Education

The only drawback to reading The Plague by Albert Camus for the first time while experiencing the COVID-19 pandemic is that I will never get the experience of reading it from a less personal perspective. As the plague in the novel begins to unfold slowly through rat deaths and lockdowns, I recognized my own incredulity…

When I made the choice to pursue a medical school education three years ago, I never imagined preparing to matriculate during a pandemic. After accepting a position at the Icahn School of Medicine in March, processing what came next became muddled in between figuring out how to transition to living and working out of a…

Whispers of fluctuating rumors had filled our ears for the last week; group messages were exploding with controversy — the invisible threat, COVID-19, had reached the Texas Medical Center. All meetings for over 25 people were canceled, effective immediately. Suddenly, during the season when as a third-year medical student, I was supposed to be rotating…

As I sit here and stare at my computer screen for the 11th hour today, my attention has drifted from my hypothetical study material to reality. Over the past two months, I’ve spent hours on WebEx lectures as opposed to learning from patients, hours on video lessons instead of casual chats with residents and attendings…

When the director of my general surgery program asked for a report on how the pandemic was affecting the residents, I queried my colleagues, promising anonymity to encourage candor. I received a wide variety of responses and reactions. Some are thriving; others are not. Overall, everyone understands that this is a historic crisis that we…

Within the current COVID-19 pandemic, health care workers and educators have quickly needed to make adaptations and sacrifices. In order to make room for the conservation of necessary aspects of care, we need to take a conscientious look at our resources. As such, two missions have been embraced nationally by health care systems and university…

“But, surely offer you therapy or mental health services?” I asked an internal medicine resident and friend on the frontlines in New York City. “No, not really. Well, there’s one person for our whole group,” they responded. “And do people feel comfortable going to that person?” I prodded. “Honestly, even if we had time, it…

“What do you want to be when you grow up?” That is a common question you hear in the setting of medical education. I think I heard it for the first time on my first clinical rotation. A little background, I was a non-traditional medical student. I worked as a clinical pharmacist for ten years…

With COVID-19 still consistently creating setbacks in the health care community, we see yet another issue for medical students because of this pandemic. In prior years, the traditional medical student would be expected to be part of a team assisting medical professionals in the field, developing relationships with future mentors, and gaining the experience necessary…