Medical School

Applying to residency is an important and exciting milestone in your medical school journey! It represents the culmination of your educational experience as you start the transition from student to physician and begin the process of securing your dream residency program.  You understandably may have questions about this process, including one on the minds of read more…

Fellowship is an exciting next step in your training after residency. Not everyone needs to do a fellowship (and many people don’t), but the advantage of further subspecialty training is the additional expertise that will set you apart from your colleagues. In this article, we’ll explain the different types of fellowships, how to apply to read more…

Starting residency is an exciting time! During this time, some specialties may require you to do a modified intern year before continuing to your “advanced” residency. This specifically applies to applicants going into anesthesiology, dermatology, ophthalmology, neurology, physical medicine and rehabilitation (PM&R), radiation oncology, radiology including interventional radiology (IR), and in some cases, urology and read more…

Call shifts are a hallmark of residency and an important hurdle to conquer prior to becoming an attending. If you’re approaching your first call shift soon, you’ve probably racked your brain wondering: how do I survive a 24-hour shift? Caring for hospitalized patients, making important medical decisions, and answering questions from nurses, patients, and families read more…

Medical school is long and expensive, with little (if any) time to earn money. Residency may not come with much more free time, but still, it’s exciting to receive a paycheck for your work rather than pay tuition. Your resident salary, generally adjusted to your cost of living, should cover housing, food, and limited entertainment. read more…

Imagine you’re a new MS3 just starting out on clinical rotations. You’d like to eventually pursue a career in surgery, but your first clerkship happens to be in psychiatry. You go through the motions of the rotation, taking detailed histories and obtaining collateral from your patients. Generally, you perform well and receive solid evaluations from read more…

Matching into residency is the ultimate goal and arguably the purpose of medical school. The years spent in the library—starting with the basic sciences and physiology, proceeding to clinical medicine and rotations, and followed by subinternships—are all to get you into a program that will train you to become an attending physician. It’s important to read more…

It’s common for students to feel overwhelmed or even panicked when put under the spotlight for a high-stakes, timed, multiple-choice test. Many questions can be tautological or filled with distractors, irrelevant information, and a slew of lab tests and diagnostics that obscure the case and the correct answer. However, having a systematic approach can demystify read more…

The best way to learn medical content is to have real patient encounters that expose you to a real person with an emotional connection to the case, workup, and outcomes. This is why the clinical year of medical school exists, so you can begin to encounter patients and hopefully continue this learning throughout residency. However, medical read more…

Studying for the shelf exams and Step 2 can be an intimidating endeavor! Your goal this year is to get ready for residency and match with your dream program, but what do programs care most about? Rotation grades (for which the shelf plays a major role), your Step 1 performance (which is now pass/fail as read more…

You’ve done it—you’ve made the big decision to go into medicine. Maybe you’re applying to medical school, maybe PA school, or maybe you’ve graduated and now you’re applying to jobs, but it’s time to get started on your applications. As you’re filling out your information and deciding who to use as your references, you hit read more…

Are you ready for a study strategy that will consolidate and organize your studying so you can more easily assess your progress, identify weaknesses, and get the confidence to enter your next exam ready to give the exam writers a real taste of who they’re messing with? By the time you graduate from medical school, read more…

It’s finally time for your family medicine rotation and you could not be more excited. Although you’re not interested in primary care, you just completed your surgery rotation and are in desperate in need of sleep. A month of outpatient nine to five clinic visits doing well-child visits and reassuring patients that they don’t need antibiotics to treat a viral cold sounds like a piece of cake.

Just as pediatricians need to bring up uncomfortable conversations about sex to keep their patients safe and healthy, isn’t it equally the responsibility of physicians to bring up diet and nutrition?

“Keep your minds open,” the dean announced at M3 orientation, “maybe you’ve always dreamed of becoming an orthopedic surgeon but will fall in love with psychiatry.” As freshly minted third year medical students with wrinkle free and yet to be coffee/pen/bodily fluid stained short white coats we entered clinical rotations much like undifferentiated cells, eager to be shaped and influenced as we transformed into the future physicians we were to become. However, for many students, choosing a specialty is not as easy as dreaming and falling in love. There is a fine line three quarters into M3 year when the reaction to uncertainty about choosing a specialty changes from a response of “you’ve got time” to a reaction that may make you feel like somehow over a few short months you became defective. In the midst of the uncertainty and doubt you then receive an email that it’s time to schedule your fourth year electives and are advised to “choose them wisely” as you are reminded that residency applications will be due just three months into the year. If that story sounds all too familiar of you anticipate that this could happen to you, don’t panic, you’re not alone, let’s get through this together.