Category: Student Stories
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How to Build an Outstanding Curriculum Vitae During Medical School
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Discover valuable strategies for crafting an impressive CV as a medical student, featuring tips on experiences, skills, and self-reflection to enhance your residency application.
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Rolling with the Punches and Finding Balance in Medical School
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Looking to strengthen your mind-body connection and become a better student this year? Read how one self-described “noodle” found balance in medical school by jumping into the boxing ring. They say that you can only choose two of the following in life: school, sleep, or a social life. However, that…
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Should DO Students Take Both USMLE and COMLEX?
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Explore whether DO students should take both COMLEX and USMLE exams amid changing residency landscapes as well as how which tests you take affect your chances of matching in competitive specialties.
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The Do’s and Dont’s of Summer Studying
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Navigating summer study as a med student? Learn practical do’s and don’ts from a first-year student on managing your schedule, wellness, and adapting to distance learning challenges.
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How Working as a Hospital Chaplain Informed My Clinical Practice
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Being present and connecting with patients can be difficult for any healthcare professional student. Sharada details her experiences as a hospital chaplain which has afforded her to better connect and to be present for her patients as she continues her medical career. When I told my parents that I wanted…
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A Day in the Life of a Clinical Student
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In today’s Osmosis blog, a medical student discusses their experiences while on clinical rotations compared to their basic science courses, and how he is successfully navigating this part of his medical educational journey. As a basic science student, I had always speculated and dreamed of what it would be like…
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Mindfulness in Medicine
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Keerat, a third-year medical student, discusses how she practices meditation to help develop mindfulness and strengthen her brain as she journeys through medical school. Medical school can be overwhelming. With 8:00 AM lectures after 2:00 AM study nights, cadaver dissections with the omnipresent taste of formaldehyde, changing from white coat…
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Clinical Encounters
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A medical student shares her best tips for keeping perspective and connecting with patients while out on clinical clerkship. “Hi, my name is Sarina and I’m a medical student.” Medical trainees are all too familiar with this sentence, repeating it dozens and dozens of times in a day. We use…
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Establishing Balance in Medical School
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Second-year medical school student Percy Takyi discusses the importance of finding balance, from making time to working out to maintaining his friendships, all while being a medical school student. While medical school is comprised of many difficult topics, perhaps its most difficult aspect is learning how to deal with the…
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Neurophobia, Let’s Talk About It
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Neurology has a reputation as one of the toughest medical specialties to master, but what does it mean to fear it? Four weeks into our twelve-week long neurology module, I had an unsettling realization, “I think my brain hates itself.” I had developed an intense distaste for learning neurology. There…
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A Day in the Life of a Dual Degree Program Student
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Meet a graduate student tackling a masters and medical school simultaneously. Here is how they do it and what they find rewarding about it. I’m a medical student and graduate student in a small program, a hidden medical school at UC Berkeley, called the UC Berkeley-UCSF Joint Medical Program (JMP).…
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The Clinical Experience That Shaped Me
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Clinical experiences can shape the way clinicians think, feel, and their approach to providing care. A med student shares an important experience as she learns to become the best doctor she can be. As a 7 year old learning about how my grandpa gave himself insulin injections everyday, I wanted…
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Learning How to Use Spaced Repetition in Medical School
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Learn how spaced-repetition flashcards helped a medical student improve memorization and application of medical facts, leading to higher exam scores and clinical confidence.
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How I Studied for the Shelf Exams and Survived Clinical Year
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Clinical year can feel overwhelming, but effective studying doesn’t require perfection. Discover practical, high-yield strategies for shelf exams, clerkships, and balancing medical school with life outside the hospital.
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How I’m Managing Medical School with OCD
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Medical school is hard, but I’m sure you know this already. What they don’t tell you though, is that many medical students experience high amounts of stress – and this stress carries well into residency and beyond. As a result, mental health conditions can be exacerbated by the stress. A…
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My Step 1 Experience, Dr. George Koshy
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Learn how a medical student used a 3-month integrated study plan with trusted resources and daily checklists to prepare effectively for the USMLE® Step 1 exam
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Socio-cultural Awareness: 5 Common Cultural Treatment Practices
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As a medical student who also studied anthropology, it’s easy for me to apply my socio-cultural lens to the practice of medicine. Throughout my first year of clinical medicine, I’ve run across a number of examples of alternative practices and cultural healing. Although we are being trained in Western medicine,…
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OB/GYN Rotation coming up? – Maximize your productivity!
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Obstetrics and gynecology (‘OB/GYN’) are two subjects every student must study before he or she can graduate with a medical degree. It is the study of the female reproductive system, all the areas surrounding pregnancy and depending on the tutor may also involve some urology as well. Whilst starting my…
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The Negative Effects of Competition Amongst Medical Students and 5 Tips to Overcome Them
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During a typical day in the third and fourth years of medical school, students work with countless other students. For example, on any given clerkship I work with anywhere from 0 students to 6 or more. So what happens when you put multiple medical students in a setting where we…
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To Conference, or Not to Conference? – Tips and Tricks for Medical Students
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By William GuntherEdited by Myles McKittrick Medical school is not all about studying your life away (that’s only about 99% of it!). But for those of you who are looking for a guilt free way to get out of the books while being able to meet fellow medical students, learn…