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The Undifferentiated Medical Student

The TUMS podcast is about helping medical students to choose a medical specialty and plan a career in medicine. The list of career options available to medical students is long, but the time to explore them all is short. Moreover, mentorship in medical school is lacking, and many medical students tackle the task of career planning alone, most struggling and almost all clutching to the hope that 3rd year clinical rotations will definitively resolve their remaining uncertainties about how they want to specialize. However, having been distracted by the relentless pace of their pre-clinical curricula and the specter of Step 1, 3rd year medical students are eventually confronted with the reality that there are simply too many specialties to explore in one year and that they may not even get to finish their clinical rotations before important decisions about their careers need to be made (e.g., the planning of acting internships) if they are to be competitive applicants. Thus, mentorless and clinically unexposed, many medical students are forced to make wholly uninformed decisions about their futures. By interviewing at least one physician from each of the 120+ specialties listed on the AAMC's Careers in Medicine website 1) about their specialty, 2) how they decided this specialty was right for them, and 3) for advice about long-term career planning irrespective of the specialty they went into, this podcast aims to enumerate the details of every specialty and provide virtual mentorship on how best to go about moving past being an undifferentiated medical student.
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Now displaying: June, 2018
Ep 068 - Academic Hospitalist Medicine with Dr. Emily Silverman 0
Jun 29, 2018

See below for time stamps.

This episode is sponsored by OnlineMedEd!

Check out the TUMS Resources page for a complete list of book recommendations made by guests on this show (as well as other goodies).

If you would like to support the show, use the TUMS Amazon link to make all your normal Amazon purchases! You get all your things in usual 2 days, and TUMS gets a little sumin' sumin' at no extra cost to you.

Show notes for this episode can be found here.

Dr. Emily Silverman

Dr. Silverman is an academic hospitalist at the Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital.

Dr. Silverman completed her undergraduate degree at Brown University in 2009 where she majored in History of Art and Architecture, briefly flirting with a career in the art world before heading down the pre-med path. She then completed her medical degree at Johns Hopkins University in 2014, followed by her residency in internal medicine residency at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) in 2017.

In addition to practicing hospitalist medicine, Dr. Silverman is the host and creator of The Nocturists, a live medical storytelling event and podcast for physicians and other healthcare providers. You can think of it as medicine’s version of the Moth. She is also the author of a series of prose poems about her experiences as a medical resident, many of which are published in the The Examined Life Journal of the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine. Her writing is animated by a deep-seated curiosity about science, human nature, and what it means to live and die well.

In addition to her podcast’s website at thenocturnists.com, Dr. Silverman can be found at her personal website at emilysilverman.com, as well as on twitter as @ESilvermanMD

Please enjoy with Dr. Emily Silverman!

Time Stamps

  • Intro to Dr. Silverman + intro to storytelling [3:36]
  • Part 1: “Tell us about your specialty” [22:25]
    • Routines, patients and outcomes [30:50]
    • Biggest challenges / prediction for the next 10-20 years [58:18]
    • Most exciting / most mundane [1:04:04]
    • One thing you wish you had known [1:14:29]
    • One thing to consider in earnest [1:16:37]
    • Specific questions about academic hospital medicine [1:18:33]
    • Resources [1:22:29]
  • Part 2: “Tell us about how you decided your specialty was right for you“ [1:24:04]
  • Part 3: “Give us advice for long-term career planning irrespective of your choice of specialty” [1:31:58]
  • Book recommendations [1:39:44]
Ep 067 - Combined Pediatrics-Anesthesiology with Dr. Mark Rockoff 0
Jun 15, 2018

See below for time stamps.

This episode is sponsored by OnlineMedEd!

Check out the TUMS Resources page for a complete list of book recommendations made by guests on this show (as well as other goodies).

Show notes for this episode can be found here.

Dr. Mark Rockoff 

Dr. Rockoff is a Professor of Anaesthesia at Harvard Medical School and Vice-Chairman of the Department of Anesthesiology, Perioperative and Pain Medicine at Boston Children’s Hospital.

A native of New Jersey, he graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1969 and Johns Hopkins Medical School in 1973.  He then completed residencies in both pediatrics and anesthesiology at the Massachusetts General Hospital, followed by a fellowship in neuroanesthesiology at the University of California at San Diego.  After leaving San Diego, he was on staff at MGH for two years when he moved to Boston Children’s Hospital where he has been since 1981.

Dr. Rockoff is board-certified in pediatrics, anesthesiology, pediatric anesthesiology, and critical care medicine.  He has been a member of the Residency Review Committee for Anesthesiology of the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education and is a Past-President of the Society for Pediatric Anesthesia and the American Board of Anesthesiology.  He is Chairman of the Archives Committee at Boston Children’s Hospital and has had a longstanding interest in American and medical history. Importantly, Dr. Rockoff is seen by many as the father of combined pediatric-anesthesiology training spearheading the founding of the first combined residency program in Boston. He and his wife have three children and two grandchildren and reside in Hingham, MA.

Please enjoy with Dr. Mark Rockoff!

Time Stamps

  • Part 1: “Tell us about your specialty” [10:54]
    • Routines, patients and outcomes [19:13]
    • Most exciting / most mundane [44:50]
    • One thing you wish you had known [48:43]
    • One thing to consider in earnest [58:52]
    • How practice changes depending on setting [59:44]
    • Specific questions about combined peds-anesthesia [1:08:17]
    • Biggest challenges / prediction for the next 10-20 years [1:17:56]
    • Resources [1:22:46]
  • Part 2: “Tell us about how you decided your specialty was right for you“ [1:24:54]
  • Part 3: “Give us advice for long-term career planning irrespective of your choice of specialty” [1:42:43]
  • Book recommendations [2:02:44]

 

The 4th Year Episode #2 0
Jun 1, 2018

See below for time stamps.

Confused about 4th year? This episode is for you! Newly matched 4th year med students Roy Swanson (ophthalmology), Marco Swanson (plastic surgery), and Dana Canfield (obstetrics and gynecology) school Ian on the ins and outs of 4th year of medical school.

Show notes can be found here.

This is a wide ranging conversation that starts at the end of 3rd year and takes the listener through the completion of 4th year. A complete list of discussion topics for this episode can be found here, but includes:

  • Introductions [2:44]
  • Start 4th year discussion [15:32]
  • Acting internships (+ away rotations) [26:01]
  • Away rotations [1:04:25]
  • Visiting Student Application Service (VSAS) --> now the Visiting Student Learning Opportunities (VSLO) [1:12:47]
  • Letters of recommendation [1:15:05]
  • Electronic Residency Application Service (ERAS) and personal statements [1:38:00]
  • The Step 2s (Clinical Knowledge and Clinical Skills) [2:02:24]
  • Residency interviews [2:34:20]
  • The rank list and the Matching algorithm [3:07:35]
  • The Match and Match week [3:24:49]
  • Supplemental Offer of Acceptance Program (SOAP) aka "the scramble" [3:26:40]
  • Life post-Match [3:33:49]
  • Final comments from the gang [3:43:37]

Special thank you to Katie Bedard, MD; Alice Yu, MD; Gary Parizher, MD; Kelly Manger, MD; and Karishma Habbu, MD for their help in formulating the discussion topics.

And an extra special thank you to Kristol Das, MD for sitting patiently through a dry run of the interview to identify missing topics and to make sure the 4th Year Episode would flow properly :)

Please enjoy with Roy, Marco, and Dana!

 

This episode is sponsored by OnlineMedEd!

Check out the TUMS Resources page, which includes a complete list of book recommendations made by guests on this show!

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