Uw Medicine Town Hall 2 - Motivation
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UW Medicine Town Hall 2 - Motivation
Hi. Welcome to our second town hall meeting. Last time we spoke about application in general, and particularly about MCATs, grades, and letters of recommendation. Tonight we are going to talk about your experiences that you list in your MCATs application, shadowing, and writing your personal statement. And the whole point of all this is to help you realize whether you're interested in medicine, as a career, for the right reasons and clarify for yourself and for us what your motivation is.. let's talk about experiences a little bit. First of all the value of experience is finding out what the career is all about, to clarify and validate your initial impressions, and learn about the dark side of medicine. And what we mean by that are things that are things that are frustrating to doctors, things that are difficult for doctors, it's not all as easy or noble as you might think. Experience will help you test your level of commitment to the field. If you find that you are really not enjoying yourself as you have experiences then you may want to change your mind. So, obviously, experiences help you discover what you like and dislike, they help you improve the articulation of your own goals, and enhance your motivation. And clearly the more experiences you have the better you understand other people and other cultures. And when we say other cultures you should realize that other cultures can be a few blocks away from where you live. You don't have to go to Botswana or some place like that to appreciate other cultures. But the more people you've had contact with and the more outside your own comfort zone you can get and outside your own neighborhood, the better you will be able to relate to your patients. We don't want you to choose an experience to get into medical school. People always ask us the question... "Should I work in a nursing home... or should I work in an emergency room... or should I volunteer for this or volunteer for that?" You really should be choosing an experience because it appeals to you or it is important to you, not because you think it is going to help you get in. The other thing that it is important to consider is you should be choosing experiences that are consistent with what your present goals are.. if you think that you want to be a surgeon, you should be choosing experiences that would get you some exposure to surgery. Either volunteer at a recovery room or shadowing a surgeon or even working at a desk in a surgery center, something like that. One of the things that we tell the committee to look for in an application, and also in an interview is, that somebody's experiences are consistent with their goals.. if someone comes in and they've shadowed a radiologist, and they've shadowed a neurosurgeon and they come in and tell us that they want to be a primary care doctor, we are a little suspicious they are just saying that because, for some reason, they think that is what we want to hear. And remember that our school is looking for primary care doctors as well as specialists and future academicians.. there is room for everybody. And you should be choosing an experience that is something you want to explore for yourself. When I think about the type of experiences you could have, in my mind I divided them up into these three areas. One are service type experiences, where you're in a situation where basically, you are going to meet other peoples needs. And they don't have to be medical service experiences. A lot of our applicants have have worked in restaurants, which have a lot of things in common with the field of medicine, in that you have a wide ranging clientele, they can be pretty demanding, or not, you have to deal with unhappy people who don't think they are getting what they should be getting, and things like that,. there is a lot of transfer there and that's fine. A second type of experience might be working on some sort of team that has a common goal, and this could be a research team, or it could be a sports team, but again just getting a feel for what it's like to work with other people toward a common goal because that's what you will be doing. You will definitely be working in a medical team with other physicians, nurse practitioners, physicians assistants, nurses, medical assistants, all kinds of different people.. you have to see how you feel about working on a team. There are other types of experiences where the main goal of the experience is for the greater good and these, typically, are community type experiences and again they don't have to be health related but certainly can be health related. The key thing from all experiences is to not only figure out, for yourself, what did you learn from each experience, but to let us know what you learned. You need to make your application, I think I said this last week, you need to make your application clear enough that it's easy for the people, screening the application or planning to interview you, to find what they're looking for, and what we want to know is what did you learn from all your experiences. That's, essentially, a sign of maturity that you can reflect on what you learned from everything you did whether it was positive or negative.. we want you to be thinking about what you did and what you saw, and it's a good idea to write things down as soon after a given experience as you can, whether it is the end of the day, or the end of the week. I would strongly encourage you to try journaling. If you do that as you go along, first of all you will see your own personal growth, hopefully, and second of all it will be easier for you to go back and create the little mini essays that you put in your experience boxes. The experience boxes can be like miniature personal statements basically.. we want to know for each experience, how did the experience clarify your choice to go into medicine and to be a doctor? And the key thing, in all these little boxes that you fill out on your MCATs application, is to be reflecting on your experience rather than just describing your experience. In some cases you have to do a very little bit of description,. that people who aren't as familiar with the type of experience that you had can understand the milieu in which you were, in which you were, but in many cases we know... we know, for example, typically, what goes on in emergency rooms, and things like that.. here are some examples... um, and the little pictures are sort of an increasing... um, levels of a better experience box.. the first one, these are all three from real applications, and they're all from people who worked in emergency rooms. So, the first one says "I folded towels, stalked saline, gave blankets to patients" and this really doesn't tell us anything about what was learned, or how it helped you make a decision to go into medicine. The second one is a little bit better it's sort of a germinating idea which is why I used the particular smiley face that I used and says "Although I was mainly helping to stock and distribute needed supplies, I felt good just knowing I was helping someone.". that's got some reflection in it that lets us know that this is a fairly altruistic person. The third one says "While working in the ER, I noticed that even when doctors were busy, the time they took to explain what was happening to a patient relieved a lot of the patient's anxiety.". this again is somebody making an observation about how physicians function and how it affects the patients and that's a good reflection in an experience box. Here are two more that really don't tell us a lot about the applicant at all.. the first one describes a summer research project I won't read you the whole thing basically, "My project focused on the use of a tranposon mutagenesis system to generate tumors in mice, etc." And again, it's perfectly OK to say that but we also want to know what you learned from that experience, what was it like to have parts of your project not go well which is pretty typical, how did you feel when something did go well and came up with something new or a key finding or even not such a key finding but something that helped plan the next part of that research project? How did you feel working in the lab with other researchers? What were the interesting parts about interpersonal relationships that you learned working in the lab and all those kinds of things? The second one is about somebody who works at the Bailey-Boushay House and its a good idea to describe as this person did what the Bailey-Boushay House is for people who don't know that. This applicant went on to say "I volunteered 4 hours a week in the Adult Day Program taking orders for and serving a hot breakfast. During my time there I interacted and built relationships with participants, staff, and other volunteers.". we again don't learn anything about the applicant from this. We would have loved to hear what it was like getting to know people with HIV/AIDS What were their problems? What were their worries? How did you as an applicant feel about that? Did it make you think about death? Did it change any of your thinking with regards to HIV/AIDS? That would be all really really nice to know. Here is 2 examples of some really good experience boxes that really let us know a little about the applicant.. the first one says "What I find pleasing about pediatrics is the ability to shape a child's life early on. they can start out healthy and hopefully make good decisions later on in life. One must also be able to gain the parents trust in medical treatments as one is dealing with their most precious object. I also love working with kids and am very interested in pursuing pediatrics someday." That tells us a lot. Another one from a future surgeon who is a student who is shadowing a surgeon. "Later, I would scrub into the surgeries" No, actually this is not from a student shadowing this is somebody who is working in a surgeon's research lab, but decided to do a little bit of shadowing as well.. the initial part of that description box talked about the research project and then said "Later, I would scrub into the surgeries and witness the plan that was discussed in rounds. I found this very interesting to be able to see a patient in the morning, try out your plan of action during the day, and almost immediately see the results.". again this person was in the lab and then also shadowed the surgeon and then went to some of their rounds and also went into surgery.. really made a lot out of that research experience and also was able to reflect on it in such a way to show that what is often attractive to surgeons is that you see somebody, you plan out the action and then you get to see what happens pretty quickly.. this has to do with a little bit of sort of stereotypical surgeon personality of relatively immediate gratification. And I think that's... we see a bit of that when we read this and see that this person is saying they almost immediately see the results. These are phrases that we see in experience boxes that really leave us hanging and we don't know what to do with them. One is I did such and such experience and it really broadened my exposure and it stops there and we would like to know how did it broadened your exposure? The second is you know working with. and. or in this environment helped me understand the field of medicine. Well, helped you understand what? Again we want you to be reflective enough to be specific and let us know how you grew from this experience. The third is an just another example made me realize usually it doesn't end with anything specific unfortunately.. if you are going to use those words or those phrases be sure to keep going and give us the details. A lot of you have asked how do you fit all of your experiences onto your MCATs application and I would encourage you to group some things together. We sometimes see applications in which someone was on the Dean's List in the Fall Quarter, the Dean's List in the Winter quarter, and the Dean's List in the Spring quarter and they are all listed seperately which takes up a lot of boxes which you could have used to tell us something else. We also see people who describe their research project in one box and then they describe presenting it at an annual meeting of an organization in another box and the fact that they got honors for doing it and then the fact that it was published and all of these are incredibly important and we do need to know them and they show us the quality of your work but they can easily be put into one box. They don't need to be seperated. I would encourage you to group academic honors together. You could also group sports together. You don't have to have swim team in one box and enjoying playing tennis in another box and I don't know... something recreational that you like to do in a third box you could put those together and again not just put them together but tell us what you learned from doing these sports whether they were team sports or individual sports? Did you learn how to cooperate with other people, did you enjoy helping a group of people get to a final goal were you able to beat your own personal best things like that? And how did you feel about those things? Moving on to shadowing. Shadowing is not there as a hoop for you to jump through. We are putting out that we think you should have about 40 hours of shadowing and I'll come back to that in a minute. But basically if you are not interested in shadowing then you're probably not interested in becoming a physician and. it surprises us that people don't do this you really need to find out what the career is all about some of our applicants are children of physicians and they feel like they understand the field of medicine, but what you heard at the dinner table is not necessarily what it was like for your parent or parents to be in the trenches during the day. You don't know how they dealt with a difficult question from a patient. How they presented bad news to the patient. You know you might hear some of these stories at the dinner table, but it's not the same as being in the room and watching it happen.. it really gives you a good feel for whether again you're planning for the right career for yourself, you also sometimes develop a relationship with the person you are shadowing and they act as a role model for you which is nice we recommend a minimum of 40 hours we don't think that's. difficult to get that could be one hour a week for most of a year it could be a couple of half days here and there during a year and. over a period of two to three years in college you should be able to get 40 hours in without too much difficulty. I will say that we understand people have to work and we look for that in an application if we don't see a lot of shadowing. And again you can put all of your shadowing in one box or if you learn different things from different shadowing experiences then spread them out. We know that shadowing is not always easy to find and what we have suggested and some of this is on our website is first of all the Washington Academy of Family Practice has a site that will match you up with mentors. We also have collected a number of names of physicians who are willing to be shadowed that are not in primary care and we have those in our office. You can contact us and ask for that. You should ask your own personal physician assuming you have one if you can shadow him or her or friends if you have friends whose parents are physicians that's a good way to start and just do some networking see what you can find out and you probably want to shadow in the office, maybe on rounds, maybe in surgery, maybe on call, etc. Other good experiences that get you shadowing are emergency room scribe, type experience, working in the athletic training room if you are here at the University of Washington participating in the Summer Medical/Dental education through the office of Multicultural Affairs. And again at the U alternative spring break where you go to an under served community for a week and these last four things that I've mentioned are things that you learn about when you sign onto or join the prehealth groups that are on campus here at the university. AED for example there are about 50 prehealth groups they are all a little bit different, but they all have managed to get a lot of resources together to get people more exposure to the field of medicine which is great.. I encourage you to contact your fellow undergrad students and feel free to contact our office as well.. again why should you shadow these are some things I eluded to a few minutes ago but you want to on a day-to-day basis what seemed to make the doctor happy, what seemed frustrating, how did the doctor adapt his or her style, communication style, to the patient? When you were observing this relationship with the doctor and the patient how did the patient react to the doctor's behavior? Was that something you liked? Was it something you think you would have done differently, and if. how? And it is perfectly OK to put some of this in your reflection of your experience.. again, how did the doctor handle a tough situation when they couldn't solve a problem, they couldn't make a diagnosis, they couldn't come up with a cure? How did they allow for patient autonomy if the physician you are shadowing suggested something to the patient and the patient didn't want to do it. How did the physician react to that? Were they able to work with the patient to come to a common understanding? How do they deal with a patient who for instance is a smoker and just won't give it up? All those sorts of things again, how do you deal with not having enough time to give the patient the time you think they need? All those things are not things you learn from just talking to doctors or sitting round the dinner table with them. This slide is a little more oriented to people who are already in medical school and are trying to figure out what kind of doctor they want to be and I will say that we have data that shows that when we compare what students tell us on day one medical school with where they finally match at the end of medical school, about 80% of students changed their mind while they are in school.. this isn't even what they said at interviews. we don't put a lot of store into what you say at interview what you want to be. What we are mainly looking for again are your experiences consistent with what you think you want to be . That's what we are looking for at that time. But even so, you should know that there are differences as you are trying to form some preliminary plan of what kind of doctor you want to shadow for example, you might think about these things.. what are the ages and genders of the patients that are seen in a given type of office, and what kind of problems are they? Are they straight forward problems? Are they very complex problems? And what's more appealing to you? Is there a predominance of chronic problems or of acute problems? Which anatomic parts are involved? Is there a lot of variety or are you hanging out with a specialist that is fairly focused on one anatomic part? For example, a urologist, different fields of medicine also deal with a large body of knowledge with modern understanding of each area and that might be a primary care type of physician, or a limited body of knowledge with an in depth understanding and that would be any sort of specialist. Some people feel bored with the first, and some people feel bored with the second and. again it's a good idea to get exposed and see how your personality fits best. There are sort of corporate personalities of individual disciplines.. I can speak for orthopedics in particular because I am an orthopedic surgeon and just say that most orthopedists stereotypically are pretty friendly. They certainly have a compulsive bent because they are surgeons and the classic stereotype is that they're big dumb jocks. here I am to tell you that we can't always fit the stereotype. There are exceptions. You might also want to be giving some thought to possible lifestyles that you might lead as a physician. Whether you want be in a solo practice which those are probably not going to exist much longer but there certainly are solo practices particularly in rural environments and you have to decide whether you are willing to be a physician 24/7 or not. On the one hand, you really develop amazing relationships with your patients. On the other hand, you are pretty much on all the time. Or do you want to be in a group practice? Do you want the group to be small or large? Do you want it to be a multi-specialty group? And again, some of this you won't know until you've had more exposure but it is a good thing to think about this in advance. Are you interested enough in research and teaching that you want to consider a career in academic medicine? Do you think you want to be rural or urban? Do you want to work with under-served patients all of the time or some of the time? In other words, do you want to spend a month or two overseas in every given year and can you find a practice that would allow that? What's interesting, the reason I even bring this up... is that we have had applicants who say that they are interested in doing bench research and they want to practice in a rural environment, and they just don't go together And. when we hear you say that, we usually will send you a letter saying you are not ready yet, that you haven't really thought this through. You really should consider what would make you happy, rather than reimbursement and time and that sort of thing. And we realize that you are going to graduate with some debt but at the end of the day, you want to pick a career that you're going to love doing for the next 30-40 years. And if the career itself is challenging and interesting, maybe you don't like challenge but I like challenge,. if it's challenging and interesting and at the end of the day you're happy all the rest of this gonna is sort itself out. Going to personal statement, again the personal statement is meant to show us what your motivation is, why you are interested in medicine and then how are you in particular suited for medicine based on what you've discovered through your experiences.. we really want you to show us that you know this is the right career for you.. we expect you to change your mind again but you should have some knowledge and concept of the possibilities of who you might become and why you are suited for that.. one of the key things is to self assess. This is incredibly important for a physician because we are often in a situation where we are presented with something we don't know and. we have to recognize that. We have to be self-aware enough that we can say, "Boy, I've never seen this before. I am not sure what this is. What am I going to do about that?" And we will go into more detail about that next time when we talk about problem solving. It's also important that you recognize your own subconscious reaction to a patient, and how that may influence how you interact with that patient. And that's what I meant by biases. So, if for instance... let me use myself as an example. I have allergies to perfume, and if I walk into a patient room and somebody is heavily perfumed I typically want to get out of that room as fast as I can. And at the same time I don't want to short change the patient. I have to decide whether to just do the best I can and get out of there quickly or explain the situation to the patient, go out and get a mask, come back in and try again. But again that will influence just that little, it's not even a bias, its an allergy. But it influences my willingness to stay in the room and interact with that patient. And other people have biases against certain appearances, certain smells... any number of things of things that you may not even be aware you have.. the more you can self assess the better. It's a good idea to be able to assess your own strengths and areas for improvement and also what your own learning style is because to be a physician you have to enjoy lifelong learning and self propelled lifelong learning. People are not going to be telling you what chapter to read and what book to look up. You are going to have to do that yourself.. if you need to be directed this may not be the right field for you.. here is an exercise you can do, and this comes from, a variation of this comes from, a book written by Harvel Hendricks and we posted some of his self assessment questions on the website.. one of the ways to do this is to make a circle, or an ellipse in the case of the one on the left, or you can do this in a list form and basically you want to list all the things that you are really good at in the positive section. You want to list things that make you happy and bring you joy. In the minus section you want to list things that drive you crazy, that frustrate you, that you're not. good at and that people tell you you need to work on. And that's a good idea to do the same thing about medicine. Clearly medicine is not all positive, there are some negatives, there are frustrations, there are things like paperwork people find frustrating, or not enough time to spend with your patient, or many of the things we've already mentioned. Not being able to cure an illness, etc. And the more exposure you've had, the more balanced your perspective on medicine is going to be.. you either make lists or fill out these circles and then you decide whether the negatives of medicine are things that don't match well with you or your own negatives.. for example if you listed a number of highly frustrating things on the negative side of medicine and in your own personality you've discovered that you frustrate very easily and you don't tolerate frustration well then this is not the right career for you. On the other hand if it turns out that you really rise to a challenge and that you consider these negatives of medicine as challenges rather than frustrations then you are on the right track. I also just want to make a comment on the side. I've been using this little symbol with the thumbs up in many of my slides. And I know that in different cultures hand signals mean different things. hopefully I am not offending anybody. If I am please excuse me. These are just readily available on the web. I use them quite a bit.. here in the room let's just talk about another exercise. Call out to me some characteristics you think a good doctor should have. Anything. Yeah. Patience. With a c e you mean. Yeah. P a t i e n c e yeah. Yes that's a good one. OK. Patience. Yes over there. Good listening skills. That's good. Not being judgmental is another one. OK.. you could do this yourself at home. You could do this with your friends. You might lose a few friends. I am sure your friends are kind of tired of having you being. obsessed with getting into medical school. But at any rate it can be something that you can do with your friends. just sit around or with your family and see how many characteristics you can tick off that you would like to have in your own doctor. And then look back at your own experiences and see how they might show that you have these characteristics. And again make sure that you make that obvious to the person reading your application.. we hope that you will incorporate all these findings from these exercises and from your experiences into your personal statement. Pick a few of these and show us examples and tell us how you are suited to medicine. Which experiences or people have had positive influences or even negative influences. The third thing I want to talk about a little bit in a personal statement and I alluded to this last time is don't make us feel like we're the fourth person you asked to the prom. And let me explain that a little bit. A lot of people do a chronological statement and I'm gonna show you some examples, but what I mean by this... when you were in high school maybe or something, you may have known somebody that asked your best friend to the prom which was not to smart but your best friend said no and then they asked you to the prom next or maybe they even asked someone else in between and then they asked you and by the time they got to you, you knew, because word gets around, that you were the third or fourth person they'd asked and. you were a little annoyed, disappointed, but you know you might have gone to the dance anyway because you really wanted to go. But in the case of your medical school application you want to let the reader know that you are excited about going to medical school and that this is a conscious, purposeful decision. It is not just the next best alternative to something that you were doing before but it didn't work out for you. Now I am going to show you some examples. It's also important in your personal statement to let us know why you think you will be a good doctor not why you think you will be a good medical student. They are a little bit different. When sometimes we have people say I'm going to be a good student because I help other people in class and I work hard and that sort of thing. Generally you want to start off with why you are excited about medicine and then if you need to tell us some negative experiences you have had it is fine to do that but you should start off with the positive and then go into the compare and contrast mode. here is an example of the fourth date to the prom example I tried engineering but the applicability seemed too distant. I tried research but I missed working with people. Medicine will allow me to combine problem solving and discovery with working with people. the next one, also from somebody's application, says pretty much the same thing, but in a more positive way. "Medicine appeals to me because helping people and solving puzzles are both stimulating to me." A few more examples. These are all real. The first one "I have spent my entire life training to be a doctor. All of my toys and friends have been treated by me I am a doctor at heart, that is why I want to go to medical school." Well that really doesn't really tell us anything about the person or what their attributes are or why they think they're gonna be good at it. Here is another very chronological description that again does not tell us anything about the applicant. And I'll sort of paraphrase it "I entered the university with the intention of pursuing a degree in mathematics, my main interest in high school. My first math class was Linear Algebra. It was interesting, etc., etc., etc. This led me through a number of inspiring courses from Physiology to Advanced Organic Chemistry and ultimately to my major in biochemistry which combines both my interests in biology, etc., etc. We can get this list of classes from the transcript and again it really doesn't tell us anything about why medicine it just tells us about the courses that this person took in college.. here's some better ones. And these are excerpted again from real applications. "The prospect of death and the blessing of life occur daily before the final diagnoses. Unshakably moving forward in such slippery conditions, I learned, is a doctor's gift.. this person has done some reflecting and again shows this in the personal statement. Here's another one "Reflecting on my college experiences as well as my current ones. I found that my life seemed most meaningful... when I was working to help a person overcome something beyond his or her control. And another one "Through confronting such a harsh, unforgiving reality. I found a deep desire to both better understand nature's actions and to assist in medical problems like Alice's. After learning that current medical research has found no cure for many illnesses such as Alice's, I found myself on PubMed for hours learning about the research." And what this showed us, this last one, is here is somebody who is very much a self-propelled learner who has curiosity. This person was just shadowing someone and happened to get to see a patient that was had a terminal illness that was a little bit of an unusual illness and. this person decided to do some more research into that just to learn more about the disease.. that told us a lot about that person. Which was very helpful. And I think that's all for tonight and. the next session is gonna be specifically about the interview And we'll now open it up to questions. Feel free to raise your hand and/or write something down and pass it down.
