Category: medical school

Tough Love for Your Personal Statement: Advice from a Medical School Dean

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By Sunny Nakae

The Stritch School of Medicine received 11,355 applications for 160 seats for the 2016-2017 season.  Thousands of applicants have the required coursework, strong grades and test scores.  The word is out that students need volunteer work, clinical exposure, leadership, and research in order to be competitive.  Every applicant submits a primary personal statement as well as responses to school-specific supplemental questions. As an admissions dean who reads hundreds of applications per year, I would like to offer some advice to all the premeds out there who are looking for a competitive edge: reflection is key to achieving and demonstrating personal growth…
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Loss: The Hidden Barrier to Professional Identity Formation

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By Meaghan P. Ruddy

Paying attention to the wider trends in medical education recently makes it difficult to miss the growing voice of Pamela Wible, MD and her crusade to end physician, resident and medical student suicides.  One premise of her argument is that all the language around burnout and resilience misses the point.  The point it misses? This demographic is suffering from abuse.

I tend to agree.  To this I would add that the result is not burnout but the closely related state of grief…
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DACA Medical Students- Making America Great Again!

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By Kimrey Van Perre

My friends have been called “courageous” for sharing their plight as undocumented students with the US Congress.  They have been called “DREAMers” due to the Dream Act that has been repeatedly introduced in Congress but never passed.  I call them “selfless” and “unrelenting” in their commitment to the medically underserved despite their uncertain legal status.

I am a 3rd year medical student at the Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine (SSOM).  I am not a DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) student.  I was born a US citizen.  But many of my friends at SSOM are DACA students.  Their families, like mine generations ago, immigrated to this country.  They wanted their children to have opportunities and to grow up in a safe and stable country…
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Stories from the Border: Hearing the Voice of All Community Members

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By Audrey Hertenstein

We shuffled through the metal detector and were directed to stand with our backs against a wall – the final step in an hour long process to enter the Florence, AZ Detention Center to visit with detainees the organization Mariposas sin Fronteras had been communicating with to offer assistances such as letters of community support and a friendly voice to reach out to.  The guards ushered me and the other Loyola students through several locked doors and into a visitation room where we were only allowed one hour to meet, rules which seemed much too strict for a person whose only crime had been seeking asylum within our borders…
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ICYMI: The Best of Reflective MedEd 2016

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With the holidays upon us, we are taking this opportunity to showcase a few excellent posts from the year gone by.  We invite you to check out these highly popular posts.

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Darrell G. Kirch, MD, “Educating for Resilience and Humanism in an Uncertain Time.”
https://reflectivemeded.org/2016/09/27/educating-for-resilience-and-humanism-in-an-uncertain-time/

 

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Hedy Wald, PhD, “Becoming Zusha: Reflecting on Potential in Medical Education and Practice.”
https://reflectivemeded.org/2016/03/09/becoming-zusha-reflecting/

 

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Sunny Nakae, PhD, “Presence and Vulnerability in Medical Education.” 
https://reflectivemeded.org/2016/02/02/presence-and-vulnerability-in-medical-education/

 

Our Devices, Our Selves: How to Avoid Practicing Distracted Doctoring

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By Laura Vearrier

Americans check their phones an average of 46 times per day, (Eadicicco 2015) and they do so no matter what they are doing, including while driving, while at church, during sex, or out to dinner. (Rodriguez 2013) Are healthcare providers any different?  In a survey of medical students, 46 % reported texting, checking email, or making a call on their personal devices during a patient encounter, and 93% had seen a senior resident or attending do so. (Tran et al. 2014)  The answer to this problem is not as simple as turning off the device.  Improvements to medical care afforded by personal devices include efficient access to electronic text books, up-to-date literature, medical apps such as dosing calculators, and improved provider connectedness, among others.  The flip side is that the inevitable distraction created by smartphones creates a threat to professionalism in healthcare…
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Memento Mori- Reflecting on my Death and the Education of Medical Students

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By Laura Creel

As part of their undergraduate medical education, students discuss end-of-life care; they hear lectures about valuing the lives and deaths of future patients; they are instructed in the legal issues surrounding advance directives and care planning.  They see death, too—see it in the cadavers that they incise, see it in patients who die surrounded by family members and in patients who die alone.  Sometimes these experiences with death are personal; many times the experiences are stripped of emotion because they occur in clinical environments.  But although students see death in medical school, some recent research shows that approximately half of residents do not feel well-prepared to deal with the deaths of patients.[i]

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Building a House, Creating a Home

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By Matthew Schreier

“There is nothing more important than a good, safe, secure home.”
~Rosalynn Carter

Food, water, shelter, education.

These facets of a healthy, safe lifestyle are seen by most of us as a basic human right.  It is in their steady presence that we are able to pursue our goals of personal growth, intellectual achievement, and career success.  For people in many parts of the world, however, it is in the acquisition these basic rights that they must focus the bulk of their energy.

For one week of this summer, six fellow medical students, one physician, one bioethicist, one firefighter, one dean, and I had the opportunity to travel down to Belize and help a family build themselves a shelter.  Estrella, the woman for whom we would be building a house, lived in a house with her son and mother that had all the components of a home: photographs, decorations, a pair of adorable dogs, and one of the strongest family bonds I have experienced.  The structure of the house itself, however, was a bit less faithful, with the foundation sinking and the floor caving in to the moisture. The shelter that this family deserved was giving out on them, so together with Hand-In-Hand Ministries, we were to come down and assist them in building a new one…

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