking for a sign or post to assuage my nerves. I found no salvation there. I had shadowed/precepted plenty during first and second year, probably to an absurd degree,...
The A-Ha Moment
By Alyssa Brown It started snowing this weekend, and it is the first snow of the year. I was staring out the window dreading the next six months of winter. I was also trying to think of something to write this piece on. I’ve covered patients’ deaths, prosciutto, and watching match day. Usually, I have something smoldering in the back of my mind that I want to write, but this time, I had nothing. It finally hit me as I was watching the snow falling. As I watched the snow tumble and swirl past my desk, I flashed back to a time during third year when I was standing outside at 5am watching the snow fall. I am sitting 647 miles and almost two years from that time and place now. It was a moment that shouldn’t have been that important in the grand scheme of things, but it was...
An Incomplete Solution
By Elizabeth Lim As a medical student and an aspiring surgeon, I enjoy when there is a definite solution or an answer to a problem. The level of satisfaction knowing that something is fixable is immense, especially when it comes to patient outcomes. The ability to help and provide care to a patient by resolving their health issues is one of the most rewarding feelings one can experience. However, I realize that is not always the case, whether it’s in surgery or any other specialty. During my very first rotation of third year of medical school, I quickly learned about the difficulty of incomplete solutions. One particular issue comes to mind-the issue of emergency dialysis in undocumented patients with end-stage renal disease (ESRD). This issue became a hot topic for me as it tends to spark a spectrum of emotions that ranges from anger to helplessness. I will never forget...
A Transplant Reflection
By Priya Suri At first glance, he was a sinewy man—built long and hard. He was wheeled into the operating room (OR) intubated and eyes blinking. Was he blinded by the blaring white lights just like me? This was my first potential organ procurement. He was a “possible DCD,” meaning that if ventilator support was removed, the patient would likely progress to circulatory death. The head anesthesiologist had asked the resident if he had seen one of these before. He hadn’t and she remarked that it could be an emotionally taxing surgery to watch. The surgeons gowned up and left the room. It wasn’t our call to make if the patient died on the table—the ICU team would declare the time of death to ensure there was no conflict of interest. This was the first case where a patient entered the OR alive but if events were to progress as...
Waiting Your Turn
By Alyssa Brown I remember very clearly the first time I heard about Match Day. We were sitting in the lecture hall, and we stopped lecture to watch the live stream of Match Day. This was almost four years ago now, and from that day forward, I started an anxious countdown to when I would experience it myself. I would be surrounded by my friends that I had met the first weeks of medical school, and we would all find out where we would be heading for residency. The type of residency and location of the residency on the card changed over the course of medical school, but the day-dreaming feeling never really stopped. As the years passed, I knew more and more people who were matching. There were ups and downs through this. I watched close friends above me struggle through not matching, and I watched some come to...
Gimme Shelter
By Alyssa Brown “It’s just a shot away, it’s just a shot away,” blared the music in the OR. There was a flurry of hands and spurts of blood. But I should start at the beginning of the story. I hate to say that there is something exciting about getting called in to the hospital in the middle of the night. Logically, I know that means something bad is happening to someone else, but it makes my heart beat a little faster and my adrenaline rush to know I can potentially help. I had been following a surgeon at a local hospital all Saturday. We didn’t have any cases so we both went home to rest at 3pm. We agreed that she would call me if anything came in. She always rolled her eyes when I asked her to do this because she thought I should probably just get some...
A Glimpse Behind the Scenes: What Really Goes on at a Residency Selection Committee
By Sarah Armenia On a crisp Boston morning during the AWS annual meeting this fall, sixty medical students gradually filed into a ballroom and chatted nervously as they sipped coffee and looked at the programs in front of them. I looked around for any familiar faces to ease the anxiety I felt just by the title alone: “Mock Residency Selection Committee.” I could tell I was not the only person bracing themselves for rocky subject matter in the audience, as the mood was significantly different from the jovial atmosphere of the AWS resident and medical student mixer the night before. But this sense of doom was instantly lifted as the panelists began introducing themselves, adding humor and levity to what could have otherwise been a grim session. Dr. Abbey Fingeret (@DrFingeret) began by coaching us through the thought process behind a powerful personal statement. She emphasized it should not be...
Death & Dying: Finding Meaning in Loss
By Vaidehi Mujumdar April of 2017, Siddhartha Mukherjee wrote a piece in The New Yorker called “Love in the Time of Numbness; Or Doctor Chekhov, Writer.’ The last line was: "Beauty in all of its myriad forms, can only be created in opposition to numbness. That, at least for me, serves as a quiet manifesto of our times." That same April, I had just taken my first of what will end up being three board exams to obtain a medical license in the US. It had been a year where our political landscape shifted, where we saw the effects of a changing America on our communities. It came after the death of a classmate, the loss of personal relationships, and what sometimes felt like a loss of personhood. One week after reading Mukherjee’s article, I started my third year of medical school. Third year had been a re-start for me,...