UW Medicine Town Hall 2 - Motivation
Hi. Welcome to our second town hall meeting. Last time we spoke about application in general, and particularly about MCATs, grades, and letters of recommendation. Tonight we are going to talk about your experiences that you list in your MCATs application, shadowing, and writing your personal statement. And the whole point of all this is to help you realize whether you're interested in medicine, as a career, for the right reasons and clarify for yourself and for us what your motivation is.. let's talk about experiences a little bit. First of all the value of experience is finding out what the career is all about, to clarify and validate your initial impressions, and learn about the dark side of medicine. And what we mean by that are things that are things that are frustrating to doctors, things that are difficult for doctors, it's not all as easy or noble as you might think. Experience will help you test your level of commitment to the field. If you find that you are really not enjoying yourself as you have experiences then you may want to change your mind. So, obviously, experiences help you discover what you like and dislike, they help you improve the articulation of your own goals, and enhance your motivation. And clearly the more experiences you have the better you understand other people and other cultures. And when we say other cultures you should realize that other cultures can be a few blocks away from where you live. You don't have to go to Botswana or some place like that to appreciate other cultures. But the more people you've had contact with and the more outside your own comfort zone you can get and outside your own neighborhood, the better you will be able to relate to your patients. We don't want you to choose an experience to get into medical school. People always ask us the question... "Should I work in a nursing home... or should I work in an emergency room... or should I volunteer for this or volunteer for that?" You really should be choosing an experience because it appeals to you or it is important to you, not because you think it is going to help you get in. The other thing that it is important to consider is you should be choosing experiences that are consistent with what your present goals are.. if you think that you want to be a surgeon, you should be choosing experiences that would get you some exposure to surgery. Either volunteer at a recovery room or shadowing a surgeon or even working at a desk in a surgery center, something like that. One of the things that we tell the committee to look for in an application, and also in an interview is, that somebody's experiences are consistent with their goals.. if someone comes in and they've shadowed a radiologist, and they've shadowed a neurosurgeon and they come in and tell us that they want to be a primary care doctor, we are a little suspicious they are just saying that because, for some reason, they think that is what we want to hear. And remember that our school is looking for primary care doctors as well as specialists and future academicians.. there is room for everybody. And you should be choosing an experience that is something you want to explore for yourself. When I think about the type of experiences you could have, in my mind I divided them up into these three areas. One are service type experiences, where you're in a situation where basically, you are going to meet other peoples needs. And they don't have to be medical service experiences. A lot of our applicants have have worked in restaurants, which have a lot of things in common with the field of medicine, in that you have a wide ranging clientele, they can be pretty demanding, or not, you have to deal with unhappy people who don't think they are getting what they should be getting, and things like that,. there is a lot of transfer there and that's fine. A second type of experience might be working on some sort of team that has a common goal, and this could be a research team, or it could be a sports team, but again just getting a feel for what it's like to work with other people toward a common goal because that's what you will be doing. You will definitely be working in a medical team with other physicians, nurse practitioners, physicians assistants, nurses, medical assistants, all kinds of different people.. you have to see how you feel about working on a team. There are other types of experiences where the main goal of the experience is for the greater good and these, typically, are community type experiences and again they don't have to be health related but certainly can be health related. The key thing from all experiences is to not only figure out, for yourself, what did you learn from each experience, but to let us know what you learned. You need to make your application, I think I said this last week, you need to make your application clear enough that it's easy for the people, screening the application or planning to interview you, to find what they're looking for, and what we want to know is what did you learn from all your experiences. That's, essentially, a sign of maturity that you can reflect on what you learned from everything you did whether it was positive or negative.. we want you to be thinking about what you did and what you saw, and it's a good idea to write things down as soon after a given experience as you can, whether it is the end of the day, or the end of the week. I would strongly encourage you to try journaling. If you do that as you go along, first of all you will see your own personal growth, hopefully, and second of all it will be easier for you to go back and create the little mini essays that you put in your experience boxes. The experience boxes can be like miniature personal statements basically.. we want to know for each experience, how did the experience clarify your choice to go into medicine and to be a doctor? And the key thing, in all these little boxes that you fill out on your MCATs application, is to be reflecting on your experience rather than just describing your experience. In some cases you have to do a very little bit of description,. that people who aren't as familiar with the type of experience that you had can understand the milieu in which you were, in which you were, but in many cases we know... we know, for example, typically, what goes on in emergency rooms, and things like that.. here are some examples... um, and the little pictures are sort of an increasing... um, levels of a better experience box.. the first one, these are all three from real applications, and they're all from people who worked in emergency rooms. So, the first one says "I folded towels, stalked saline, gave blankets to patients" and this really doesn't tell us anything about what was learned, or how it helped you make a decision to go into medicine. The second one is a little bit better it's sort of a germinating idea which is why I used the particular smiley face that I used and says "Although I was mainly helping to stock and distribute needed supplies, I felt good just knowing I was helping someone.". that's got some reflection in it that lets us know that this is a fairly altruistic person. The third one says "While working in the ER, I noticed that even when doctors were busy, the time they took to explain what was happening to a patient relieved a lot of the patient's anxiety.". this again is somebody making an observation about how physicians function and how it affects the patients and that's a good reflection in an experience box. Here are two more that really don't tell us a lot about the applicant at all.. the first one describes a summer research project I won't read you the whole thing basically, "My project focused on the use of a tranposon mutagenesis system to generate tumors in mice, etc." And again, it's perfectly OK to say that but we also want to know what you learned from that experience, what was it like to have parts of your project not go well which is pretty typical, how did you feel when something did go well and came up with something new or a key finding or even not such a key finding but something that helped plan the next part of that research project? How did you feel working in the lab with other researchers? What were the interesting parts about interpersonal relationships that you learned working in the lab and all those kinds of things? The second one is about somebody who works at the Bailey-Boushay House and its a good idea to describe as this person did what the Bailey-Boushay House is for people who don't know that. This applicant went on to say "I volunteered 4 hours a week in the Adult Day Program taking orders for and serving a hot breakfast. During my time there I interacted and built relationships with participants, staff, and other volunteers.". we again don't learn anything about the applicant from this. We would have loved to hear what it was like getting to know people with HIV/AIDS What were their problems? What were their worries? How did you as an applicant feel about that? Did it make you think about death? Did it change any of your thinking with regards to HIV/AIDS? That would be all really really nice to know. Here is 2 examples of some really good experience boxes that really let us know a little about the applicant.. the first one says "What I find pleasing about pediatrics is the ability to shape a child's life early on. they can start out healthy and hopefully make good decisions later on in life. One must also be able to gain the parents trust in medical treatments as one is dealing with their most precious object. I also love working with kids and am very interested in pursuing pediatrics someday." That tells us a lot. Another one from a future surgeon who is a student who is shadowing a surgeon. "Later, I would scrub into the surgeries" No, actually this is not from a student shadowing this is somebody who is working in a surgeon's research lab, but decided to do a little bit of shadowing as well.. the initial part of that description box talked about the research project and then said "Later, I would scrub into the surgeries and witness the plan that was discussed in rounds. I found this very interesting to be able to see a patient in the morning, try out your plan of action during the day, and almost immediately see the results.". again this person was in the lab and then also shadowed the surgeon and then went to some of their rounds and also went into surgery.. really made a lot out of that research experience and also was able to reflect on it in such a way to show that what is often attractive to surgeons is that you see somebody, you plan out the action and then you get to see what happens pretty quickly.. this has to do with a little bit of sort of stereotypical surgeon personality of relatively immediate gratification. And I think that's... we see a bit of that when we read this and see that this person is saying they almost immediately see the results. These are phrases that we see in experience boxes that really leave us hanging and we don't know what to do with them. One is I did such and such experience and it really broadened my exposure and it stops there and we would like to know how did it broadened your exposure? The second is you know working with. and. or in this environment helped me understand the field of medicine. Well, helped you understand what? Again we want you to be reflective enough to be specific and let us know how you grew from this experience. The third is an just another example made me realize usually it doesn't end with anything specific unfortunately.. if you are going to use those words or those phrases be sure to keep going and give us the details. A lot of you have asked how do you fit all of your experiences onto your MCATs application and I would encourage you to group some things together. We sometimes see applications in which someone was on the Dean's List in the Fall Quarter, the Dean's List in the Winter quarter, and the Dean's List in the Spring quarter and they are all listed seperately which takes up a lot of boxes which you could have used to tell us something else. We also see people who describe their research project in one box and then they describe presenting it at an annual meeting of an organization in another box and the fact that they got honors for doing it and then the fact that it was published and all of these are incredibly important and we do need to know them and they show us the quality of your work but they can easily be put into one box. They don't need to be seperated. I would encourage you to group academic honors together. You could also group sports together. You don't have to have swim team in one box and enjoying playing tennis in another box and I don't know... something recreational that you like to do in a third box you could put those together and again not just put them together but tell us what you learned from doing these sports whether they were team sports or individual sports? Did you learn how to cooperate with other people, did you enjoy helping a group of people get to a final goal were you able to beat your own personal best things like that? And how did you feel about those things? Moving on to shadowing. Shadowing is not there as a hoop for you to jump through. We are putting out that we think you should have about 40 hours of shadowing and I'll come back to that in a minute. But basically if you are not interested in shadowing then you're probably not interested in becoming a physician and. it surprises us that people don't do this you really need to find out what the career is all about some of our applicants are children of physicians and they feel like they understand the field of medicine, but what you heard at the dinner table is not necessarily what it was like for your parent or parents to be in the trenches during the day. You don't know how they dealt with a difficult question from a patient. How they presented bad news to the patient. You know you might hear some of these stories at the dinner table, but it's not the same as being in the room and watching it happen.. it really gives you a good feel for whether again you're planning for the right career for yourself, you also sometimes develop a relationship with the person you are shadowing and they act as a role model for you which is nice we recommend a minimum of 40 hours we don't think that's. difficult to get that could be one hour a week for most of a year it could be a couple of half days here and there during a year and. over a period of two to three years in college you should be able to get 40 hours in without too much difficulty. I will say that we understand people have to work and we look for that in an application if we don't see a lot of shadowing. And again you can put all of your shadowing in one box or if you learn different things from different shadowing experiences then spread them out. We know that shadowing is not always easy to find and what we have suggested and some of this is on our website is first of all the Washington Academy of Family Practice has a site that will match you up with mentors. We also have collected a number of names of physicians who are willing to be shadowed that are not in primary care and we have those in our office. You can contact us and ask for that. You should ask your own personal physician assuming you have one if you can shadow him or her or friends if you have friends whose parents are physicians that's a good way to start and just do some networking see what you can find out and you probably want to shadow in the office, maybe on rounds, maybe in surgery, maybe on call, etc. Other good experiences that get you shadowing are emergency room scribe, type experience, working in the athletic training room if you are here at the University of Washington participating in the Summer Medical/Dental education through the office of Multicultural Affairs. And again at the U alternative spring break where you go to an under served community for a week and these last four things that I've mentioned are things that you learn about when you sign onto or join the prehealth groups that are on campus here at the university. AED for example there are about 50 prehealth groups they are all a little bit different, but they all have managed to get a lot of resources together to get people more exposure to the field of medicine which is great.. I encourage you to contact your fellow undergrad students and feel free to contact our office as well.. again why should you shadow these are some things I eluded to a few minutes ago but you want to on a day-to-day basis what seemed to make the doctor happy, what seemed frustrating, how did the doctor adapt his or her style, communication style, to the patient? When you were observing this relationship with the doctor and the patient how did the patient react to the doctor's behavior? Was that something you liked? Was it something you think you would have done differently, and if. how? And it is perfectly OK to put some of this in your reflection of your experience.. again, how did the doctor handle a tough situation when they couldn't solve a problem, they couldn't make a diagnosis, they couldn't come up with a cure? How did they allow for patient autonomy if the physician you are shadowing suggested something to the patient and the patient didn't want to do it. How did the physician react to that? Were they able to work with the patient to come to a common understanding? How do they deal with a patient who for instance is a smoker and just won't give it up? All those sorts of things again, how do you deal with not having enough time to give the patient the time you think they need? All those things are not things you learn from just talking to doctors or sitting round the dinner table with them. This slide is a little more oriented to people who are already in medical school and are trying to figure out what kind of doctor they want to be and I will say that we have data that shows that when we compare what students tell us on day one medical school with where they finally match at the end of medical school, about 80% of students changed their mind while they are in school.. this isn't even what they said at interviews. we don't put a lot of store into what you say at interview what you want to be. What we are mainly looking for again are your experiences consistent with what you think you want to be . That's what we are looking for at that time. But even so, you should know that there are differences as you are trying to form some preliminary plan of what kind of doctor you want to shadow for example, you might think about these things.. what are the ages and genders of the patients that are seen in a given type of office, and what kind of problems are they? Are they straight forward problems? Are they very complex problems? And what's more appealing to you? Is there a predominance of chronic problems or of acute problems? Which anatomic parts are involved? Is there a lot of variety or are you hanging out with a specialist that is fairly focused on one anatomic part? For example, a urologist, different fields of medicine also deal with a large body of knowledge with modern understanding of each area and that might be a primary care type of physician, or a limited body of knowledge with an in depth understanding and that would be any sort of specialist. Some people feel bored with the first, and some people feel bored with the second and. again it's a good idea to get exposed and see how your personality fits best. There are sort of corporate personalities of individual disciplines.. I can speak for orthopedics in particular because I am an orthopedic surgeon and just say that most orthopedists stereotypically are pretty friendly. They certainly have a compulsive bent because they are surgeons and the classic stereotype is that they're big dumb jocks. here I am to tell you that we can't always fit the stereotype. There are exceptions. You might also want to be giving some thought to possible lifestyles that you might lead as a physician. Whether you want be in a solo practice which those are probably not going to exist much longer but there certainly are solo practices particularly in rural environments and you have to decide whether you are willing to be a physician 24/7 or not. On the one hand, you really develop amazing relationships with your patients. On the other hand, you are pretty much on all the time. Or do you want to be in a group practice? Do you want the group to be small or large? Do you want it to be a multi-specialty group? And again, some of this you won't know until you've had more exposure but it is a good thing to think about this in advance. Are you interested enough in research and teaching that you want to consider a career in academic medicine? Do you think you want to be rural or urban? Do you want to work with under-served patients all of the time or some of the time? In other words, do you want to spend a month or two overseas in every given year and can you find a practice that would allow that? What's interesting, the reason I even bring this up... is that we have had applicants who say that they are interested in doing bench research and they want to practice in a rural environment, and they just don't go together And. when we hear you say that, we usually will send you a letter saying you are not ready yet, that you haven't really thought this through. You really should consider what would make you happy, rather than reimbursement and time and that sort of thing. And we realize that you are going to graduate with some debt but at the end of the day, you want to pick a career that you're going to love doing for the next 30-40 years. And if the career itself is challenging and interesting, maybe you don't like challenge but I like challenge,. if it's challenging and interesting and at the end of the day you're happy all the rest of this gonna is sort itself out. Going to personal statement, again the personal statement is meant to show us what your motivation is, why you are interested in medicine and then how are you in particular suited for medicine based on what you've discovered through your experiences.. we really want you to show us that you know this is the right career for you.. we expect you to change your mind again but you should have some knowledge and concept of the possibilities of who you might become and why you are suited for that.. one of the key things is to self assess. This is incredibly important for a physician because we are often in a situation where we are presented with something we don't know and. we have to recognize that. We have to be self-aware enough that we can say, "Boy, I've never seen this before. I am not sure what this is. What am I going to do about that?" And we will go into more detail about that next time when we talk about problem solving. It's also important that you recognize your own subconscious reaction to a patient, and how that may influence how you interact with that patient. And that's what I meant by biases. So, if for instance... let me use myself as an example. I have allergies to perfume, and if I walk into a patient room and somebody is heavily perfumed I typically want to get out of that room as fast as I can. And at the same time I don't want to short change the patient. I have to decide whether to just do the best I can and get out of there quickly or explain the situation to the patient, go out and get a mask, come back in and try again. But again that will influence just that little, it's not even a bias, its an allergy. But it influences my willingness to stay in the room and interact with that patient. And other people have biases against certain appearances, certain smells... any number of things of things that you may not even be aware you have.. the more you can self assess the better. It's a good idea to be able to assess your own strengths and areas for improvement and also what your own learning style is because to be a physician you have to enjoy lifelong learning and self propelled lifelong learning. People are not going to be telling you what chapter to read and what book to look up. You are going to have to do that yourself.. if you need to be directed this may not be the right field for you.. here is an exercise you can do, and this comes from, a variation of this comes from, a book written by Harvel Hendricks and we posted some of his self assessment questions on the website.. one of the ways to do this is to make a circle, or an ellipse in the case of the one on the left, or you can do this in a list form and basically you want to list all the things that you are really good at in the positive section. You want to list things that make you happy and bring you joy. In the minus section you want to list things that drive you crazy, that frustrate you, that you're not. good at and that people tell you you need to work on. And that's a good idea to do the same thing about medicine. Clearly medicine is not all positive, there are some negatives, there are frustrations, there are things like paperwork people find frustrating, or not enough time to spend with your patient, or many of the things we've already mentioned. Not being able to cure an illness, etc. And the more exposure you've had, the more balanced your perspective on medicine is going to be.. you either make lists or fill out these circles and then you decide whether the negatives of medicine are things that don't match well with you or your own negatives.. for example if you listed a number of highly frustrating things on the negative side of medicine and in your own personality you've discovered that you frustrate very easily and you don't tolerate frustration well then this is not the right career for you. On the other hand if it turns out that you really rise to a challenge and that you consider these negatives of medicine as challenges