Education

An excerpt from Doctors’ Orders: The Making of Status Hierarchies in an Elite Profession. Copyright (c) 2020 Tania M. Jenkins. Used by arrangement with the publisher. All rights reserved. I met Trevor on his very first day of residency, at the start of three years of practical, on-the-ground training in internal medicine following medical school.…

One of my favorite ways to spend an afternoon is perusing bookstore shelves and choosing books solely based on their cover. Wow, No Thank You is a series of essays by Samantha Irby that was selected in such a fashion. While the adorable fluffy bunny on the front drew me to the book, it was…

Our country is currently battling two urgent and severe health care crises: COVID and systemic racism. We believe that addressing systemic racism now is as urgent and as dangerous to the health of our nation and its people as the COVID19 pandemic. In addition, we believe systemic racism is intersecting with the COVID-19 pandemic, as…

Most incarcerated individuals — over 95 percent of them — will return to their communities. Medical students have a unique opportunity, as a part of their training, to learn about the medical needs of this group and help provide care for a vulnerable population that has historically been abused. Moreover, prison health services have been…

The Match is a stressful time during any physician’s life. Applicants study for, arrange for, and lose sleep over their USMLE steps, their letters of recommendation, and their personal statements. The matching process is particularly difficult during a global pandemic. As COVID-19 spread in March 2020, all USMLE testing was suspended. Applicants were reassured that…

I was 19 years old when I became pregnant. Pregnancy and birth, at such a young age, was both the happiest and the scariest thing to have happened to me. My dream of becoming a doctor began when I was in middle school, from a seemingly mundane moment that suddenly and unexpectedly changed the course…

To the residents graduating in 2020 and joining us in the ranks as physicians, from a residency educator: Victor Frankl was an Austrian psychiatrist and holocaust survivor. He was paraphrasing Goethe when he said: “If you take a man as he is, you make him worse. If you take him as he should be, you…

Despite major disparities that exist for African Americans in health outcomes and access to care, there is still an alarming lack of African American physicians in the field. This must be addressed with a concerted effort to recruit, admit, and train more black doctors – breaking down the barriers that directly or indirectly prevent black…

Over the course of medical school, I developed a fascination for public health and finding new ways to optimize care delivery to patients. This eventually resulted in me deciding to take a gap year between my third and fourth year to complete a Masters of Public Health. I originally applied to four programs based on…