Category: Education

Take yourself as you know you can be: a message from residency educator

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 …

Why it’s time for more black men in medicine

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 m…

Lessons learned from my MPH gap year

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…

A medical student’s physician inspiration

Amaka was a timid-looking girl, tall in stature with a head of braided hair, like myself. She was unassuming and composed at first glance and, if my hypothesis was correct, she could not have been older than me. We were similar, both being of Igbo heri…

Transition recommendations for the reporting of USMLE Step 1 scores as pass/fail

On February 12, 2020, the United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE) announced that, “the USMLE program will change score reporting for Step 1 from a three-digit numeric score to reporting only a pass/fail outcome” as early as January 1, 2022….

How medical education fails minority students

“You have to work twice as hard to get half as far.” As a black woman, this sentiment has haunted me for my entire life. Minority individuals are consistently forced to go above and beyond to prove themselves, regardless of the setting. Unfortunately, …

The black physician’s burden

I remember clearly the first lecture in which I began to feel the painful knot of despair clenched in my chest. We were being taught about piebaldism, a disease that impacts the pigment-producing cells of the body. It was not the description of the con…

When imposter syndrome becomes incompatible with the profession of medicine

When people ask me what A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara is about, I have trouble describing it beyond the story of a young man named Jude with a horrific past and his relationships with the people he meets in college. The heart of the story lies not …

What’s next for medical students? The path is not so clear.

The evolving COVID-19 outbreak has generated concern for students across a variety of disciplines.  While some might believe the healthcare sector is protected in the setting of a pandemic, rising medical graduates are realizing they, too, are not immu…

Medical education during COVID is more than a monolith

This pandemic has taught us that undergraduate medical education is nimbler and more adaptive than we have previously assumed it to be. COVID-19 has propelled medical schools into an online, remote learning age. It has beseeched educators to creatively…