rather than frustrations then you are on the right track. I also just want to make a comment on the side. I've been using this little symbol with the thumbs up in many of my slides. And I know that in different cultures hand signals mean different things. hopefully I am not offending anybody. If I am please excuse me. These are just readily available on the web. I use them quite a bit.. here in the room let's just talk about another exercise. Call out to me some characteristics you think a good doctor should have. Anything. Yeah. Patience. With a c e you mean. Yeah. P a t i e n c e yeah. Yes that's a good one. OK. Patience. Yes over there. Good listening skills. That's good. Not being judgmental is another one. OK.. you could do this yourself at home. You could do this with your friends. You might lose a few friends. I am sure your friends are kind of tired of having you being. obsessed with getting into medical school. But at any rate it can be something that you can do with your friends. just sit around or with your family and see how many characteristics you can tick off that you would like to have in your own doctor. And then look back at your own experiences and see how they might show that you have these characteristics. And again make sure that you make that obvious to the person reading your application.. we hope that you will incorporate all these findings from these exercises and from your experiences into your personal statement. Pick a few of these and show us examples and tell us how you are suited to medicine. Which experiences or people have had positive influences or even negative influences. The third thing I want to talk about a little bit in a personal statement and I alluded to this last time is don't make us feel like we're the fourth person you asked to the prom. And let me explain that a little bit. A lot of people do a chronological statement and I'm gonna show you some examples, but what I mean by this... when you were in high school maybe or something, you may have known somebody that asked your best friend to the prom which was not to smart but your best friend said no and then they asked you to the prom next or maybe they even asked someone else in between and then they asked you and by the time they got to you, you knew, because word gets around, that you were the third or fourth person they'd asked and. you were a little annoyed, disappointed, but you know you might have gone to the dance anyway because you really wanted to go. But in the case of your medical school application you want to let the reader know that you are excited about going to medical school and that this is a conscious, purposeful decision. It is not just the next best alternative to something that you were doing before but it didn't work out for you. Now I am going to show you some examples. It's also important in your personal statement to let us know why you think you will be a good doctor not why you think you will be a good medical student. They are a little bit different. When sometimes we have people say I'm going to be a good student because I help other people in class and I work hard and that sort of thing. Generally you want to start off with why you are excited about medicine and then if you need to tell us some negative experiences you have had it is fine to do that but you should start off with the positive and then go into the compare and contrast mode. here is an example of the fourth date to the prom example I tried engineering but the applicability seemed too distant. I tried research but I missed working with people. Medicine will allow me to combine problem solving and discovery with working with people. the next one, also from somebody's application, says pretty much the same thing, but in a more positive way. "Medicine appeals to me because helping people and solving puzzles are both stimulating to me." A few more examples. These are all real. The first one "I have spent my entire life training to be a doctor. All of my toys and friends have been treated by me I am a doctor at heart, that is why I want to go to medical school." Well that really doesn't really tell us anything about the person or what their attributes are or why they think they're gonna be good at it. Here is another very chronological description that again does not tell us anything about the applicant. And I'll sort of paraphrase it "I entered the university with the intention of pursuing a degree in mathematics, my main interest in high school. My first math class was Linear Algebra. It was interesting, etc., etc., etc. This led me through a number of inspiring courses from Physiology to Advanced Organic Chemistry and ultimately to my major in biochemistry which combines both my interests in biology, etc., etc. We can get this list of classes from the transcript and again it really doesn't tell us anything about why medicine it just tells us about the courses that this person took in college.. here's some better ones. And these are excerpted again from real applications. "The prospect of death and the blessing of life occur daily before the final diagnoses. Unshakably moving forward in such slippery conditions, I learned, is a doctor's gift.. this person has done some reflecting and again shows this in the personal statement. Here's another one "Reflecting on my college experiences as well as my current ones. I found that my life seemed most meaningful... when I was working to help a person overcome something beyond his or her control. And another one "Through confronting such a harsh, unforgiving reality. I found a deep desire to both better understand nature's actions and to assist in medical problems like Alice's. After learning that current medical research has found no cure for many illnesses such as Alice's, I found myself on PubMed for hours learning about the research." And what this showed us, this last one, is here is somebody who is very much a self-propelled learner who has curiosity. This person was just shadowing someone and happened to get to see a patient that was had a terminal illness that was a little bit of an unusual illness and. this person decided to do some more research into that just to learn more about the disease.. that told us a lot about that person. Which was very helpful. And I think that's all for tonight and. the next session is gonna be specifically about the interview And we'll now open it up to questions. Feel free to raise your hand and/or write something down and pass it down.
UW Medicine Town Hall 2 - Motivation
Hi. Welcome to our second town hall meeting. Last time we spoke about application in general, and particularly about MCATs, grades, and letters of recommendation. Tonight we are going to talk about your experiences that you list in your MCATs application, shadowing, and writing your personal statement. And the whole point of all this is to help you realize whether you're interested in medicine, as a career, for the right reasons and clarify for yourself and for us what your motivation is.. let's talk about experiences a little bit. First of all the value of experience is finding out what the career is all about, to clarify and validate your initial impressions, and learn about the dark side of medicine. And what we mean by that are things that are things that are frustrating to doctors, things that are difficult for doctors, it's not all as easy or noble as you might think. Experience will help you test your level of commitment to the field. If you find that you are really not enjoying yourself as you have experiences then you may want to change your mind. So, obviously, experiences help you discover what you like and dislike, they help you improve the articulation of your own goals, and enhance your motivation. And clearly the more experiences you have the better you understand other people and other cultures. And when we say other cultures you should realize that other cultures can be a few blocks away from where you live. You don't have to go to Botswana or some place like that to appreciate other cultures. But the more people you've had contact with and the more outside your own comfort zone you can get and outside your own neighborhood, the better you will be able to relate to your patients. We don't want you to choose an experience to get into medical school. People always ask us the question... "Should I work in a nursing home... or should I work in an emergency room... or should I volunteer for this or volunteer for that?" You really should be choosing an experience because it appeals to you or it is important to you, not because you think it is going to help you get in. The other thing that it is important to consider is you should be choosing experiences that are consistent with what your present goals are.. if you think that you want to be a surgeon, you should be choosing experiences that would get you some exposure to surgery. Either volunteer at a recovery room or shadowing a surgeon or even working at a desk in a surgery center, something like that. One of the things that we tell the committee to look for in an application, and also in an interview is, that somebody's experiences are consistent with their goals.. if someone comes in and they've shadowed a radiologist, and they've shadowed a neurosurgeon and they come in and tell us that they want to be a primary care doctor, we are a little suspicious they are just saying that because, for some reason, they think that is what we want to hear. And remember that our school is looking for primary care doctors as well as specialists and future academicians.. there is room for everybody. And you should be choosing an experience that is something you want to explore for yourself. When I think about the type of experiences you could have, in my mind I divided them up into these three areas. One are service type experiences, where you're in a situation where basically, you are going to meet other peoples needs. And they don't have to be medical service experiences. A lot of our applicants have have worked in restaurants, which have a lot of things in common with the field of medicine, in that you have a wide ranging clientele, they can be pretty demanding, or not, you have to deal with unhappy people who don't think they are getting what they should be getting, and things like that,. there is a lot of transfer there and that's fine. A second type of experience might be working on some sort of team that has a common goal, and this could be a research team, or it could be a sports team, but again just getting a feel for what it's like to work with other people toward a common goal because that's what you will be doing. You will definitely be working in a medical team with other physicians, nurse practitioners, physicians assistants, nurses, medical assistants, all kinds of different people.. you have to see how you feel about working on a team. There are other types of experiences where the main goal of the experience is for the greater good and these, typically, are community type experiences and again they don't have to be health related but certainly can be health related. The key thing from all experiences is to not only figure out, for yourself, what did you learn from each experience, but to let us know what you learned. You need to make your application, I think I said this last week, you need to make your application clear enough that it's easy for the people, screening the application or planning to interview you, to find what they're looking for, and what we want to know is what did you learn from all your experiences. That's, essentially, a sign of maturity that you can reflect on what you learned from everything you did whether it was positive or negative.. we want you to be thinking about what you did and what you saw, and it's a good idea to write things down as soon after a given experience as you can, whether it is the end of the day, or the end of the week. I would strongly encourage you to try journaling. If you do that as you go along, first of all you will see your own personal growth, hopefully, and second of all it will be easier for you to go back and create the little mini essays that you put in your experience boxes. The experience boxes can be like miniature personal statements basically.. we want to know for each experience, how did the experience clarify your choice to go into medicine and to be a doctor? And the key thing, in all these little boxes that you fill out on your MCATs application, is to be reflecting on your experience rather than just describing your experience. In some cases you have to do a very little bit of description,. that people who aren't as familiar with the type of experience that you had can understand the milieu in which you were, in which you were, but in many cases we know... we know, for example, typically, what goes on in emergency rooms, and things like that.. here are some examples... um, and the little pictures are sort of an increasing... um, levels of a better experience box.. the first one, these are all three from real applications, and they're all from people who worked in emergency rooms. So, the first one says "I folded towels, stalked saline, gave blankets to patients" and this really doesn't tell us anything about what was learned, or how it helped you make a decision to go into medicine. The second one is a little bit better it's sort of a germinating idea which is why I used the particular smiley face that I used and says "Although I was mainly helping to stock and distribute needed supplies, I felt good just knowing I was helping someone.". that's got some reflection in it that lets us know that this is a fairly altruistic person. The third one says "While working in the ER, I noticed that even when doctors were busy, the time they took to explain what was happening to a patient relieved a lot of the patient's anxiety.". this again is somebody making an observation about how physicians function and how it affects the patients and that's a good reflection in an experience box. Here are two more that really don't tell us a lot about the applicant at all.. the first one describes a summer research project I won't read you the whole thing basically, "My project focused on the use of a tranposon mutagenesis system to generate tumors in mice, etc." And again, it's perfectly OK to say that but we also want to know what you learned from that experience, what was it like to have parts of your project not go well which is pretty typical, how did you feel when something did go well and came up with something new or a key finding or even not such a key finding but something that helped plan the next part of that research project? How did you feel working in the lab with other researchers? What were the interesting parts about interpersonal relationships that you learned working in the lab and all those kinds of things? The second one is about somebody who works at the Bailey-Boushay House and its a good idea to describe as this person did what the Bailey-Boushay House is for people who don't know that. This applicant went on to say "I volunteered 4 hours a week in the Adult Day Program taking orders for and serving a hot breakfast. During my time there I interacted and built relationships with participants, staff, and other volunteers.". we again don't learn anything about the applicant from this. We would have loved to hear what it was like getting to know people with HIV/AIDS What were their problems? What were their worries? How did you as an applicant feel about that? Did it make you think about death? Did it change any of your thinking with regards to HIV/AIDS? That would be all really really nice to know. Here is 2 examples of some really good experience boxes that really let us know a little about the applicant.. the first one says "What I find pleasing about pediatrics is the ability to shape a child's life early on. they can start out healthy and hopefully make good decisions later on in life. One must also be able to gain the parents trust in medical treatments as one is dealing with their most precious object. I also love working with kids and am very interested in pursuing pediatrics someday." That tells us a lot. Another one from a future surgeon who is a student who is shadowing a surgeon. "Later, I would scrub into the surgeries" No, actually this is not from a student shadowing this is somebody who is working in a surgeon's research lab, but decided to do a little bit of shadowing as well.. the initial part of that description box talked about the research project and then said "Later, I would scrub into the surgeries and witness the plan that was discussed in rounds. I found this very interesting to be able to see a patient in the morning, try out your plan of action during the day, and almost immediately see the results.". again this person was in the lab and then also shadowed the surgeon and then went to some of their rounds and also went into surgery.. really made a lot out of that research experience and also was able to reflect on it in such a way to show that what is often attractive to surgeons is that you see somebody, you plan out the action and then you get to see what happens pretty quickly.. this has to do with a little bit of sort of stereotypical surgeon personality of relatively immediate gratification. And I think that's... we see a bit of that when we read this and see that this person is saying they almost immediately see the results. These are phrases that we see in experience boxes that really leave us hanging and we don't know what to do with them. One is I did such and such experience and it really broadened my exposure and it stops there and we would like to know how did it broadened your exposure? The second is you know working with. and. or in this environment helped me understand the field of medicine. Well, helped you understand what? Again we want you to be reflective enough to be specific and let us know how you grew from this experience. The third is an just another example made me realize usually it doesn't end with anything specific unfortunately.. if you are going to use those words or those phrases be sure to keep going and give us the details. A lot of you have asked how do you fit all of your experiences onto your MCATs application and I would encourage you to group some things together. We sometimes see applications in which someone was on the Dean's List in the Fall Quarter, the Dean's List in the Winter quarter, and the Dean's List in the Spring quarter and they are all listed seperately which takes up a lot of boxes which you could have used to tell us something else. We also see people who describe their research project in one box and then they describe presenting it at an annual meeting of an organization in another box and the fact that they got honors for doing it and then the fact that it was published and all of these are incredibly important and we do need to know them and they show us the quality of your work but they can easily be put into one box. They don't need to be seperated. I would encourage you to group academic honors together. You could also group sports together. You don't have to have swim team in one box and enjoying playing tennis in another box and I don't know... something recreational that you like to do in a third box you could put those together and again not just put them together but tell us what you learned from doing these sports whether they were team sports or individual sports? Did you learn how to cooperate with other people, did you enjoy helping a group of people get to a final goal were you able to beat your own personal best things like that? And how did you feel about those things? Moving on to shadowing. Shadowing is not there as a hoop for you to jump through. We are putting out that we think you should have about 40 hours of shadowing and I'll come back to that in a minute. But basically if you are not interested in shadowing then you're probably not interested in becoming a physician and. it surprises us that people don't do this you really need to find out what the career is all about some of our applicants are children of physicians and they feel like they understand the field of medicine, but what you heard at the dinner table is not necessarily what it was like for your parent or parents to be in the trenches during the day. You don't know how they dealt with a difficult question from a patient. How they presented bad news to the patient. You know you might hear some of these stories at the dinner table, but it's not the same as being in the room and watching it happen.. it really gives you a good feel for whether again you're planning for the right career for yourself, you also sometimes develop a relationship with the person you are shadowing and they act as a role model for you which is nice we recommend a minimum of 40 hours we don't think that's. difficult to get that could be one hour a week for most of a year it could be a couple of half days here and there during a year and. over a period of two to three years in college you should be able to get 40 hours in without too much difficulty. I will say that we understand people have to work and we look for that in an application if we don't see a lot of shadowing. And again you can put all of your shadowing in one box or if you learn different things from different shadowing experiences then spread them out. We know that shadowing is not always easy to find and what we have suggested and some of this is on our website is first of all the Washington Academy of Family Practice has a site that will match you up with mentors. We also have collected a number of names of physicians who are willing to be shadowed that are not in primary care and we have those in our office. You can contact us and ask for that. You should ask your own personal physician assuming you have one if you can shadow him or her or friends if you have friends whose parents are physicians that's a good way to start and just do some networking see what you can find out and you probably want to shadow in the office, maybe on rounds, maybe in surgery, maybe on call, etc. Other good experiences that get you shadowing are emergency room scribe, type experience, working in the athletic training room if you are here at the University of Washington participating in the Summer Medical/Dental education through the office of Multicultural Affairs. And again at the U alternative spring break where you go to an under served community for a week and these last four things that I've mentioned are things that you learn about when you sign onto or join the prehealth groups that are on campus here at the university. AED for example there are about 50 prehealth groups they are all a little bit different, but they all have managed to get a lot of resources together to get people more exposure to the field of medicine which is great.. I encourage you to contact your fellow undergrad students and feel free to contact our office as well.. again why should you shadow these are some things I eluded to a few minutes ago but you want to on a day-to-day basis what seemed to make the doctor happy, what seemed frustrating, how did the doctor adapt his or her style, communication style, to the patient? When you were observing this relationship with the doctor and the patient how did the patient react to the doctor's behavior? Was that something you liked? Was it something you think you would have done differently, and if. how? And it is perfectly OK to put some of this in your reflection of your experience.. again, how did the doctor handle a tough situation when they couldn't solve a problem, they couldn't make a diagnosis, they couldn't come up with a cure? How did they allow for patient autonomy if the physician you are shadowing suggested something to the patient and the patient didn't want to do it. How did the physician react to that? Were they able to work with the patient to come to a common understanding? How do they deal with a patient who for instance is a smoker and just won't give it up? All those sorts of things again, how do you deal with not having enough time to give the patient the time you think they need? All those things are not things you learn from just talking to doctors or sitting round the dinner table with them. This slide is a little more oriented to people who are already in medical school and are trying to figure out what kind of doctor they want to be and I will say that we have data that shows that when we compare what students tell us on day one medical school with where they finally match at the end of medical school, about 80% of students changed their mind while they are in school.. this isn't even what they said at interviews. we don't put a lot of store into what you say at interview what you want to be. What we are mainly looking for again are your experiences consistent with what you think you want to be . That's what we are looking for at that time. But even so, you should know that there are differences as you are trying to form some preliminary plan of what kind of doctor you want to shadow for example, you might think about these things.. what are the ages and genders of the patients that are seen in a given type of office, and what kind of problems are they? Are they straight forward problems? Are they very complex problems? And what's more appealing to you? Is there a predominance of chronic problems or of acute problems? Which anatomic parts are involved? Is there a lot of variety or are you hanging out with a specialist that is fairly focused on one anatomic part? For example, a urologist, different fields of medicine also deal with a large body of knowledge with modern understanding of each area and that might be a primary care type of physician, or a limited body of knowledge with an in depth understanding and that would be any sort of specialist. Some people feel bored with the first, and some people