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 …
Category: Medical school
A young mother’s medical school journey
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 t…
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, …
It’s time to flip the medical school classroom [PODCAST]
“As a nearly graduated medical student, I have come to the conclusion that the focus of medical school is split between training and distinguishing medical students. Modern pedagogy has not found its way into the modern medical school classroom. …
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…
That was me: a millennial physician’s experience with racism
A black girl was called the N-word on the playground in elementary school in the ’90s. That black girl was me. A black girl was called ugly because of her dark black skin in elementary school in the ’90s. That black girl was me. A black girl created an…
