While the American college experience can be a time of great discovery and learning, the pressure to achieve academically is also great—especially for those bound for medical school, law schools or other highly competitive career tracks. This pressure has led to high levels of stress to perform well in school—and to the increased use of “study drugs” to help students live up to these expectations. However, while there are short-term advantages to be had with the use of stimulants in regards to study, these medications are dangerous when used out of context, and studies have shown that they actually are correlated to lower grade point averages. This article looks at the problem of stimulant use on college campuses, and also at what colleges can do to help mitigate the issue.
career
Residents and Fellows: Your Guide to the Right Career Path
You’ve earned your medical degree, worked your way through your residency or fellowship program, and … Read more
Advice from 20+ interviews: Part 2
Don’t miss Part I of this article, which covered how to prepare before the interview and general interview advice.
COMMON INTERVIEW QUESTIONS
1. Tell me about yourself
You should have prepared for this! Like I said, have your key bullets/road map ready. Try to keep it around 5 minutes too. This question usually comes up on closed file interviews (where they don’t look at your file beforehand). You may want to cover a bit of question 2 (below) if you have time, since it may not get asked separately. I think it’s always best to include things beyond the typical premed experiences. Talk about your cultural background, travels, cool hobbies, non-medically related endeavors, odd jobs… They’ve always loved those things most. Mention the relevant premed stuff too, but don’t forget about what I mentioned in the previous sentence. Stand out as a person, not a premed machine!
A Comprehensive Guide To Medical Career Interviews
Interviews are often stressful—even for those who have gone on countless interviews. The best way to reduce the stress is to be prepared. These tips will help you through the entire interviewing process and ensure that you not only impress your interviewer but also know if the facility is the right place for you.
The Soft Skills You Need to be a Leader in Medicine
Medicine needs a strong core of leadership now more than ever. Medical students and new physicians spend massive amounts of time training and studying the basics of medicine, yet they may not be receiving training in many of the soft skills required to be a leader in today’s medical environment.
Being knowledgeable about disease and various forms of treatment is absolutely vital, but soft skills are what separates a good physician from a great physician. These skills include communication, collaboration, and confidence. As physicians, we are expected to practice as a team, and ultimately be the leader of that team. Let’s discuss how you can prepare to be a leader in medicine.
An Introduction to Student Loans
Consider these three questions. First, what is a loan? Second, how is it typically is structured? Third, do you know how much you will be paying back if you borrowed x amount? I always wished someone had personally educated me and answered these very questions.
It has been almost 20 years since I chose my college (an expensive one), and almost 10 since I made my decision to pursue a career in pharmacy (a smarter choice, but still expensive one). I consider myself fortunate because my profession (for the most part) allows me to pay back the student loan I have accumulated and still enjoy a lifestyle I had imagined.
How Test Prep Prepares Me To Be An Effective Physician
Before medical school, the dream of becoming a physician involves helping people and curing disease. During medical school, that dream matures through educational and clinical experiences into a realization that being a physician is something much deeper, a permanent responsibility that only those who are doctors themselves will understand.
Every patient is a trial and error that can lead to life or death. Is the abdominal pain just constipation, a brewing appendicitis, or even worse, colon cancer? Is the patient presentation worthy of simple reassurance, or perhaps blood work, or—to be safe—diagnostic imaging?
Managing Bipolar Disorder in Medical School
Two days before interviewing at the medical school I now attend, I couldn’t get out of bed. At the nadir of my eighth major depressive episode in eight years, I seriously considered whether I could make the trip. Thankfully, I did. And thankfully, six days after that interview I met the psychiatrist who would finally piece together my long and steadily worsening psychiatric history.
I sat in his office, quiet and dulled compared to my spring and summer self, and began recounting my story – the weightiness of my current depression, the semester in college marked by a mere two to four hours of sleep a night (“insomnia” according to my doctor then), and the clockwork nature of my mood changes each year. Within ten minutes, he stopped me mid-sentence and said, almost casually, “You know, you show a lot of signs of bipolar disorder.”
How My Research Degree Taught Me I’m Not a Surgeon
Recognizing the connection between lab work and surgery
What surprised me the most during my medical school journey was that it was primarily lab work, not my surgery rotation, that taught me I was not a surgeon. The type of experience my lab work entailed had absolutely nothing to do with surgery or clinical medicine, so it was a peculiar and fortuitous realization. I do not believe when entering medical school that I had ever thought about doing research, but our program strongly advocated it. I met with various advisors in first year and decided I was going to transition into the combined PhD program.