feel bored with the second and. again it's a good idea to get exposed and see how your personality fits best. There are sort of corporate personalities of individual disciplines.. I can speak for orthopedics in particular because I am an orthopedic surgeon and just say that most orthopedists stereotypically are pretty friendly. They certainly have a compulsive bent because they are surgeons and the classic stereotype is that they're big dumb jocks. here I am to tell you that we can't always fit the stereotype. There are exceptions. You might also want to be giving some thought to possible lifestyles that you might lead as a physician. Whether you want be in a solo practice which those are probably not going to exist much longer but there certainly are solo practices particularly in rural environments and you have to decide whether you are willing to be a physician 24/7 or not. On the one hand, you really develop amazing relationships with your patients. On the other hand, you are pretty much on all the time. Or do you want to be in a group practice? Do you want the group to be small or large? Do you want it to be a multi-specialty group? And again, some of this you won't know until you've had more exposure but it is a good thing to think about this in advance. Are you interested enough in research and teaching that you want to consider a career in academic medicine? Do you think you want to be rural or urban? Do you want to work with under-served patients all of the time or some of the time? In other words, do you want to spend a month or two overseas in every given year and can you find a practice that would allow that? What's interesting, the reason I even bring this up... is that we have had applicants who say that they are interested in doing bench research and they want to practice in a rural environment, and they just don't go together And. when we hear you say that, we usually will send you a letter saying you are not ready yet, that you haven't really thought this through. You really should consider what would make you happy, rather than reimbursement and time and that sort of thing. And we realize that you are going to graduate with some debt but at the end of the day, you want to pick a career that you're going to love doing for the next 30-40 years. And if the career itself is challenging and interesting, maybe you don't like challenge but I like challenge,. if it's challenging and interesting and at the end of the day you're happy all the rest of this gonna is sort itself out. Going to personal statement, again the personal statement is meant to show us what your motivation is, why you are interested in medicine and then how are you in particular suited for medicine based on what you've discovered through your experiences.. we really want you to show us that you know this is the right career for you.. we expect you to change your mind again but you should have some knowledge and concept of the possibilities of who you might become and why you are suited for that.. one of the key things is to self assess. This is incredibly important for a physician because we are often in a situation where we are presented with something we don't know and. we have to recognize that. We have to be self-aware enough that we can say, "Boy, I've never seen this before. I am not sure what this is. What am I going to do about that?" And we will go into more detail about that next time when we talk about problem solving. It's also important that you recognize your own subconscious reaction to a patient, and how that may influence how you interact with that patient. And that's what I meant by biases. So, if for instance... let me use myself as an example. I have allergies to perfume, and if I walk into a patient room and somebody is heavily perfumed I typically want to get out of that room as fast as I can. And at the same time I don't want to short change the patient. I have to decide whether to just do the best I can and get out of there quickly or explain the situation to the patient, go out and get a mask, come back in and try again. But again that will influence just that little, it's not even a bias, its an allergy. But it influences my willingness to stay in the room and interact with that patient. And other people have biases against certain appearances, certain smells... any number of things of things that you may not even be aware you have.. the more you can self assess the better. It's a good idea to be able to assess your own strengths and areas for improvement and also what your own learning style is because to be a physician you have to enjoy lifelong learning and self propelled lifelong learning. People are not going to be telling you what chapter to read and what book to look up. You are going to have to do that yourself.. if you need to be directed this may not be the right field for you.. here is an exercise you can do, and this comes from, a variation of this comes from, a book written by Harvel Hendricks and we posted some of his self assessment questions on the website.. one of the ways to do this is to make a circle, or an ellipse in the case of the one on the left, or you can do this in a list form and basically you want to list all the things that you are really good at in the positive section. You want to list things that make you happy and bring you joy. In the minus section you want to list things that drive you crazy, that frustrate you, that you're not. good at and that people tell you you need to work on. And that's a good idea to do the same thing about medicine. Clearly medicine is not all positive, there are some negatives, there are frustrations, there are things like paperwork people find frustrating, or not enough time to spend with your patient, or many of the things we've already mentioned. Not being able to cure an illness, etc. And the more exposure you've had, the more balanced your perspective on medicine is going to be.. you either make lists or fill out these circles and then you decide whether the negatives of medicine are things that don't match well with you or your own negatives.. for example if you listed a number of highly frustrating things on the negative side of medicine and in your own personality you've discovered that you frustrate very easily and you don't tolerate frustration well then this is not the right career for you. On the other hand if it turns out that you really rise to a challenge and that you consider these negatives of medicine as challenges rather than frustrations then you are on the right track. I also just want to make a comment on the side. I've been using this little symbol with the thumbs up in many of my slides. And I know that in different cultures hand signals mean different things. hopefully I am not offending anybody. If I am please excuse me. These are just readily available on the web. I use them quite a bit.. here in the room let's just talk about another exercise. Call out to me some characteristics you think a good doctor should have. Anything. Yeah. Patience. With a c e you mean. Yeah. P a t i e n c e yeah. Yes that's a good one. OK. Patience. Yes over there. Good listening skills. That's good. Not being judgmental is another one. OK.. you could do this yourself at home. You could do this with your friends. You might lose a few friends. I am sure your friends are kind of tired of having you being. obsessed with getting into medical school. But at any rate it can be something that you can do with your friends. just sit around or with your family and see how many characteristics you can tick off that you would like to have in your own doctor. And then look back at your own experiences and see how they might show that you have these characteristics. And again make sure that you make that obvious to the person reading your application.. we hope that you will incorporate all these findings from these exercises and from your experiences into your personal statement. Pick a few of these and show us examples and tell us how you are suited to medicine. Which experiences or people have had positive influences or even negative influences. The third thing I want to talk about a little bit in a personal statement and I alluded to this last time is don't make us feel like we're the fourth person you asked to the prom. And let me explain that a little bit. A lot of people do a chronological statement and I'm gonna show you some examples, but what I mean by this... when you were in high school maybe or something, you may have known somebody that asked your best friend to the prom which was not to smart but your best friend said no and then they asked you to the prom next or maybe they even asked someone else in between and then they asked you and by the time they got to you, you knew, because word gets around, that you were the third or fourth person they'd asked and. you were a little annoyed, disappointed, but you know you might have gone to the dance anyway because you really wanted to go. But in the case of your medical school application you want to let the reader know that you are excited about going to medical school and that this is a conscious, purposeful decision. It is not just the next best alternative to something that you were doing before but it didn't work out for you. Now I am going to show you some examples. It's also important in your personal statement to let us know why you think you will be a good doctor not why you think you will be a good medical student. They are a little bit different. When sometimes we have people say I'm going to be a good student because I help other people in class and I work hard and that sort of thing. Generally you want to start off with why you are excited about medicine and then if you need to tell us some negative experiences you have had it is fine to do that but you should start off with the positive and then go into the compare and contrast mode. here is an example of the fourth date to the prom example I tried engineering but the applicability seemed too distant. I tried research but I missed working with people. Medicine will allow me to combine problem solving and discovery with working with people. the next one, also from somebody's application, says pretty much the same thing, but in a more positive way. "Medicine appeals to me because helping people and solving puzzles are both stimulating to me." A few more examples. These are all real. The first one "I have spent my entire life training to be a doctor. All of my toys and friends have been treated by me I am a doctor at heart, that is why I want to go to medical school." Well that really doesn't really tell us anything about the person or what their attributes are or why they think they're gonna be good at it. Here is another very chronological description that again does not tell us anything about the applicant. And I'll sort of paraphrase it "I entered the university with the intention of pursuing a degree in mathematics, my main interest in high school. My first math class was Linear Algebra. It was interesting, etc., etc., etc. This led me through a number of inspiring courses from Physiology to Advanced Organic Chemistry and ultimately to my major in biochemistry which combines both my interests in biology, etc., etc. We can get this list of classes from the transcript and again it really doesn't tell us anything about why medicine it just tells us about the courses that this person took in college.. here's some better ones. And these are excerpted again from real applications. "The prospect of death and the blessing of life occur daily before the final diagnoses. Unshakably moving forward in such slippery conditions, I learned, is a doctor's gift.. this person has done some reflecting and again shows this in the personal statement. Here's another one "Reflecting on my college experiences as well as my current ones. I found that my life seemed most meaningful... when I was working to help a person overcome something beyond his or her control. And another one "Through confronting such a harsh, unforgiving reality. I found a deep desire to both better understand nature's actions and to assist in medical problems like Alice's. After learning that current medical research has found no cure for many illnesses such as Alice's, I found myself on PubMed for hours learning about the research." And what this showed us, this last one, is here is somebody who is very much a self-propelled learner who has curiosity. This person was just shadowing someone and happened to get to see a patient that was had a terminal illness that was a little bit of an unusual illness and. this person decided to do some more research into that just to learn more about the disease.. that told us a lot about that person. Which was very helpful. And I think that's all for tonight and. the next session is gonna be specifically about the interview And we'll now open it up to questions. Feel free to raise your hand and/or write something down and pass it down.
UW Medicine Town Hall 2 - Motivation
Hi. Welcome to our second town hall meeting. Last time we spoke about application in general, and particularly about MCATs, grades, and letters of recommendation. Tonight we are going to talk about your experiences that you list in your MCATs application, shadowing, and writing your personal statement. And the whole point of all this is to help you realize whether you're interested in medicine, as a career, for the right reasons and clarify for yourself and for us what your motivation is.. let's talk about experiences a little bit. First of all the value of experience is finding out what the career is all about, to clarify and validate your initial impressions, and learn about the dark side of medicine. And what we mean by that are things that are things that are frustrating to doctors, things that are difficult for doctors, it's not all as easy or noble as you might think. Experience will help you test your level of commitment to the field. If you find that you are really not enjoying yourself as you have experiences then you may want to change your mind. So, obviously, experiences help you discover what you like and dislike, they help you improve the articulation of your own goals, and enhance your motivation. And clearly the more experiences you have the better you understand other people and other cultures. And when we say other cultures you should realize that other cultures can be a few blocks away from where you live. You don't have to go to Botswana or some place like that to appreciate other cultures. But the more people you've had contact with and the more outside your own comfort zone you can get and outside your own neighborhood, the better you will be able to relate to your patients. We don't want you to choose an experience to get into medical school. People always ask us the question... "Should I work in a nursing home... or should I work in an emergency room... or should I volunteer for this or volunteer for that?" You really should be choosing an experience because it appeals to you or it is important to you, not because you think it is going to help you get in. The other thing that it is important to consider is you should be choosing experiences that are consistent with what your present goals are.. if you think that you want to be a surgeon, you should be choosing experiences that would get you some exposure to surgery. Either volunteer at a recovery room or shadowing a surgeon or even working at a desk in a surgery center, something like that. One of the things that we tell the committee to look for in an application, and also in an interview is, that somebody's experiences are consistent with their goals.. if someone comes in and they've shadowed a radiologist, and they've shadowed a neurosurgeon and they come in and tell us that they want to be a primary care doctor, we are a little suspicious they are just saying that because, for some reason, they think that is what we want to hear. And remember that our school is looking for primary care doctors as well as specialists and future academicians.. there is room for everybody. And you should be choosing an experience that is something you want to explore for yourself. When I think about the type of experiences you could have, in my mind I divided them up into these three areas. One are service type experiences, where you're in a situation where basically, you are going to meet other peoples needs. And they don't have to be medical service experiences. A lot of our applicants have have worked in restaurants, which have a lot of things in common with the field of medicine, in that you have a wide ranging clientele, they can be pretty demanding, or not, you have to deal with unhappy people who don't think they are getting what they should be getting, and things like that,. there is a lot of transfer there and that's fine. A second type of experience might be working on some sort of team that has a common goal, and this could be a research team, or it could be a sports team, but again just getting a feel for what it's like to work with other people toward a common goal because that's what you will be doing. You will definitely be working in a medical team with other physicians, nurse practitioners, physicians assistants, nurses, medical assistants, all kinds of different people.. you have to see how you feel about working on a team. There are other types of experiences where the main goal of the experience is for the greater good and these, typically, are community type experiences and again they don't have to be health related but certainly can be health related. The key thing from all experiences is to not only figure out, for yourself, what did you learn from each experience, but to let us know what you learned. You need to make your application, I think I said this last week, you need to make your application clear enough that it's easy for the people, screening the application or planning to interview you, to find what they're looking for, and what we want to know is what did you learn from all your experiences. That's, essentially, a sign of maturity that you can reflect on what you learned from everything you did whether it was positive or negative.. we want you to be thinking about what you did and what you saw, and it's a good idea to write things down as soon after a given experience as you can, whether it is the end of the day, or the end of the week. I would strongly encourage you to try journaling. If you do that as you go along, first of all you will see your own personal growth, hopefully, and second of all it will be easier for you to go back and create the little mini essays that you put in your experience boxes. The experience boxes can be like miniature personal statements basically.. we want to know for each experience, how did the experience clarify your choice to go into medicine and to be a doctor? And the key thing, in all these little boxes that you fill out on your MCATs application, is to be reflecting on your experience rather than just describing your experience. In some cases you have to do a very little bit of description,. that people who aren't as familiar with the type of experience that you had can understand the milieu in which you were, in which you were, but in many cases we know... we know, for example, typically, what goes on in emergency rooms, and things like that.. here are some examples... um, and the little pictures are sort of an increasing... um, levels of a better experience box.. the first one, these are all three from real applications, and they're all from people who worked in emergency rooms. So, the first one says "I folded towels, stalked saline, gave blankets to patients" and this really doesn't tell us anything about what was learned, or how it helped you make a decision to go into medicine. The second one is a little bit better it's sort of a germinating idea which is why I used the particular smiley face that I used and says "Although I was mainly helping to stock and distribute needed supplies, I felt good just knowing I was helping someone.". that's got some reflection in it that lets us know that this is a fairly altruistic person. The third one says "While working in the ER, I noticed that even when doctors were busy, the time they took to explain what was happening to a patient relieved a lot of the patient's anxiety.". this again is somebody making an observation about how physicians function and how it affects the patients and that's a good reflection in an experience box. Here are two more that really don't tell us a lot about the applicant at all.. the first one describes a summer research project I won't read you the whole thing basically, "My project focused on the use of a tranposon mutagenesis system to generate tumors in mice, etc." And again, it's perfectly OK to say that but we also want to know what you learned from that experience, what was it like to have parts of your project not go well which is pretty typical, how did you feel when something did go well and came up with something new or a key finding or even not such a key finding but something that helped plan the next part of that research project? How did you feel working in the lab with other researchers? What were the interesting parts about interpersonal relationships that you learned working in the lab and all those kinds of things? The second one is about somebody who works at the Bailey-Boushay House and its a good idea to describe as this person did what the Bailey-Boushay House is for people who don't know that. This applicant went on to say "I volunteered 4 hours a week in the Adult Day Program taking orders for and serving a hot breakfast. During my time there I interacted and built relationships with participants, staff, and other volunteers.". we again don't learn anything about the applicant from this. We would have loved to hear what it was like getting to know people with HIV/AIDS What were their problems? What were their worries? How did you as an applicant feel about that? Did it make you think about death? Did it change any of your thinking with regards to HIV/AIDS? That would be all really really nice to know. Here is 2 examples of some really good experience boxes that really let us know a little about the applicant.. the first one says "What I find pleasing about pediatrics is the ability to shape a child's life early on. they can start out healthy and hopefully make good decisions later on in life. One must also be able to gain the parents trust in medical treatments as one is dealing with their most precious object. I also love working with kids and am very interested in pursuing pediatrics someday." That tells us a lot. Another one from a future surgeon who is a student who is shadowing a surgeon. "Later, I would scrub into the surgeries" No, actually this is not from a student shadowing this is somebody who is working in a surgeon's research lab, but decided to do a little bit of shadowing as well.. the initial part of that description box talked about the research project and then said "Later, I would scrub into the surgeries and witness the plan that was discussed in rounds. I found this very interesting to be able to see a patient in the morning, try out your plan of action during the day, and almost immediately see the results.". again this person was in the lab and then also shadowed the surgeon and then went to some of their rounds and also went into surgery.. really made a lot out of that research experience and also was able to reflect on it in such a way to show that what is often attractive to surgeons is that you see somebody, you plan out the action and then you get to see what happens pretty quickly.. this has to do with a little bit of sort of stereotypical surgeon personality of relatively immediate gratification. And I think that's... we see a bit of that when we read this and see that this person is saying they almost immediately see the results. These are phrases that we see in experience boxes that really leave us hanging and we don't know what to do with them. One is I did such and such experience and it really broadened my exposure and it stops there and we would like to know how did it broadened your exposure? The second is you know working with. and. or in this environment helped me understand the field of medicine. Well, helped you understand what? Again we want you to be reflective enough to be specific and let us know how you grew from this experience. The third is an just another example made me realize usually it doesn't end with anything specific unfortunately.. if you are going to use those words or those phrases be sure to keep going and give us the details. A lot of you have asked how do you fit all of your experiences onto your MCATs application and I would encourage you to group some things together. We sometimes see applications in which someone was on the Dean's List in the Fall Quarter, the Dean's List in the Winter quarter, and the Dean's List in the Spring quarter and they are all listed seperately which takes up a lot of boxes which you could have used to tell us something else. We also see people who describe their research project in one box and then they describe presenting it at an annual meeting of an organization in another box and the fact that they got honors for doing it and then the fact that it was published and all of these are incredibly important and we do need to know them and they show us the quality of your work but they can easily be put into one box. They don't need to be seperated. I would encourage you to group academic honors together. You could also group sports together. You don't have to have swim team in one box and enjoying playing tennis in another box and I don't know... something recreational that you like to do in a third box you could put those together and again not just put them together but tell us what you learned from doing these sports whether they were team sports