Student Corner

The medical profession in the U.S. has a remarkable international flair. One in four U.S. physicians is an international medical graduate (IMG), and every year around 12,000 IMGs apply for U.S. residency positions. But the path to practicing in the U.S. is not an easy one when you must navigate the requirements without the structural support...

After many long nights huddled over textbooks, agonizing over the brachial plexus, committing childhood exanthems to memory, and making surgical knots of any loose fiber within arm’s reach, you have finally received the news of a lifetime: You’re accepted to a residency program! Now you know what kind of doctor you will be...

For many medical students, choosing a specialty is one of the most challenging aspects of medical school. Although many medical schools are expanding third-year exposure to different specialties to include more time in clinical rotations and a wider variety of experiences, it remains a relatively short amount of time and exposure from which to base a career choice.

Students often arrive in medical school already knowing what specialty to pursue, but for many, exposure to the different specialties throughout the clinical years can trigger a professional identity crisis. How do you decide what specialty to pursue for a lifetime?

A Day in the Life is a podcast for medical students, by medical students, in which attendings are asked about their training and daily life. In this episode of A Day in the Life, Heena Ahmed interviews Dr. Rita Charon M.D. PhD, a professor of medicine and the founder of the Program in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University.

Training practitioners with better skills in teamwork and communication is thought to be essential for preventing medical errors, and it may help reduce health inequities and reverse rising costs by providing patients with the amount and type of expertise they need.

Medical schools have been moving away from lecture-based courses. Questions remain, however, regarding what content students must learn, how that learning is best done, and what else is required for trainees to become lifelong learners and adaptable practitioners.

With the rapid pace of health care delivery reform, there have been calls for medical schools to increase their focus on health policy research and education.

I was entering my third year of medical school when my brother’s friend called me, saying “I think your brother has schizophrenia.” I packed my suitcase and headed home. The plan was to get him a psychiatry referral and start him on medications. Easy, right?

A medical student with type 1 diabetes has to develop workarounds for her surgical rotation, choose her specialty carefully…and decide whether, when, and how to disclose her condition to her educators and to patients.

Despite having conducted numerous speculum exams, the medical student had yet to submit to her own first pelvic exam. In college, she had been sexually assaulted in her dorm room, and the idea of the exam brought up ferocious anxiety, metallic bile, fear, and refusal.