MedEx Day 3 - May 18, 2022

Today began with a personal statement workshop hosted by Dr. Cindy Riyad. She walked us through what some common pitfalls of personal statements are, including not making it personal, being too cliche, and/ or making it a sob story without talking about one's personal growth. Afterwards, our tier completed a Mind Mapping activity in order to start thinking about what is important to us. From there we crafted elevator speeches that narrowed from 5 sentences to 2 sentences to 1 sentence of 150 characters or less. I found this activity incredibly helpful, as I continued to build my communication and critical thinking competencies. I also felt that I gained some key insights to aid me in my writing process.

Later, Dr. Rob Morgan, an anesthesiologist, spoke to us about his profession. Besides sharing the history of anesthesia, he shared about a patient encounter where he had to intubate a patient who was awake. I had never heard of this type of intubation and found it extremely fascinating, as he showed us a video of a professor who performed this type of intubation on himself every year. I loved learning about this due to the myriad implications that this type of intubation could have for patients who otherwise may have been unable to get normal treatment. Innovations like this excite me for the world of healthcare, a field that is always changing and improving itself. After Dr. Morgan spoke, we played a Jeopardy!-like game with our M2 mentors. We had to guess which M2 had the favorite song in question, had the spirit animal in question, etc. The competitive side of me is proud to say that my team won on the last question after a thrilling comeback.

To conclude the day, our Tier had lectures from Ms. Kate Elrod, a former nurse in the OR, Ms. Loretta Westcott, a hospital librarian, and Dr. Griffith, a psychiatrist. Ms. Elrod discussed how to properly shadow in the OR and discussed Prisma's Memorial Greenville's OR highlights (transplant program, etc.) I greatly enjoyed hearing about this and look forward to my shadowing days in the OR. Ms. Westcott lectured about PubMed and the power that it can provide to researchers, as it is the best database of healthcare information in the world. We did an activity on how to best utilize PubMed and about how to identify the best studies. I greatly enjoyed her talk, as I was able to hone my PubMed research skills which will aid in my senior thesis research. Lastly, Dr. Griffith spoke about his job as a psychiatrist and answered all of our Tier's questions regarding his job.