or individual sports? Did you learn how to cooperate with other people, did you enjoy helping a group of people get to a final goal were you able to beat your own personal best things like that? And how did you feel about those things? Moving on to shadowing. Shadowing is not there as a hoop for you to jump through. We are putting out that we think you should have about 40 hours of shadowing and I'll come back to that in a minute. But basically if you are not interested in shadowing then you're probably not interested in becoming a physician and. it surprises us that people don't do this you really need to find out what the career is all about some of our applicants are children of physicians and they feel like they understand the field of medicine, but what you heard at the dinner table is not necessarily what it was like for your parent or parents to be in the trenches during the day. You don't know how they dealt with a difficult question from a patient. How they presented bad news to the patient. You know you might hear some of these stories at the dinner table, but it's not the same as being in the room and watching it happen.. it really gives you a good feel for whether again you're planning for the right career for yourself, you also sometimes develop a relationship with the person you are shadowing and they act as a role model for you which is nice we recommend a minimum of 40 hours we don't think that's. difficult to get that could be one hour a week for most of a year it could be a couple of half days here and there during a year and. over a period of two to three years in college you should be able to get 40 hours in without too much difficulty. I will say that we understand people have to work and we look for that in an application if we don't see a lot of shadowing. And again you can put all of your shadowing in one box or if you learn different things from different shadowing experiences then spread them out. We know that shadowing is not always easy to find and what we have suggested and some of this is on our website is first of all the Washington Academy of Family Practice has a site that will match you up with mentors. We also have collected a number of names of physicians who are willing to be shadowed that are not in primary care and we have those in our office. You can contact us and ask for that. You should ask your own personal physician assuming you have one if you can shadow him or her or friends if you have friends whose parents are physicians that's a good way to start and just do some networking see what you can find out and you probably want to shadow in the office, maybe on rounds, maybe in surgery, maybe on call, etc. Other good experiences that get you shadowing are emergency room scribe, type experience, working in the athletic training room if you are here at the University of Washington participating in the Summer Medical/Dental education through the office of Multicultural Affairs. And again at the U alternative spring break where you go to an under served community for a week and these last four things that I've mentioned are things that you learn about when you sign onto or join the prehealth groups that are on campus here at the university. AED for example there are about 50 prehealth groups they are all a little bit different, but they all have managed to get a lot of resources together to get people more exposure to the field of medicine which is great.. I encourage you to contact your fellow undergrad students and feel free to contact our office as well.. again why should you shadow these are some things I eluded to a few minutes ago but you want to on a day-to-day basis what seemed to make the doctor happy, what seemed frustrating, how did the doctor adapt his or her style, communication style, to the patient? When you were observing this relationship with the doctor and the patient how did the patient react to the doctor's behavior? Was that something you liked? Was it something you think you would have done differently, and if. how? And it is perfectly OK to put some of this in your reflection of your experience.. again, how did the doctor handle a tough situation when they couldn't solve a problem, they couldn't make a diagnosis, they couldn't come up with a cure? How did they allow for patient autonomy if the physician you are shadowing suggested something to the patient and the patient didn't want to do it. How did the physician react to that? Were they able to work with the patient to come to a common understanding? How do they deal with a patient who for instance is a smoker and just won't give it up? All those sorts of things again, how do you deal with not having enough time to give the patient the time you think they need? All those things are not things you learn from just talking to doctors or sitting round the dinner table with them. This slide is a little more oriented to people who are already in medical school and are trying to figure out what kind of doctor they want to be and I will say that we have data that shows that when we compare what students tell us on day one medical school with where they finally match at the end of medical school, about 80% of students changed their mind while they are in school.. this isn't even what they said at interviews. we don't put a lot of store into what you say at interview what you want to be. What we are mainly looking for again are your experiences consistent with what you think you want to be . That's what we are looking for at that time. But even so, you should know that there are differences as you are trying to form some preliminary plan of what kind of doctor you want to shadow for example, you might think about these things.. what are the ages and genders of the patients that are seen in a given type of office, and what kind of problems are they? Are they straight forward problems? Are they very complex problems? And what's more appealing to you? Is there a predominance of chronic problems or of acute problems? Which anatomic parts are involved? Is there a lot of variety or are you hanging out with a specialist that is fairly focused on one anatomic part? For example, a urologist, different fields of medicine also deal with a large body of knowledge with modern understanding of each area and that might be a primary care type of physician, or a limited body of knowledge with an in depth understanding and that would be any sort of specialist. Some people feel bored with the first, and some people feel bored with the second and. again it's a good idea to get exposed and see how your personality fits best. There are sort of corporate personalities of individual disciplines.. I can speak for orthopedics in particular because I am an orthopedic surgeon and just say that most orthopedists stereotypically are pretty friendly. They certainly have a compulsive bent because they are surgeons and the classic stereotype is that they're big dumb jocks. here I am to tell you that we can't always fit the stereotype. There are exceptions. You might also want to be giving some thought to possible lifestyles that you might lead as a physician. Whether you want be in a solo practice which those are probably not going to exist much longer but there certainly are solo practices particularly in rural environments and you have to decide whether you are willing to be a physician 24/7 or not. On the one hand, you really develop amazing relationships with your patients. On the other hand, you are pretty much on all the time. Or do you want to be in a group practice? Do you want the group to be small or large? Do you want it to be a multi-specialty group? And again, some of this you won't know until you've had more exposure but it is a good thing to think about this in advance. Are you interested enough in research and teaching that you want to consider a career in academic medicine? Do you think you want to be rural or urban? Do you want to work with under-served patients all of the time or some of the time? In other words, do you want to spend a month or two overseas in every given year and can you find a practice that would allow that? What's interesting, the reason I even bring this up... is that we have had applicants who say that they are interested in doing bench research and they want to practice in a rural environment, and they just don't go together And. when we hear you say that, we usually will send you a letter saying you are not ready yet, that you haven't really thought this through. You really should consider what would make you happy, rather than reimbursement and time and that sort of thing. And we realize that you are going to graduate with some debt but at the end of the day, you want to pick a career that you're going to love doing for the next 30-40 years. And if the career itself is challenging and interesting, maybe you don't like challenge but I like challenge,. if it's challenging and interesting and at the end of the day you're happy all the rest of this gonna is sort itself out. Going to personal statement, again the personal statement is meant to show us what your motivation is, why you are interested in medicine and then how are you in particular suited for medicine based on what you've discovered through your experiences.. we really want you to show us that you know this is the right career for you.. we expect you to change your mind again but you should have some knowledge and concept of the possibilities of who you might become and why you are suited for that.. one of the key things is to self assess. This is incredibly important for a physician because we are often in a situation where we are presented with something we don't know and. we have to recognize that. We have to be self-aware enough that we can say, "Boy, I've never seen this before. I am not sure what this is. What am I going to do about that?" And we will go into more detail about that next time when we talk about problem solving. It's also important that you recognize your own subconscious reaction to a patient, and how that may influence how you interact with that patient. And that's what I meant by biases. So, if for instance... let me use myself as an example. I have allergies to perfume, and if I walk into a patient room and somebody is heavily perfumed I typically want to get out of that room as fast as I can. And at the same time I don't want to short change the patient. I have to decide whether to just do the best I can and get out of there quickly or explain the situation to the patient, go out and get a mask, come back in and try again. But again that will influence just that little, it's not even a bias, its an allergy. But it influences my willingness to stay in the room and interact with that patient. And other people have biases against certain appearances, certain smells... any number of things of things that you may not even be aware you have.. the more you can self assess the better. It's a good idea to be able to assess your own strengths and areas for improvement and also what your own learning style is because to be a physician you have to enjoy lifelong learning and self propelled lifelong learning. People are not going to be telling you what chapter to read and what book to look up. You are going to have to do that yourself.. if you need to be directed this may not be the right field for you.. here is an exercise you can do, and this comes from, a variation of this comes from, a book written by Harvel Hendricks and we posted some of his self assessment questions on the website.. one of the ways to do this is to make a circle, or an ellipse in the case of the one on the left, or you can do this in a list form and basically you want to list all the things that you are really good at in the positive section. You want to list things that make you happy and bring you joy. In the minus section you want to list things that drive you crazy, that frustrate you, that you're not. good at and that people tell you you need to work on. And that's a good idea to do the same thing about medicine. Clearly medicine is not all positive, there are some negatives, there are frustrations, there are things like paperwork people find frustrating, or not enough time to spend with your patient, or many of the things we've already mentioned. Not being able to cure an illness, etc. And the more exposure you've had, the more balanced your perspective on medicine is going to be.. you either make lists or fill out these circles and then you decide whether the negatives of medicine are things that don't match well with you or your own negatives.. for example if you listed a number of highly frustrating things on the negative side of medicine and in your own personality you've discovered that you frustrate very easily and you don't tolerate frustration well then this is not the right career for you. On the other hand if it turns out that you really rise to a challenge and that you consider these negatives of medicine as challenges rather than frustrations then you are on the right track. I also just want to make a comment on the side. I've been using this little symbol with the thumbs up in many of my slides. And I know that in different cultures hand signals mean different things. hopefully I am not offending anybody. If I am please excuse me. These are just readily available on the web. I use them quite a bit.. here in the room let's just talk about another exercise. Call out to me some characteristics you think a good doctor should have. Anything. Yeah. Patience. With a c e you mean. Yeah. P a t i e n c e yeah. Yes that's a good one. OK. Patience. Yes over there. Good listening skills. That's good. Not being judgmental is another one. OK.. you could do this yourself at home. You could do this with your friends. You might lose a few friends. I am sure your friends are kind of tired of having you being. obsessed with getting into medical school. But at any rate it can be something that you can do with your friends. just sit around or with your family and see how many characteristics you can tick off that you would like to have in your own doctor. And then look back at your own experiences and see how they might show that you have these characteristics. And again make sure that you make that obvious to the person reading your application.. we hope that you will incorporate all these findings from these exercises and from your experiences into your personal statement. Pick a few of these and show us examples and tell us how you are suited to medicine. Which experiences or people have had positive influences or even negative influences. The third thing I want to talk about a little bit in a personal statement and I alluded to this last time is don't make us feel like we're the fourth person you asked to the prom. And let me explain that a little bit. A lot of people do a chronological statement and I'm gonna show you some examples, but what I mean by this... when you were in high school maybe or something, you may have known somebody that asked your best friend to the prom which was not to smart but your best friend said no and then they asked you to the prom next or maybe they even asked someone else in between and then they asked you and by the time they got to you, you knew, because word gets around, that you were the third or fourth person they'd asked and. you were a little annoyed, disappointed, but you know you might have gone to the dance anyway because you really wanted to go. But in the case of your medical school application you want to let the reader know that you are excited about going to medical school and that this is a conscious, purposeful decision. It is not just the next best alternative to something that you were doing before but it didn't work out for you. Now I am going to show you some examples. It's also important in your personal statement to let us know why you think you will be a good doctor not why you think you will be a good medical student. They are a little bit different. When sometimes we have people say I'm going to be a good student because I help other people in class and I work hard and that sort of thing. Generally you want to start off with why you are excited about medicine and then if you need to tell us some negative experiences you have had it is fine to do that but you should start off with the positive and then go into the compare and contrast mode. here is an example of the fourth date to the prom example I tried engineering but the applicability seemed too distant. I tried research but I missed working with people. Medicine will allow me to combine problem solving and discovery with working with people. the next one, also from somebody's application, says pretty much the same thing, but in a more positive way. "Medicine appeals to me because helping people and solving puzzles are both stimulating to me." A few more examples. These are all real. The first one "I have spent my entire life training to be a doctor. All of my toys and friends have been treated by me I am a doctor at heart, that is why I want to go to medical school." Well that really doesn't really tell us anything about the person or what their attributes are or why they think they're gonna be good at it. Here is another very chronological description that again does not tell us anything about the applicant. And I'll sort of paraphrase it "I entered the university with the intention of pursuing a degree in mathematics, my main interest in high school. My first math class was Linear Algebra. It was interesting, etc., etc., etc. This led me through a number of inspiring courses from Physiology to Advanced Organic Chemistry and ultimately to my major in biochemistry which combines both my interests in biology, etc., etc. We can get this list of classes from the transcript and again it really doesn't tell us anything about why medicine it just tells us about the courses that this person took in college.. here's some better ones. And these are excerpted again from real applications. "The prospect of death and the blessing of life occur daily before the final diagnoses. Unshakably moving forward in such slippery conditions, I learned, is a doctor's gift.. this person has done some reflecting and again shows this in the personal statement. Here's another one "Reflecting on my college experiences as well as my current ones. I found that my life seemed most meaningful... when I was working to help a person overcome something beyond his or her control. And another one "Through confronting such a harsh, unforgiving reality. I found a deep desire to both better understand nature's actions and to assist in medical problems like Alice's. After learning that current medical research has found no cure for many illnesses such as Alice's, I found myself on PubMed for hours learning about the research." And what this showed us, this last one, is here is somebody who is very much a self-propelled learner who has curiosity. This person was just shadowing someone and happened to get to see a patient that was had a terminal illness that was a little bit of an unusual illness and. this person decided to do some more research into that just to learn more about the disease.. that told us a lot about that person. Which was very helpful. And I think that's all for tonight and. the next session is gonna be specifically about the interview And we'll now open it up to questions. Feel free to raise your hand and/or write something down and pass it down.
UW Medicine Town Hall 2 - Motivation
Hi. Welcome to our second town hall meeting. Last time we spoke about application in general, and particularly about MCATs, grades, and letters of recommendation. Tonight we are going to talk about your experiences that you list in your MCATs application, shadowing, and writing your personal statement. And the whole point of all this is to help you realize whether you're interested in medicine, as a career, for the right reasons and clarify for yourself and for us what your motivation is.. let's talk about experiences a little bit. First of all the value of experience is finding out what the career is all about, to clarify and validate your initial impressions, and learn about the dark side of medicine. And what we mean by that are things that are things that are frustrating to doctors, things that are difficult for doctors, it's not all as easy or noble as you might think. Experience will help you test your level of commitment to the field. If you find that you are really not enjoying yourself as you have experiences then you may want to change your mind. So, obviously, experiences help you discover what you like and dislike, they help you improve the articulation of your own goals, and enhance your motivation. And clearly the more experiences you have the better you understand other people and other cultures. And when we say other cultures you should realize that other cultures can be a few blocks away from where you live. You don't have to go to Botswana or some place like that to appreciate other cultures. But the more people you've had contact with and the more outside your own comfort zone you can get and outside your own neighborhood, the better you will be able to relate to your patients. We don't want you to choose an experience to get into medical school. People always ask us the question... "Should I work in a nursing home... or should I work in an emergency room... or should I volunteer for this or volunteer for that?" You really should be choosing an experience because it appeals to you or it is important to you, not because you think it is going to help you get in. The other thing that it is important to consider is you should be choosing experiences that are consistent with what your present goals are.. if you think that you want to be a surgeon, you should be choosing experiences that would get you some exposure to surgery. Either volunteer at a recovery room or shadowing a surgeon or even working at a desk in a surgery center, something like that. One of the things that we tell the committee to look for in an application, and also in an interview is, that somebody's experiences are consistent with their goals.. if someone comes in and they've shadowed a radiologist, and they've shadowed a neurosurgeon and they come in and tell us that they want to be a primary care doctor, we are a little suspicious they are just saying that because, for some reason, they think that is what we want to hear. And remember that our school is looking for primary care doctors as well as specialists and future academicians.. there is room for everybody. And you should be choosing an experience that is something you want to explore for yourself. When I think about the type of experiences you could have, in my mind I divided them up into these three areas. One are service type experiences, where you're in a situation where basically, you are going to meet other peoples needs. And they don't have to be medical service experiences. A lot of our applicants have have worked in restaurants, which have a lot of things in common with the field of medicine, in that you have a wide ranging clientele, they can be pretty demanding, or not, you have to deal with unhappy people who don't think they are getting what they should be getting, and things like that,. there is a lot of transfer there and that's fine. A second type of experience might be working on some sort of team that has a common goal, and this could be a research team, or it could be a sports team, but again just getting a feel for what it's like to work with other people toward a common goal because that's what you will be doing. You will definitely be working in a medical team with other physicians, nurse practitioners, physicians assistants, nurses, medical assistants, all kinds of different people.. you have to see how you feel about working on a team. There are other types of experiences where the main goal of the experience is for the greater good and these, typically, are community type experiences and again they don't have to be health related but certainly can be health related. The key thing from all experiences is to not only figure out, for yourself, what did you learn from each experience, but to let us know what you learned. You need to make your application, I think I said this last week, you need to make your application clear enough that it's easy for the people, screening the application or planning to interview you, to find what they're looking for, and what we want to know is what did you learn from all your experiences. That's, essentially, a sign of maturity that you can reflect on what you learned from everything you did whether it was positive or negative.. we want you to be thinking about what you did and what you saw, and it's a good idea to write things down as soon after a given experience as you can, whether it is the end of the day, or the end of the week. I would strongly encourage you to try journaling. If you do that as you go along, first of all you will see your own personal growth, hopefully, and second of all it will be easier for you to go back and create the little mini essays that you put in your experience boxes. The experience boxes can be like miniature personal statements basically.. we want to know for each experience, how did the experience clarify your choice to go into medicine and to be a doctor? And the key thing, in all these little boxes that you fill out on your MCATs application, is to be reflecting on your experience rather than just describing your experience. In some cases you have to do a very little bit of description,. that people who aren't as familiar with the type of experience that you had can understand the milieu in which you were, in which you were, but in many cases we know... we know, for example, typically, what goes on in emergency rooms, and things like that.. here are some examples... um, and the little pictures are sort of an increasing... um, levels