Amsa Ad Lib

Final residency program rank lists for the Match were due this week. Here, one applicant looks back on how she shaped her list and reflects on how her residency interviews factored in.

For physicians in training in the U.S., the global refugee crisis will likely bring patients with unique stories and challenges to your clinic. Here's how to help.

Have you thought about what makes medical school worth the effort? What story do you tell people when they ask? In this two-part episode, we hear one student explain her very personal motivation, and Perry Tsai explains how his storytelling sessions work.

If you’ve spent more than five hours learning about proper LGBT health care techniques in your formal medical education, you may be the outlier. Transgender patients face major health disparities, often because health providers haven’t received adequate training on how to ask the right questions to deliver respectful and effective care.

What does the county fair have to do with the journey to becoming a physician? In one student's experience, a lot. Stories are great for connecting people and learning from the experiences of others. In this episode, Joey Johnson tells about his own waiting game on the way to med school from a rural community.

Is it possible to maintain a creative life outside of medical training? Is it worth it? When M.D./Ph.D. student Lee Hong found herself drifting away from her poetry amid the grind of training, rather than give in, she wrote a poem about the challenge itself. Here, she reads from and discusses her work and the value it has brought to her in medicine.

Med school admissions isn't just about GPA and MCAT scores. Applicants have to explain how medicine is a good fit for them, and vice versa. But how do they convey that in their application? We talk to admissions expert Dr. Gary Rose.

Even if you are not a non-traditional student, there's a lot you can learn from their experiences, like lessons on how to capitalize on the unusual aspects of your career in the med school application process.

Think study abroad will help your med school application? It might do the opposite, if you choose a program that takes advantage of patients. Here's how to spot the dangerous programs.

To get the most out of an international training experience, future physicians have to appreciate both difference and similarity in other systems. Otherwise, there's a risk that those differences will simply reinforce biases, even unintentional ones. Pavitra Krishnamani talks us through some steps to avoid the "us vs. them" divide, as well as how to deal with typical ethical conflicts on the ground.

Dr. Alison Case takes us on her Midwestern advocacy road trip, from rallying around a human milk carton in Chicago to tailgating with Donald Trump in Iowa.

Recent strides to improve care for LGBT patients haven't been universal. Even as large medical groups develop curricula for training students, there is tremendous variation in how med schools and teaching hospitals approach those topics. For students whose schools fall short in terms of training or support--or even those whose administration could be hostile--Dr. Carl Streed, Jr. has advice. (Have a question for Dr. Streed? Email him at cjstreed@gmail.com.)

Is general internal medicine all clinical all the time? What does it take to get into a general internal medicine residency position? Dr. Paul O'Rourke, a fellow in general internal medicine at Johns Hopkins University, and Tyler Mains, a fourth-year medical student, address med students' questions and some myths about the specialty as they explain the advantages of being a general internist.

Crowdsourcing diagnosis. Bringing the patient into the physician's notes. These are all challenges and opportunities the incoming generation of physicians will face. Jumping off a theme from one of AMSA's upcoming Fall Conferences, Dr. Jeff Koetje dives into the digitized black bag of the future.

This week we hear a story from the University of North Carolina (UNC) - Chapel Hill School of Medicine Story Slam, themed "Idio-path: Stories of Personal Journeys." The winner that night was Brittany Papworth, a second year medical student at the time. She shared her story titled "Don't Put My Pants In the Dryer" in which she made a fitting realization that would improve her life as a medical student and that she hopes will improve her relationships with her patients.

Think the playing field is level when it comes to medical school admissions? Student Editor Joey Johnson talks about his feature story on discrimination and bias in the October 2015 issue of The New Physician magazine.

What's it like to interview for a residency position in neurosurgery? How does it compare to interviewing in other specialties? In this episode, medical students share their experiences and questions, including tackling rumors about the neurosurgery interview process.

The health effects of climate change are already showing up in the clinic. How will you address it as a physician? Here are selections from a webinar given by Dr. Jerome Paulson on the front-line role of physicians in communicating with patients about the environment. Besides practicing and teaching pediatrics for more than 30 years, Dr. Paulson is professor emeritus of environmental and occupational health at the George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health.

Finding the right residency program is a journey that starts well before the fourth-year interview trail. In this episode, AMSA ad lib's Rachel Glassford talks to AMSA's immediate past president, Dr. Britani Kessler, about what factors she considered while weighing programs and preparing for interviews.

We sat down with some of your fellow AMSA members who share personal experiences from their AMSA journey and what being an AMSA member means to them.