How Nontraditional Students Can Best Position Themselves When Applying to Med School
A friend of mine studied film in college and subsequently found himself working as a cameraman for a documentary television program about the lives of EMTs and ER physicians. He experienced some very tense situations, and from his work decided that he wanted to do more than document how people received medical care—his desire was to participate in the action of helping others as a doctor.
Unfortunately, his film education was the furthest possible undergrad experience he could have from pre-med. He had no applicable science credits, no anatomy or physiology, and the only shadowing he had done of physicians had been with a camera in hand. In short, his path would be an arduous one, and he was soon going to turn 31.
Paving the Road to Medical School
The path to becoming a doctor can feel daunting. For those of us that don’t come from a medical family, it can be challenging to navigate what all you need to do to be a competitive candidate. As a third year psychiatry resident looking back on my pre-med days, I realize just how lost-in-the-woods I felt at times trying to figure out how to get where I wanted to go. Here are half a dozen steps you can take to help pave the way to medical school.
Q&A with Physician-Author with Michael Collins, MD
Tell me about yourself – who you are, what you do, where you practice. I … Read more
Diversity in Med School: What Minority Applicants Need to Know
While getting accepted into medical school is more difficult than ever in America, there are … Read more
Sleep Deprivation and Residents: Are We on the Right Track?
The tradition of long hours on the floor is an old one in American medical training. And criticism of this tradition is of long standing too. The controversy over the grueling residency schedules is not a new one, but neither is it one that has been successfully resolved. It can still spark off strong feelings in both the proponents and opponents of cutting back on the length of residency shifts and/or the time off between shifts for professionals engaged in this important stage in their medical education. What’s more, it is a topic which has pitted respected healthcare institutions such as the Harvard School for Public Health and the American Academy of Family Physicians against one another, so much so that this issue is not likely to be resolved anytime soon.
Who Makes a Good Doctor? How Medical Schools Around the World Try to Find the Best Candidates
One of the continuing challenges for medical schools both here in the United States and around the world is to find ways to select the students who will have the best chance of successfully completing their education. The goal of a good medical education, after all, is to train students who go on to become doctors, helping to fill the enormous global demand for well-trained, competent physicians. What might surprise many students, however, is how many different ways medical colleges around the world have come up with to find these ideal candidates–and how widely medical education varies from one country to another.
Choosing a Residency That’s Right for You
If you are in medical school, you have been making choices for a long time now, from what to major in as an undergraduate to what volunteer work during your gap year will give you the best chances at getting a coveted med school slot. But now that you are in medical school, one of the most important decisions still lies ahead: what kind of residency should you choose? This is an incredibly important choice that will shape the rest of your career. A good decision now will make it more likely that you will be satisfied with your professional life down the road.
The choice can be a difficult one. What things should you consider before you decide? Read on to find out more about the steps you should take in order to match to a residency that will leave you both personally and professionally satisfied.
Q&A With Stephen Aichele, PhD – Quantitative Psychologist
Stephen Aichele, PhD, is a research scientist in Switzerland in University of Geneva’s Psychology & … Read more
The Dangerous Devolution of Physicians into Technicians
Reposted from here with permission. As I sat in my institution’s white coat ceremony this past fall, … Read more
Physician Employment Contracts Part II: The Story Continues
Make sure to check out Part I here!
Today’s article takes a closer look at several key terms in employment contracts that can have a significant impact on a new physician – compensation methods, incentive compensation and outside work or “moonlighting”. Building on our first article that examined termination provisions, non-compete clauses, professional liability insurance and indemnification, we will identify key issues in evaluating compensation models and moonlighting and outline some of the questions to consider before signing on the dotted line.
Junior Doctor Stress and What Can be Done about It
Junior doctors [and residents in the US] do a valuable and sometimes life-saving job for patients. They are the future in medicine and can bring enthusiasm and fresh ideas into the profession. Despite the importance of their role to society, junior doctors have sky rocketing stress levels and many have an appalling state of mental health.
The Shocking Suicide Rate Among Doctors
It is totally shocking that in the 21st century, so many bright young doctors fall prey to depression and around 400 US physicians intentionally end their own lives annually. This means that every year in America, a million patients lose their doctor to suicide. The chance of dying by suicide is greatly increased for those in the medical profession compared with ‘lay’ people. For instance, male doctors have a 70% increased risk of dying as a result of suicide, when comparing the death rates with men from the general population. One of the reasons there are more completed suicides – ironically – may be as a result of doctor training. Doctors know the human body intimately. They know about drug dosages, they know more about the effects of drugs on the body. They know how to save a life and because of this, how to take one. A determined doctor can calculate a fatal drug dose expertly or know where to cut that would be catastrophic. They also have access to powerful, death dealing drugs that are only available on prescription to the rest of the population. This may be why there are so many successful doctor suicides each year.