of a better experience box.. the first one, these are all three from real applications, and they're all from people who worked in emergency rooms. So, the first one says "I folded towels, stalked saline, gave blankets to patients" and this really doesn't tell us anything about what was learned, or how it helped you make a decision to go into medicine. The second one is a little bit better it's sort of a germinating idea which is why I used the particular smiley face that I used and says "Although I was mainly helping to stock and distribute needed supplies, I felt good just knowing I was helping someone.". that's got some reflection in it that lets us know that this is a fairly altruistic person. The third one says "While working in the ER, I noticed that even when doctors were busy, the time they took to explain what was happening to a patient relieved a lot of the patient's anxiety.". this again is somebody making an observation about how physicians function and how it affects the patients and that's a good reflection in an experience box. Here are two more that really don't tell us a lot about the applicant at all.. the first one describes a summer research project I won't read you the whole thing basically, "My project focused on the use of a tranposon mutagenesis system to generate tumors in mice, etc." And again, it's perfectly OK to say that but we also want to know what you learned from that experience, what was it like to have parts of your project not go well which is pretty typical, how did you feel when something did go well and came up with something new or a key finding or even not such a key finding but something that helped plan the next part of that research project? How did you feel working in the lab with other researchers? What were the interesting parts about interpersonal relationships that you learned working in the lab and all those kinds of things? The second one is about somebody who works at the Bailey-Boushay House and its a good idea to describe as this person did what the Bailey-Boushay House is for people who don't know that. This applicant went on to say "I volunteered 4 hours a week in the Adult Day Program taking orders for and serving a hot breakfast. During my time there I interacted and built relationships with participants, staff, and other volunteers.". we again don't learn anything about the applicant from this. We would have loved to hear what it was like getting to know people with HIV/AIDS What were their problems? What were their worries? How did you as an applicant feel about that? Did it make you think about death? Did it change any of your thinking with regards to HIV/AIDS? That would be all really really nice to know. Here is 2 examples of some really good experience boxes that really let us know a little about the applicant.. the first one says "What I find pleasing about pediatrics is the ability to shape a child's life early on. they can start out healthy and hopefully make good decisions later on in life. One must also be able to gain the parents trust in medical treatments as one is dealing with their most precious object. I also love working with kids and am very interested in pursuing pediatrics someday." That tells us a lot. Another one from a future surgeon who is a student who is shadowing a surgeon. "Later, I would scrub into the surgeries" No, actually this is not from a student shadowing this is somebody who is working in a surgeon's research lab, but decided to do a little bit of shadowing as well.. the initial part of that description box talked about the research project and then said "Later, I would scrub into the surgeries and witness the plan that was discussed in rounds. I found this very interesting to be able to see a patient in the morning, try out your plan of action during the day, and almost immediately see the results.". again this person was in the lab and then also shadowed the surgeon and then went to some of their rounds and also went into surgery.. really made a lot out of that research experience and also was able to reflect on it in such a way to show that what is often attractive to surgeons is that you see somebody, you plan out the action and then you get to see what happens pretty quickly.. this has to do with a little bit of sort of stereotypical surgeon personality of relatively immediate gratification. And I think that's... we see a bit of that when we read this and see that this person is saying they almost immediately see the results. These are phrases that we see in experience boxes that really leave us hanging and we don't know what to do with them. One is I did such and such experience and it really broadened my exposure and it stops there and we would like to know how did it broadened your exposure? The second is you know working with. and. or in this environment helped me understand the field of medicine. Well, helped you understand what? Again we want you to be reflective enough to be specific and let us know how you grew from this experience. The third is an just another example made me realize usually it doesn't end with anything specific unfortunately.. if you are going to use those words or those phrases be sure to keep going and give us the details. A lot of you have asked how do you fit all of your experiences onto your MCATs application and I would encourage you to group some things together. We sometimes see applications in which someone was on the Dean's List in the Fall Quarter, the Dean's List in the Winter quarter, and the Dean's List in the Spring quarter and they are all listed seperately which takes up a lot of boxes which you could have used to tell us something else. We also see people who describe their research project in one box and then they describe presenting it at an annual meeting of an organization in another box and the fact that they got honors for doing it and then the fact that it was published and all of these are incredibly important and we do need to know them and they show us the quality of your work but they can easily be put into one box. They don't need to be seperated. I would encourage you to group academic honors together. You could also group sports together. You don't have to have swim team in one box and enjoying playing tennis in another box and I don't know... something recreational that you like to do in a third box you could put those together and again not just put them together but tell us what you learned from doing these sports whether they were team sports or individual sports? Did you learn how to cooperate with other people, did you enjoy helping a group of people get to a final goal were you able to beat your own personal best things like that? And how did you feel about those things? Moving on to shadowing. Shadowing is not there as a hoop for you to jump through. We are putting out that we think you should have about 40 hours of shadowing and I'll come back to that in a minute. But basically if you are not interested in shadowing then you're probably not interested in becoming a physician and. it surprises us that people don't do this you really need to find out what the career is all about some of our applicants are children of physicians and they feel like they understand the field of medicine, but what you heard at the dinner table is not necessarily what it was like for your parent or parents to be in the trenches during the day. You don't know how they dealt with a difficult question from a patient. How they presented bad news to the patient. You know you might hear some of these stories at the dinner table, but it's not the same as being in the room and watching it happen.. it really gives you a good feel for whether again you're planning for the right career for yourself, you also sometimes develop a relationship with the person you are shadowing and they act as a role model for you which is nice we recommend a minimum of 40 hours we don't think that's. difficult to get that could be one hour a week for most of a year it could be a couple of half days here and there during a year and. over a period of two to three years in college you should be able to get 40 hours in without too much difficulty. I will say that we understand people have to work and we look for that in an application if we don't see a lot of shadowing. And again you can put all of your shadowing in one box or if you learn different things from different shadowing experiences then spread them out. We know that shadowing is not always easy to find and what we have suggested and some of this is on our website is first of all the Washington Academy of Family Practice has a site that will match you up with mentors. We also have collected a number of names of physicians who are willing to be shadowed that are not in primary care and we have those in our office. You can contact us and ask for that. You should ask your own personal physician assuming you have one if you can shadow him or her or friends if you have friends whose parents are physicians that's a good way to start and just do some networking see what you can find out and you probably want to shadow in the office, maybe on rounds, maybe in surgery, maybe on call, etc. Other good experiences that get you shadowing are emergency room scribe, type experience, working in the athletic training room if you are here at the University of Washington participating in the Summer Medical/Dental education through the office of Multicultural Affairs. And again at the U alternative spring break where you go to an under served community for a week and these last four things that I've mentioned are things that you learn about when you sign onto or join the prehealth groups that are on campus here at the university. AED for example there are about 50 prehealth groups they are all a little bit different, but they all have managed to get a lot of resources together to get people more exposure to the field of medicine which is great.. I encourage you to contact your fellow undergrad students and feel free to contact our office as well.. again why should you shadow these are some things I eluded to a few minutes ago but you want to on a day-to-day basis what seemed to make the doctor happy, what seemed frustrating, how did the doctor adapt his or her style, communication style, to the patient? When you were observing this relationship with the doctor and the patient how did the patient react to the doctor's behavior? Was that something you liked? Was it something you think you would have done differently, and if. how? And it is perfectly OK to put some of this in your reflection of your experience.. again, how did the doctor handle a tough situation when they couldn't solve a problem, they couldn't make a diagnosis, they couldn't come up with a cure? How did they allow for patient autonomy if the physician you are shadowing suggested something to the patient and the patient didn't want to do it. How did the physician react to that? Were they able to work with the patient to come to a common understanding? How do they deal with a patient who for instance is a smoker and just won't give it up? All those sorts of things again, how do you deal with not having enough time to give the patient the time you think they need? All those things are not things you learn from just talking to doctors or sitting round the dinner table with them. This slide is a little more oriented to people who are already in medical school and are trying to figure out what kind of doctor they want to be and I will say that we have data that shows that when we compare what students tell us on day one medical school with where they finally match at the end of medical school, about 80% of students changed their mind while they are in school.. this isn't even what they said at interviews. we don't put a lot of store into what you say at interview what you want to be. What we are mainly looking for again are your experiences consistent with what you think you want to be . That's what we are looking for at that time. But even so, you should know that there are differences as you are trying to form some preliminary plan of what kind of doctor you want to shadow for example, you might think about these things.. what are the ages and genders of the patients that are seen in a given type of office, and what kind of problems are they? Are they straight forward problems? Are they very complex problems? And what's more appealing to you? Is there a predominance of chronic problems or of acute problems? Which anatomic parts are involved? Is there a lot of variety or are you hanging out with a specialist that is fairly focused on one anatomic part? For example, a urologist, different fields of medicine also deal with a large body of knowledge with modern understanding of each area and that might be a primary care type of physician, or a limited body of knowledge with an in depth understanding and that would be any sort of specialist. Some people feel bored with the first, and some people feel bored with the second and. again it's a good idea to get exposed and see how your personality fits best. There are sort of corporate personalities of individual disciplines.. I can speak for orthopedics in particular because I am an orthopedic surgeon and just say that most orthopedists stereotypically are pretty friendly. They certainly have a compulsive bent because they are surgeons and the classic stereotype is that they're big dumb jocks. here I am to tell you that we can't always fit the stereotype. There are exceptions. You might also want to be giving some thought to possible lifestyles that you might lead as a physician. Whether you want be in a solo practice which those are probably not going to exist much longer but there certainly are solo practices particularly in rural environments and you have to decide whether you are willing to be a physician 24/7 or not. On the one hand, you really develop amazing relationships with your patients. On the other hand, you are pretty much on all the time. Or do you want to be in a group practice? Do you want the group to be small or large? Do you want it to be a multi-specialty group? And again, some of this you won't know until you've had more exposure but it is a good thing to think about this in advance. Are you interested enough in research and teaching that you want to consider a career in academic medicine? Do you think you want to be rural or urban? Do you want to work with under-served patients all of the time or some of the time? In other words, do you want to spend a month or two overseas in every given year and can you find a practice that would allow that? What's interesting, the reason I even bring this up... is that we have had applicants who say that they are interested in doing bench research and they want to practice in a rural environment, and they just don't go together And. when we hear you say that, we usually will send you a letter saying you are not ready yet, that you haven't really thought this through. You really should consider what would make you happy, rather than reimbursement and time and that sort of thing. And we realize that you are going to graduate with some debt but at the end of the day, you want to pick a career that you're going to love doing for the next 30-40 years. And if the career itself is challenging and interesting, maybe you don't like challenge but I like challenge,. if it's challenging and interesting and at the end of the day you're happy all the rest of this gonna is sort itself out. Going to personal statement, again the personal statement is meant to show us what your motivation is, why you are interested in medicine and then how are you in particular suited for medicine based on what you've discovered through your experiences.. we really want you to show us that you know this is the right career for you.. we expect you to change your mind again but you should have some knowledge and concept of the possibilities of who you might become and why you are suited for that.. one of the key things is to self assess. This is incredibly important for a physician because we are often in a situation where we are presented with something we don't know and. we have to recognize that. We have to be self-aware enough that we can say, "Boy, I've never seen this before. I am not sure what this is. What am I going to do about that?" And we will go into more detail about that next time when we talk about problem solving. It's also important that you recognize your own subconscious reaction to a patient, and how that may influence how you interact with that patient. And that's what I meant by biases. So, if for instance... let me use myself as an example. I have allergies to perfume, and if I walk into a patient room and somebody is heavily perfumed I typically want to get out of that room as fast as I can. And at the same time I don't want to short change the patient. I have to decide whether to just do the best I can and get out of there quickly or explain the situation to the patient, go out and get a mask, come back in and try again. But again that will influence just that little, it's not even a bias, its an allergy. But it influences my willingness to stay in the room and interact with that patient. And other people have biases against certain appearances, certain smells... any number of things of things that you may not even be aware you have.. the more you can self assess the better. It's a good idea to be able to assess your own strengths and areas for improvement and also what your own learning style is because to be a physician you have to enjoy lifelong learning and self propelled lifelong learning. People are not going to be telling you what chapter to read and what book to look up. You are going to have to do that yourself.. if you need to be directed this may not be the right field for you.. here is an exercise you can do, and this comes from, a variation of this comes from, a book written by Harvel Hendricks and we posted some of his self assessment questions on the website.. one of the ways to do this is to make a circle, or an ellipse in the case of the one on the left, or you can do this in a list form and basically you want to list all the things that you are really good at in the positive section. You want to list things that make you happy and bring you joy. In the minus section you want to list things that drive you crazy, that frustrate you, that you're not. good at and that people tell you you need to work on. And that's a good idea to do the same thing about medicine. Clearly medicine is not all positive, there are some negatives, there are frustrations, there are things like paperwork people find frustrating, or not enough time to spend with your patient, or many of the things we've already mentioned. Not being able to cure an illness, etc. And the more exposure you've had, the more balanced your perspective on medicine is going to be.. you either make lists or fill out these circles and then you decide whether the negatives of medicine are things that don't match well with you or your own negatives.. for example if you listed a number of highly frustrating things on the negative side of medicine and in your own personality you've discovered that you frustrate very easily and you don't tolerate frustration well then this is not the right career for you. On the other hand if it turns out that you really rise to a challenge and that you consider these negatives of medicine as challenges rather than frustrations then you are on the right track. I also just want to make a comment on the side. I've been using this little symbol with the thumbs up in many of my slides. And I know that in different cultures hand signals mean different things. hopefully I am not offending anybody. If I am please excuse me. These are just readily available on the web. I use them quite a bit.. here in the room let's just talk about another exercise. Call out to me some characteristics you think a good doctor should have. Anything. Yeah. Patience. With a c e you mean. Yeah. P a t i e n c e yeah. Yes that's a good one. OK. Patience. Yes over there. Good listening skills. That's good. Not being judgmental is another one. OK.. you could do this yourself at home. You could do this with your friends. You might lose a few friends. I am sure your friends are kind of tired of having you being. obsessed with getting into medical school. But at any rate it can be something that you can do with your friends. just sit around or with your family and see how many characteristics you can tick off that you would like to have in your own doctor. And then look back at your own experiences and see how they might show that you have these characteristics. And again make sure that you make that obvious to the person reading your application.. we hope that you will incorporate all these findings from these exercises and from your experiences into your personal statement. Pick a few of these and show us examples and tell us how you are suited to medicine. Which experiences or people have had positive influences or even negative influences. The third thing I want to talk about a little bit in a personal statement and I alluded to this last time is don't make us feel like we're the fourth person you asked to the prom. And let me explain that a little bit. A lot of people do a chronological statement and I'm gonna show you some examples, but what I mean by this... when you were in high school maybe or something, you may have known somebody that asked your best friend to the prom which was not to smart but your best friend said no and then they asked you to the prom next or maybe they even asked someone else in between and then they asked you and by the time they got to you, you knew, because word gets around, that you were the third or fourth person they'd asked and. you were a little annoyed, disappointed, but you know you might have gone to the dance anyway because you really wanted to go. But in the case of your medical school application you want to let the reader know that you are excited about going to medical school and that this is a conscious, purposeful decision. It is not just the next best alternative to something that you were doing before but it didn't work out for you. Now I am going to show you some examples. It's also important in your personal statement to let us know why you think you will be a good doctor not why you think you will be a good medical student. They are a little bit different. When sometimes we have people say I'm going to be a good student because I help other people in class and I work hard and that sort of thing. Generally you want to start off with why you are excited about medicine and then if you need to tell us some negative experiences you have had it is fine to do that but you should start off with the positive and then go into the compare and contrast mode. here is an example of the fourth date to the prom example I tried engineering but the applicability seemed too distant. I tried research but I missed working with people. Medicine will allow me to combine problem solving and discovery with working with people. the next one, also from somebody's application, says pretty much the same thing, but in a more positive way. "Medicine appeals to me because helping people and solving puzzles are both stimulating to me." A few more examples. These are all real. The first one "I have spent my entire life training to be a doctor. All of my toys and friends have been treated by me I am a doctor at heart, that is why I want to go to medical school." Well that really doesn't really tell us anything about the person or what their attributes are or why they think they're gonna be good at it. Here is another very chronological description that again does not tell us anything about the applicant. And I'll sort of paraphrase it "I entered the university with the intention of pursuing a degree in mathematics, my main interest in high school. My first math class was Linear Algebra. It was interesting, etc., etc., etc. This led me through a number of inspiring courses from Physiology to Advanced Organic Chemistry and ultimately to my major in biochemistry which combines both my interests in biology, etc., etc. We can get this list of classes from the transcript and again it really doesn't tell us anything about why medicine it just tells us about the courses that this person took in college.. here's some better ones. And these are excerpted again from real applications. "The prospect of death and the blessing of life occur daily before the final diagnoses. Unshakably moving forward in such slippery conditions, I learned, is a doctor's gift.. this person has done some reflecting and again shows this in the personal statement. Here's another one "Reflecting on my college experiences as well as my current ones. I found that my life seemed most meaningful... when I was working to help a person overcome something beyond his or her control. And another one "Through confronting such a harsh, unforgiving reality. I found a deep desire to both better understand nature's actions and to assist in medical problems like Alice's. After learning that current medical research has found no cure for many illnesses such as Alice's, I found myself on PubMed for hours learning about the research." And what this showed us, this last one, is here is somebody who is very much a self-propelled learner who has curiosity. This person was just shadowing someone and happened to get to see a patient that was had a terminal illness that was a little bit of an unusual illness and. this person decided to do some more research into that just to learn more about the disease.. that told us a lot about that person. Which was very helpful. And I think that's all for tonight and. the next session is gonna be specifically about the interview And we'll now open it up to questions. Feel free to raise your hand and/or write something down and pass it down.
UW Medicine Town Hall 2 - Motivation
Hi. Welcome to our second town hall meeting. Last time we spoke about application in general, and particularly about MCATs, grades, and letters of recommendation. Tonight we are going to talk about your experiences that you list in your MCATs application, shadowing, and writing your personal statement. And the whole point of all this is to help you realize whether you're interested in medicine, as a career, for the right reasons and clarify for yourself and for us what your motivation is.. let's talk about experiences a little bit. First of all the value of experience is finding out what the career is all about, to clarify and validate your initial impressions, and learn about the dark side of medicine. And what we mean by that are things that are things that are frustrating to doctors, things that are difficult for doctors, it's not all as easy or noble as you might think. Experience will help you test your level of commitment to the field. If you find that you are really not enjoying yourself as you have experiences then you may want to change your mind. So, obviously, experiences help you discover what you like and dislike, they help you improve the articulation of your own goals, and enhance your motivation. And clearly the more experiences you have the better you understand other people and other cultures. And when we say other cultures you should realize that other cultures can be a few blocks away from where you live. You don't have to go to Botswana or some place like that to appreciate other cultures. But the more people you've had contact with and the more outside your own comfort zone you can get and outside your own neighborhood, the better you will be able to relate to your patients. We don't want you to choose an experience to get into medical school. People always ask us the question... "Should I work in a nursing home... or should I work in an emergency room... or should I volunteer for this or volunteer for that?" You really should be choosing an experience because it appeals to you or it is important to you, not because you think it is going to help you get in. The other thing that it is important to consider is you should be choosing experiences that are consistent with what your present goals are.. if you think that you want to be a surgeon, you should be choosing experiences that would get you some exposure to surgery. Either volunteer at a recovery room or shadowing a surgeon or even working at a desk in a surgery center, something like that. One of the things that we tell the committee to look for in an application, and also in an interview is, that somebody's experiences are consistent with their goals.. if someone comes in and they've shadowed a radiologist, and they've shadowed a neurosurgeon and they come in and tell us that they want to be a primary care doctor, we are a little suspicious they are just saying that because, for some reason, they think that is what we want to hear. And remember that our school is looking for primary care doctors as well as specialists and future academicians.. there is room for everybody. And you should be choosing an experience that is something you want to explore for yourself. When I think about the type of experiences you could have, in my mind I divided them up into these three areas. One are service type experiences, where you're in a situation where basically, you are going to meet other peoples needs. And they don't have to be medical service experiences. A lot of our applicants have have worked in restaurants, which have a lot of things in common with the field of medicine, in that you have a wide ranging clientele, they can be pretty demanding, or not, you have to deal with unhappy people who don't think they are getting what they should be getting, and things like that,. there is a lot of transfer there and that's fine. A second type of experience might be working on some sort of team that has a common goal, and this could be a research team, or it could be a sports team, but again just getting a feel for what it's like to work with other people toward a common goal because that's what you will be doing. You will definitely be working in a medical team with other physicians, nurse practitioners, physicians assistants, nurses, medical assistants, all kinds of different people.. you have to see how you feel about working on a team. There are other types of experiences where the main goal of the experience is for the greater good and these, typically, are community type experiences and again they don't have to be health related but certainly can be health related. The key thing from all experiences is to not only figure out, for yourself, what did you learn from each experience, but to let us know what you learned. You need to make your application, I think I said this last week, you need to make your application clear enough that it's easy for the people, screening the application or planning to interview you, to find what they're looking for, and what we want to know is what did you learn from all your experiences. That's, essentially, a sign of maturity that you can reflect on what you learned from everything you did whether it was positive or negative.. we want you to be thinking about what you did and what you saw, and it's a good idea to write things down as soon after a given experience as you can, whether it is the end of the day, or the end of the week. I would strongly encourage you to try journaling. If you do that as you go along, first of all you will see your own personal growth, hopefully, and second of all it will be easier for you to go back and create the little mini essays that you put in your experience boxes. The experience boxes can be like miniature personal statements basically.. we want to know for each experience, how did the experience clarify your choice to go into medicine and to be a doctor? And the key thing, in all these little boxes that you fill out on your MCATs application, is to be reflecting on your experience rather than just describing your experience. In some cases you have to do a very little bit of description,. that people who aren't as familiar with the type of experience that you had can understand the milieu in which you were, in which you were, but in many cases we know... we know, for example, typically, what goes on in emergency rooms, and things like that.. here are some examples... um, and the little pictures are sort of an increasing... um, levels of a better experience box.. the first one, these are all three from real applications, and they're all from people who worked in emergency rooms. So, the first one says "I folded towels, stalked saline, gave blankets to patients" and this really doesn't tell us anything about what was learned, or how it helped you make a decision to go into medicine. The second one is a little bit better it's sort of a germinating idea which is why I used the particular smiley face that I used and says "Although I was mainly helping to stock and distribute needed supplies, I felt good just knowing I was helping someone.". that's got some reflection in it that lets us know that this is a fairly altruistic person. The third one says "While working in the ER, I noticed that even when doctors were busy, the time they took to explain what was happening to a patient relieved a lot of the patient's anxiety.". this again is somebody making an observation about how physicians function and how it affects the patients and that's a good reflection in an experience box. Here are two more that really don't tell us a lot about the applicant at all.. the first one describes a summer research project I won't read you the whole thing basically, "My project focused on the use of a tranposon mutagenesis system to generate tumors in mice, etc." And again, it's perfectly OK to say that but we also want to know what you learned from that experience, what was it like to have parts of your project not go well which is pretty typical, how did you feel when something did go well and came up with something new or a key finding or even not such a key finding but something that helped plan the next part of that research project? How did you feel working in the lab with other researchers? What were the interesting parts about interpersonal relationships that you learned working in the lab and all those kinds of things? The second one is about somebody who works at the Bailey-Boushay House and its a good idea to describe as this person did what the Bailey-Boushay House is for people who don't know that. This applicant went on to say "I volunteered 4 hours a week in the Adult Day Program taking orders for and serving a hot breakfast. During my time there I interacted and built relationships with participants, staff, and other volunteers.". we again don't learn anything about the applicant from this. We would have loved to hear what it was like getting to know people with HIV/AIDS What were their problems? What were their worries? How did you as an applicant feel about that? Did it make you think about death? Did it change any of your thinking with regards to HIV/AIDS? That would be all really really nice to know. Here is 2 examples of some really good experience boxes that really let us know a little about the applicant.. the first one says "What I find pleasing about pediatrics is the ability to shape a child's life early on. they can start out healthy and hopefully make good decisions later on in life. One must also be able to gain the parents trust in medical treatments as one is dealing with their most precious object. I also love working with kids and am very interested in pursuing pediatrics someday." That tells us a lot. Another one from a future surgeon who is a student who is shadowing a surgeon. "Later, I would scrub into the surgeries" No, actually this is not from a student shadowing this is somebody who is working in a surgeon's research lab, but decided to do a little bit of shadowing as well.. the initial part of that description box talked about the research project and then said "Later, I would scrub into the surgeries and witness the plan that was discussed in rounds. I found this very interesting to be able to see a patient in the morning, try out your plan of action during the day, and almost immediately see the results.". again this person was in the lab and then also shadowed the surgeon and then went to some of their rounds and also went into surgery.. really made a lot out of that research experience and also was able to reflect on it in such a way to show that what is often attractive to surgeons is that you see somebody, you plan out the action and then you get to see what happens pretty quickly.. this has to do with a little bit of sort of stereotypical surgeon personality of relatively immediate gratification. And I think that's... we see a bit of that when we read this and see that this person is saying they almost immediately see the results. These are phrases that we see in experience boxes that really leave us hanging and we don't know what to do with them. One is I did such and such experience and it really broadened my exposure and it stops there and we would like to know how did it broadened your exposure? The second is you know working with. and. or in this environment helped me understand the field of medicine. Well, helped you understand what? Again we want you to be reflective enough to be specific and let us know how you grew from this experience. The third is an just another example made me realize usually it doesn't end with anything specific unfortunately.. if you are going to use those words or those phrases be sure to keep going and give us the details. A lot of you have asked how do you fit all of your experiences onto your MCATs application and I would encourage you to group some things together. We sometimes see applications in which someone was on the Dean's List in the Fall Quarter, the Dean's List in the Winter quarter, and the Dean's List in the Spring quarter and they are all listed seperately which takes up a lot of boxes which you could have used to tell us something else. We also see people who describe their research project in one box and then they describe presenting it at an annual meeting of an organization in another box and the fact that they got honors for doing it and then the fact that it was published and all of these are incredibly important and we do need to know them and they show us the quality of your work but they can easily be put into one box. They don't need to be seperated. I would encourage you to group academic honors together. You could also group sports together. You don't have to have swim team in one box and enjoying playing tennis in another box and I don't know... something recreational that you like to do in a third box you could put those together and again not just put them together but tell us what you learned from doing these sports whether they were team sports or individual sports? Did you learn how to cooperate with other people, did you enjoy helping a group of people get to a final goal were you able to beat your own personal best things like that? And how did you feel about those things? Moving on to shadowing. Shadowing is not there as a hoop for you to jump through. We are putting out that we think you should have about 40 hours of shadowing and I'll come back to that in a minute. But basically if you are not interested in shadowing then you're probably not interested in becoming a physician and. it surprises us that people don't do this you really need to find out what the career is all about some of our applicants are children of physicians and they feel like they understand the field of medicine, but what you heard at the dinner table is not necessarily what it was like for your parent or parents to be in the trenches during the day. You don't know how they dealt with a difficult question from a patient. How they presented bad news to the patient. You know you might hear some of these stories at the dinner table, but it's not the same as being in the room and watching it happen.. it really gives you a good feel for whether again you're planning for the right career for yourself, you also sometimes develop a relationship with the person you are shadowing and they act as a role model for you which is nice we recommend a minimum of 40 hours we don't think that's. difficult to get that could be one hour a week for most of a year it could be a couple of half days here and there during a year and. over a period of two to three years in college you should be able to get 40 hours in without too much difficulty. I will say that we understand people have to work and we look for that in an application if we don't see a lot of shadowing. And again you can put all of your shadowing in one box or if you learn different things from different shadowing experiences then spread them out. We know that shadowing is not always easy to find and what we have suggested and some of this is on our website is first of all the Washington Academy of Family Practice has a site that will match you up with mentors. We also have collected a number of names of physicians who are willing to be shadowed that are not in primary care and we have those in our office. You can contact us and ask for that. You should ask your own personal physician assuming you have one if you can shadow him or her or friends if you have friends whose parents are physicians that's a good way to start and just do some networking see what you can find out and you probably want to shadow in the office, maybe on rounds, maybe in surgery, maybe on call, etc. Other good experiences that get you shadowing are emergency room scribe, type experience, working in the athletic training room if you are here at the University of Washington participating in the Summer Medical/Dental education through the office of Multicultural Affairs. And again at the U alternative spring break where you go to an under served community for a week and these last four things that I've mentioned are things that you learn about when you sign onto or join the prehealth groups that are on campus here at the university. AED for example there are about 50 prehealth groups they are all a little bit different, but they all have managed to get a lot of resources together to get people more exposure to the field of medicine which is great.. I encourage you to contact your fellow undergrad students and feel free to contact our office as well.. again why should you shadow these are some things I eluded to a few minutes ago but you want to on a day-to-day basis what seemed to make the doctor happy, what seemed frustrating, how did the doctor adapt his or her style, communication style, to the patient? When you were observing this relationship with the doctor and the patient how did the patient react to the doctor's behavior? Was that something you liked? Was it something you think you would have done differently, and if. how? And it is perfectly OK to put some of this in your reflection of your experience.. again, how did the doctor handle a tough situation when they couldn't solve a problem, they couldn't make a diagnosis, they couldn't come up with a cure? How did they allow for patient autonomy if the physician you are shadowing suggested something to the patient and the patient didn't want to do it. How did the physician react to that? Were they able to work with the patient to come to a common understanding? How do they deal with a patient who for instance is a smoker and just won't give it up? All those sorts of things again, how do you deal with not having enough time to give the patient the time you think they need? All those things are not things you learn from just talking to doctors or sitting round the dinner table with them. This slide is a little more oriented to people who are already in medical school and are trying to figure out what kind of doctor they want to be and I will say that we have data that shows that when we compare what students tell us on day one medical school with where they finally match at the end of medical school, about 80% of students changed their mind while they are in school.. this isn't even what they said at interviews. we don't put a lot of store into what you say at interview what you want to be. What we are mainly looking for again are your experiences consistent with what you think you want to be . That's what we are looking for at that time. But even so, you should know that there are differences as you are trying to form some preliminary plan of what kind of doctor you want to shadow for example, you might think about these things.. what are the ages and genders of the patients that are seen in a given type of office, and what kind of problems are they? Are they straight forward problems? Are they very complex problems? And what's more appealing to you? Is there a predominance of chronic problems or of acute problems? Which anatomic parts are involved? Is there a lot of variety or are you hanging out with a specialist that is fairly focused on one anatomic part? For example, a urologist, different fields of medicine also deal with a large body of knowledge with modern understanding of each area and that might be a primary care type of physician, or a limited body of knowledge with an in depth understanding and that would be any sort of specialist. Some people feel bored with the first, and some people feel bored with the second and. again it's a good idea to get exposed and see how your personality fits best. There are sort of corporate personalities of individual disciplines.. I can speak for orthopedics in particular because I am an orthopedic surgeon and just say that most orthopedists stereotypically are pretty friendly. They certainly have a compulsive bent because they are surgeons and the classic stereotype is that they're big dumb jocks. here I am to tell you that we can't always fit the stereotype. There are exceptions. You might also want to be giving some thought to possible lifestyles that you might lead as a physician. Whether you want be in a solo practice which those are probably not going to exist much longer but there certainly are solo practices particularly in rural environments and you have to decide whether you are willing to be a physician 24/7 or not. On the one hand, you really develop amazing relationships with your patients. On the other hand, you are pretty much on all the time. Or do you want to be in a group practice? Do you want the group to be small or large? Do you want it to be a multi-specialty group? And again, some of this you won't know until you've had more exposure but it is a good thing to think about this in advance. Are you interested enough in research and teaching that you want to consider a career in academic medicine? Do you think you want to be rural or urban? Do you want to work with under-served patients all of the time or some of the time? In other words, do you want to spend a month or two overseas in every given year and can you find a practice that would allow that? What's interesting, the reason I even bring this up... is that we have had applicants who say that they are interested in doing bench research and they want to practice in a rural environment, and they just don't go together And. when we hear you say that, we usually will send you a letter saying you are not ready yet, that you haven't really thought this through. You really should consider what would make you happy, rather than reimbursement and time and that sort of thing. And we realize that you are going to graduate with some debt but at the end of the day, you want to pick a career that you're going to love doing for the next 30-40 years. And if the career itself is challenging and interesting, maybe you don't like challenge but I like challenge,. if it's challenging and interesting and at the end of the day you're happy all the rest of this gonna is sort itself out. Going to personal statement, again the personal statement is meant to show us what your motivation is, why you are interested in medicine and then how are you in particular suited for medicine based on what you've discovered through your experiences.. we really want you to show us that you know this is the right career for you.. we expect you to change your mind again but you should have some knowledge and concept of the possibilities of who you might become and why you are suited for that.. one of the key things is to self assess. This is incredibly important for a physician because we are often in a situation where we are presented with something we don't know and. we have to recognize that. We have to be self-aware enough that we can say, "Boy, I've never seen this before. I am not sure what this is. What am I going to do about that?" And we will go into more detail about that next time when we talk about problem solving. It's also important that you recognize your own subconscious reaction to a patient, and how that may influence how you interact with that patient. And that's what I meant by biases. So, if for instance... let me use myself as an example. I have allergies to perfume, and if I walk into a patient room and somebody is heavily perfumed I typically want to get out of that room as fast as I can. And at the same time I don't want to short change the patient. I have to decide whether to just do the best I can and get out of there quickly or explain the situation to the patient, go out and get a mask, come back in and try again. But again that will influence just that little, it's not even a bias, its an allergy. But it influences my willingness to stay in the room and interact with that patient. And other people have biases against certain appearances, certain smells... any number of things of things that you may not even be aware you have.. the more you can self assess the better. It's a good idea to be able to assess your own strengths and areas for improvement and also what your own learning style is because to be a physician you have to enjoy lifelong learning and self propelled lifelong learning. People are not going to be telling you what chapter to read and what book to look up. You are going to have to do that yourself.. if you need to be directed this may not be the right field for you.. here is an exercise you can do, and this comes from, a variation of this comes from, a book written by Harvel Hendricks and we posted some of his self assessment questions on the website.. one of the ways to do this is to make a circle, or an ellipse in the case of the one on the left, or you can do this in a list form and basically you want to list all the things that you are really good at in the positive section. You want to list things that make you happy and bring you joy. In the minus section you want to list things that drive you crazy, that frustrate you, that you're not. good at and that people tell you you need to work on. And that's a good idea to do the same thing about medicine. Clearly medicine is not all positive, there are some negatives, there are frustrations, there are things like paperwork people find frustrating, or not enough time to spend with your patient, or many of the things we've already mentioned. Not being able to cure an illness, etc. And the more exposure you've had, the more balanced your perspective on medicine is going to be.. you either make lists or fill out these circles and then you decide whether the negatives of medicine are things that don't match well with you or your own negatives.. for example if you listed a number of highly frustrating things on the negative side of medicine and in your own personality you've discovered that you frustrate very easily and you don't tolerate frustration well then this is not the right career for you. On the other hand if it turns out that you really rise to a challenge and that you consider these negatives of medicine as challenges rather than frustrations then you are on the right track. I also just want to make a comment on the side. I've been using this little symbol with the thumbs up in many of my slides. And I know that in different cultures hand signals mean different things. hopefully I am not offending anybody. If I am please excuse me. These are just readily available on the web. I use them quite a bit.. here in the room let's just talk about another exercise. Call out to me some characteristics you think a good doctor should have. Anything. Yeah. Patience. With a c e you mean. Yeah. P a t i e n c e yeah. Yes that's a good one. OK. Patience. Yes over there. Good listening skills. That's good. Not being judgmental is another one. OK.. you could do this yourself at home. You could do this with your friends. You might lose a few friends. I am sure your friends are kind of tired of having you being. obsessed with getting into medical school. But at any rate it can be something that you can do with your friends. just sit around or with your family and see how many characteristics you can tick off that you would like to have in your own doctor. And then look back at your own experiences and see how they might show that you have these characteristics. And again make sure that you make that obvious to the person reading your application.. we hope that you will incorporate all these findings from these exercises and from your experiences into your personal statement. Pick a few of these and show us examples and tell us how you are suited to medicine. Which experiences or people have had positive influences or even negative influences. The third thing I want to talk about a little bit in a personal statement and I alluded to this last time is don't make us feel like we're the fourth person you asked to the prom. And let me explain that a little bit. A lot of people do a chronological statement and I'm gonna show you some examples, but what I mean by this... when you were in high school maybe or something, you may have known somebody that asked your best friend to the prom which was not to smart but your best friend said no and then they asked you to the prom next or maybe they even asked someone else in between and then they asked you and by the time they got to you, you knew, because word gets around, that you were the third or fourth person they'd asked and. you were a little annoyed, disappointed, but you know you might have gone to the dance anyway because you really wanted to go. But in the case of your medical school application you want to let the reader know that you are excited about going to medical school and that this is a conscious, purposeful decision. It is not just the next best alternative to something that you were doing before but it didn't work out for you. Now I am going to show you some examples. It's also important in your personal statement to let us know why you think you will be a good doctor not why you think you will be a good medical student. They are a little bit different. When sometimes we have people say I'm going to be a good student because I help other people in class and I work hard and that sort of thing. Generally you want to start off with why you are excited about medicine and then if you need to tell us some negative experiences you have had it is fine to do that but you should start off with the positive and then go into the compare and contrast mode. here is an example of the fourth date to the prom example I tried engineering but the applicability seemed too distant. I tried research but I missed working with people. Medicine will allow me to combine problem solving and discovery with working with people. the next one, also from somebody's application, says pretty much the same thing, but in a more positive way. "Medicine appeals to me because helping people and solving puzzles are both stimulating to me." A few more examples. These are all real. The first one "I have spent my entire life training to be a doctor. All of my toys and friends have been treated by me I am a doctor at heart, that is why I want to go to medical school." Well that really doesn't really tell us anything about the person or what their attributes are or why they think they're gonna be good at it. Here is another very chronological description that again does not tell us anything about the applicant. And I'll sort of paraphrase it "I entered the university with the intention of pursuing a degree in mathematics, my main interest in high school. My first math class was Linear Algebra. It was interesting, etc., etc., etc. This led me through a number of inspiring courses from Physiology to Advanced Organic Chemistry and ultimately to my major in biochemistry which combines both my interests in biology, etc., etc. We can get this list of classes from the transcript and again it really doesn't tell us anything about why medicine it just tells us about the courses that this person took in college.. here's some better ones. And these are excerpted again from real applications. "The prospect of death and the blessing of life occur daily before the final diagnoses. Unshakably moving forward in such slippery conditions, I learned, is a doctor's gift.. this person has done some reflecting and again shows this in the personal statement. Here's another one "Reflecting on my college experiences as well as my current ones. I found that my life seemed most meaningful... when I was working to help a person overcome something beyond his or her control. And another one "Through confronting such a harsh, unforgiving reality. I found a deep desire to both better understand nature's actions and to assist in medical problems like Alice's. After learning that current medical research has found no cure for many illnesses such as Alice's, I found myself on PubMed for hours learning about the research." And what this showed us, this last one, is here is somebody who is very much a self-propelled learner who has curiosity. This person was just shadowing someone and happened to get to see a patient that was had a terminal illness that was a little bit of an unusual illness and. this person decided to do some more research into that just to learn more about the disease.. that told us a lot about that person. Which was very helpful. And I think that's all for tonight and. the next session is gonna be specifically about the interview And we'll now open it up to questions. Feel free to raise your hand and/or write something down and pass it down.
UW Medicine Town Hall 2 - Motivation
Hi. Welcome to our second town hall meeting. Last time we spoke about application in general, and particularly about MCATs, grades, and letters of recommendation. Tonight we are going to talk about your experiences that you list in your MCATs application, shadowing, and writing your personal statement. And the whole point of all this is to help you realize whether you're interested in medicine, as a career, for the right reasons and clarify for yourself and for us what your motivation is.. let's talk about experiences a little bit. First of all the value of experience is finding out what the career is all about, to clarify and validate your initial impressions, and learn about the dark side of medicine. And what we mean by that are things that are things that are frustrating to doctors, things that are difficult for doctors, it's not all as easy or noble as you might think. Experience will help you test your level of commitment to the field. If you find that you are really not enjoying yourself as you have experiences then you may want to change your mind. So, obviously, experiences help you discover what you like and dislike, they help you improve the articulation of your own goals, and enhance your motivation. And clearly the more experiences you have the better you understand other people and other cultures. And when we say other cultures you should realize that other cultures can be a few blocks away from where you live. You don't have to go to Botswana or some place like that to appreciate other cultures. But the more people you've had contact with and the more outside your own comfort zone you can get and outside your own neighborhood, the better you will be able to relate to your patients. We don't want you to choose an experience to get into medical school. People always ask us the question... "Should I work in a nursing home... or should I work in an emergency room... or should I volunteer for this or volunteer for that?" You really should be choosing an experience because it appeals to you or it is important to you, not because you think it is going to help you get in. The other thing that it is important to consider is you should be choosing experiences that are consistent with what your present goals are.. if you think that you want to be a surgeon, you should be choosing experiences that would get you some exposure to surgery. Either volunteer at a recovery room or shadowing a surgeon or even working at a desk in a surgery center, something like that. One of the things that we tell the committee to look for in an application, and also in an interview is, that somebody's experiences are consistent with their goals.. if someone comes in and they've shadowed a radiologist, and they've shadowed a neurosurgeon and they come in and tell us that they want to be a primary care doctor, we are a little suspicious they are just saying that because, for some reason, they think that is what we want to hear. And remember that our school is looking for primary care doctors as well as specialists and future academicians.. there is room for everybody. And you should be choosing an experience that is something you want to explore for yourself. When I think about the type of experiences you could have, in my mind I divided them up into these three areas. One are service type experiences, where you're in a situation where basically, you are going to meet other peoples needs. And they don't have to be medical service experiences. A lot of our applicants have have worked in restaurants, which have a lot of things in common with the field of medicine, in that you have a wide ranging clientele, they can be pretty demanding, or not, you have to deal with unhappy people who don't think they are getting what they should be getting, and things like that,. there is a lot of transfer there and that's fine. A second type of experience might be working on some sort of team that has a common goal, and this could be a research team, or it could be a sports team, but again just getting a feel for what it's like to work with other people toward a common goal because that's what you will be doing. You will definitely be working in a medical team with other physicians, nurse practitioners, physicians assistants, nurses, medical assistants, all kinds of different people.. you have to see how you feel about working on a team. There are other types of experiences where the main goal of the experience is for the greater good and these, typically, are community type experiences and again they don't have to be health related but certainly can be health related. The key thing from all experiences is to not only figure out, for yourself, what did you learn from each experience, but to let us know what you learned. You need to make your application, I think I said this last week, you need to make your application clear enough that it's easy for the people, screening the application or planning to interview you, to find what they're looking for, and what we want to know is what did you learn from all your experiences. That's, essentially, a sign of maturity that you can reflect on what you learned from everything you did whether it was positive or negative.. we want you to be thinking about what you did and what you saw, and it's a good idea to write things down as soon after a given experience as you can, whether it is the end of the day, or the end of the week. I would strongly encourage you to try journaling. If you do that as you go along, first of all you will see your own personal growth, hopefully, and second of all it will be easier for you to go back and create the little mini essays that you put in your experience boxes. The experience boxes can be like miniature personal statements basically.. we want to know for each experience, how did the experience clarify your choice to go into medicine and to be a doctor? And the key thing, in all these little boxes that you fill out on your MCATs application, is to be reflecting on your experience rather than just describing your experience. In some cases you have to do a very little bit of description,. that people who aren't as familiar with the type of experience that you had can understand the milieu in which you were, in which you were, but in many cases we know... we know, for example, typically, what goes on in emergency rooms, and things like that.. here are some examples... um, and the little pictures are sort of an increasing... um, levels of a better experience box.. the first one, these are all three from real applications, and they're all from people who worked in emergency rooms. So, the first one says "I folded towels, stalked saline, gave blankets to patients" and this really doesn't tell us anything about what was learned, or how it helped you make a decision to go into medicine. The second one is a little bit better it's sort of a germinating idea which is why I used the particular smiley face that I used and says "Although I was mainly helping to stock and distribute needed supplies, I felt good just knowing I was helping someone.". that's got some reflection in it that lets us know that this is a fairly altruistic person. The third one says "While working in the ER, I noticed that even when doctors were busy, the time they took to explain what was happening to a patient relieved a lot of the patient's anxiety.". this again is somebody making an observation about how physicians function and how it affects the patients and that's a good reflection in an experience box. Here are two more that really don't tell us a lot about the applicant at all.. the first one describes a summer research project I won't read you the whole thing basically, "My project focused on the use of a tranposon mutagenesis system to generate tumors in mice, etc." And again, it's perfectly OK to say that but we also want to know what you learned from that experience, what was it like to have parts of your project not go well which is pretty typical, how did you feel when something did go well and came up with something new or a key finding or even not such a key finding but something that helped plan the next part of that research project? How did you feel working in the lab with other researchers? What were the interesting parts about interpersonal relationships that you learned working in the lab and all those kinds of things? The second one is about somebody who works at the Bailey-Boushay House and its a good idea to describe as this person did what the Bailey-Boushay House is for people who don't know that. This applicant went on to say "I volunteered 4 hours a week in the Adult Day Program taking orders for and serving a hot breakfast. During my time there I interacted and built relationships with participants, staff, and other volunteers.". we again don't learn anything about the applicant from this. We would have loved to hear what it was like getting to know people with HIV/AIDS What were their problems? What were their worries? How did you as an applicant feel about that? Did it make you think about death? Did it change any of your thinking with regards to HIV/AIDS? That would be all really really nice to know. Here is 2 examples of some really good experience boxes that really let us know a little about the applicant.. the first one says "What I find pleasing about pediatrics is the ability to shape a child's life early on. they can start out healthy and hopefully make good decisions later on in life. One must also be able to gain the parents trust in medical treatments as one is dealing with their most precious object. I also love working with kids and am very interested in pursuing pediatrics someday." That tells us a lot. Another one from a future surgeon who is a student who is shadowing a surgeon. "Later, I would scrub into the surgeries" No, actually this is not from a student shadowing this is somebody who is working in a surgeon's research lab, but decided to do a little bit of shadowing as well.. the initial part of that description box talked about the research project and then said "Later, I would scrub into the surgeries and witness the plan that was discussed in rounds. I found this very interesting to be able to see a patient in the morning, try out your plan of action during the day, and almost immediately see the results.". again this person was in the lab and then also shadowed the surgeon and then went to some of their rounds and also went into surgery.. really made a lot out of that research experience and also was able to reflect on it in such a way to show that what is often attractive to surgeons is that you see somebody, you plan out the action and then you get to see what happens pretty quickly.. this has to do with a little bit of sort of stereotypical surgeon personality of relatively immediate gratification. And I think that's... we see a bit of that when we read this and see that this person is saying they almost immediately see the results. These are phrases that we see in experience boxes that really leave us hanging and we don't know what to do with them. One is I did such and such experience and it really broadened my exposure and it stops there and we would like to know how did it broadened your exposure? The second is you know working with. and. or in this environment helped me understand the field of medicine. Well, helped you understand what? Again we want you to be reflective enough to be specific and let us know how you grew from this experience. The third is an just another example made me realize usually it doesn't end with anything specific unfortunately.. if you are going to use those words or those phrases be sure to keep going and give us the details. A lot of you have asked how do you fit all of your experiences onto your MCATs application and I would encourage you to group some things together. We sometimes see applications in which someone was on the Dean's List in the Fall Quarter, the Dean's List in the Winter quarter, and the Dean's List in the Spring quarter and they are all listed seperately which takes up a lot of boxes which you could have used to tell us something else. We also see people who describe their research project in one box and then they describe presenting it at an annual meeting of an organization in another box and the fact that they got honors for doing it and then the fact that it was published and all of these are incredibly important and we do need to know them and they show us the quality of your work but they can easily be put into one box. They don't need to be seperated. I would encourage you to group academic honors together. You could also group sports together. You don't have to have swim team in one box and enjoying playing tennis in another box and I don't know... something recreational that you like to do in a third box you could put those together and again not just put them together but tell us what you learned from doing these sports whether they were team sports or individual sports? Did you learn how to cooperate with other people, did you enjoy helping a group of people get to a final goal were you able to beat your own personal best things like that? And how did you feel about those things? Moving on to shadowing. Shadowing is not there as a hoop for you to jump through. We are putting out that we think you should have about 40 hours of shadowing and I'll come back to that in a minute. But basically if you are not interested in shadowing then you're probably not interested in becoming a physician and. it surprises us that people don't do this you really need to find out what the career is all about some of our applicants are children of physicians and they feel like they understand the field of medicine, but what you heard at the dinner table is not necessarily what it was like for your parent or parents to be in the trenches during the day. You don't know how they dealt with a difficult question from a patient. How they presented bad news to the patient. You know you might hear some of these stories at the dinner table, but it's not the same as being in the room and watching it happen.. it really gives you a good feel for whether again you're planning for the right career for yourself, you also sometimes develop a relationship with the person you are shadowing and they act as a role model for you which is nice we recommend a minimum of 40 hours we don't think that's. difficult to get that could be one hour a week for most of a year it could be a couple of half days here and there during a year and. over a period of two to three years in college you should be able to get 40 hours in without too much difficulty. I will say that we understand people have to work and we look for that in an application if we don't see a lot of shadowing. And again you can put all of your shadowing in one box or if you learn different things from different shadowing experiences then spread them out. We know that shadowing is not always easy to find and what we have suggested and some of this is on our website is first of all the Washington Academy of Family Practice has a site that will match you up with mentors. We also have collected a number of names of physicians who are willing to be shadowed that are not in primary care and we have those in our office. You can contact us and ask for that. You should ask your own personal physician assuming you have one if you can shadow him or her or friends if you have friends whose parents are physicians that's a good way to start and just do some networking see what you can find out and you probably want to shadow in the office, maybe on rounds, maybe in surgery, maybe on call, etc. Other good experiences that get you shadowing are emergency room scribe, type experience, working in the athletic training room if you are here at the University of Washington participating in the Summer Medical/Dental education through the office of Multicultural Affairs. And again at the U alternative spring break where you go to an under served community for a week and these last four things that I've mentioned are things that you learn about when you sign onto or join the prehealth groups that are on campus here at the university. AED for example there are about 50 prehealth groups they are all a little bit different, but they all have managed to get a lot of resources together to get people more exposure to the field of medicine which is great.. I encourage you to contact your fellow undergrad students and feel free to contact our office as well.. again why should you shadow these are some things I eluded to a few minutes ago but you want to on a day-to-day basis what seemed to make the doctor happy, what seemed frustrating, how did the doctor adapt his or her style, communication style, to the patient? When you were observing this relationship with the doctor and the patient how did the patient react to the doctor's behavior? Was that something you liked? Was it something you think you would have done differently, and if. how? And it is perfectly OK to put some of this in your reflection of your experience.. again, how did the doctor handle a tough situation when they couldn't solve a problem, they couldn't make a diagnosis, they couldn't come up with a cure? How did they allow for patient autonomy if the physician you are shadowing suggested something to the patient and the patient didn't want to do it. How did the physician react to that? Were they able to work with the patient to come to a common understanding? How do they deal with a patient who for instance is a smoker and just won't give it up? All those sorts of things again, how do you deal with not having enough time to give the patient the time you think they need? All those things are not things you learn from just talking to doctors or sitting round the dinner table with them. This slide is a little more oriented to people who are already in medical school and are trying to figure out what kind of doctor they want to be and I will say that we have data that shows that when we compare what students tell us on day one medical school with where they finally match at the end of medical school, about 80% of students changed their mind while they are in school.. this isn't even what they said at interviews. we don't put a lot of store into what you say at interview what you want to be. What we are mainly looking for again are your experiences consistent with what you think you want to be . That's what we are looking for at that time. But even so, you should know that there are differences as you are trying to form some preliminary plan of what kind of doctor you want to shadow for example, you might think about these things.. what are the ages and genders of the patients that are seen in a given type of office, and what kind of problems are they? Are they straight forward problems? Are they very complex problems? And what's more appealing to you? Is there a predominance of chronic problems or of acute problems? Which anatomic parts are involved? Is there a lot of variety or are you hanging out with a specialist that is fairly focused on one anatomic part? For example, a urologist, different fields of medicine also deal with a large body of knowledge with modern understanding of each area and that might be a primary care type of physician, or a limited body of knowledge with an in depth understanding and that would be any sort of specialist. Some people feel bored with the first, and some people feel bored with the second and. again it's a good idea to get exposed and see how your personality fits best. There are sort of corporate personalities of individual disciplines.. I can speak for orthopedics in particular because I am an orthopedic surgeon and just say that most orthopedists stereotypically are pretty friendly. They certainly have a compulsive bent because they are surgeons and the classic stereotype is that they're big dumb jocks. here I am to tell you that we can't always fit the stereotype. There are exceptions. You might also want to be giving some thought to possible lifestyles that you might lead as a physician. Whether you want be in a solo practice which those are probably not going to exist much longer but there certainly are solo practices particularly in rural environments and you have to decide whether you are willing to be a physician 24/7 or not. On the one hand, you really develop amazing relationships with your patients. On the other hand, you are pretty much on all the time. Or do you want to be in a group practice? Do you want the group to be small or large? Do you want it to be a multi-specialty group? And again, some of this you won't know until you've had more exposure but it is a good thing to think about this in advance. Are you interested enough in research and teaching that you want to consider a career in academic medicine? Do you think you want to be rural or urban? Do you want to work with under-served patients all of the time or some of the time? In other words, do you want to spend a month or two overseas in every given year and can you find a practice that would allow that? What's interesting, the reason I even bring this up... is that we have had applicants who say that they are interested in doing bench research and they want to practice in a rural environment, and they just don't go together And. when we hear you say that, we usually will send you a letter saying you are not ready yet, that you haven't really thought this through. You really should consider what would make you happy, rather than reimbursement and time and that sort of thing. And we realize that you are going to graduate with some debt but at the end of the day, you want to pick a career that you're going to love doing for the next 30-40 years. And if the career itself is challenging and interesting, maybe you don't like challenge but I like challenge,. if it's challenging and interesting and at the end of the day you're happy all the rest of this gonna is sort itself out. Going to personal statement, again the personal statement is meant to show us what your motivation is, why you are interested in medicine and then how are you in particular suited for medicine based on what you've discovered through your experiences.. we really want you to show us that you know this is the right career for you.. we expect you to change your mind again but you should have some knowledge and concept of the possibilities of who you might become and why you are suited for that.. one of the key things is to self assess. This is incredibly important for a physician because we are often in a situation where we are presented with something we don't know and. we have to recognize that. We have to be self-aware enough that we can say, "Boy, I've never seen this before. I am not sure what this is. What am I going to do about that?" And we will go into more detail about that next time when we talk about problem solving. It's also important that you recognize your own subconscious reaction to a patient, and how that may influence how you interact with that patient. And that's what I meant by biases. So, if for instance... let me use myself as an example. I have allergies to perfume, and if I walk into a patient room and somebody is heavily perfumed I typically want to get out of that room as fast as I can. And at the same time I don't want to short change the patient. I have to decide whether to just do the best I can and get out of there quickly or explain the situation to the patient, go out and get a mask, come back in and try again. But again that will influence just that little, it's not even a bias, its an allergy. But it influences my willingness to stay in the room and interact with that patient. And other people have biases against certain appearances, certain smells... any number of things of things that you may not even be aware you have.. the more you can self assess the better. It's a good idea to be able to assess your own strengths and areas for improvement and also what your own learning style is because to be a physician you have to enjoy lifelong learning and self propelled lifelong learning. People are not going to be telling you what chapter to read and what book to look up. You are going to have to do that yourself.. if you need to be directed this may not be the right field for you.. here is an exercise you can do, and this comes from, a variation of this comes from, a book written by Harvel Hendricks and we posted some of his self assessment questions on the website.. one of the ways to do this is to make a circle, or an ellipse in the case of the one on the left, or you can do this in a list form and basically you want to list all the things that you are really good at in the positive section. You want to list things that make you happy and bring you joy. In the minus section you want to list things that drive you crazy, that frustrate you, that you're not. good at and that people tell you you need to work on. And that's a good idea to do the same thing about medicine. Clearly medicine is not all positive, there are some negatives, there are frustrations, there are things like paperwork people find frustrating, or not enough time to spend with your patient, or many of the things we've already mentioned. Not being able to cure an illness, etc. And the more exposure you've had, the more balanced your perspective on medicine is going to be.. you either make lists or fill out these circles and then you decide whether the negatives of medicine are things that don't match well with you or your own negatives.. for example if you listed a number of highly frustrating things on the negative side of medicine and in your own personality you've discovered that you frustrate very easily and you don't tolerate frustration well then this is not the right career for you. On the other hand if it turns out that you really rise to a challenge and that you consider these negatives of medicine as challenges rather than frustrations then you are on the right track. I also just want to make a comment on the side. I've been using this little symbol with the thumbs up in many of my slides. And I know that in different cultures hand signals mean different things. hopefully I am not offending anybody. If I am please excuse me. These are just readily available on the web. I use them quite a bit.. here in the room let's just talk about another exercise. Call out to me some characteristics you think a good doctor should have. Anything. Yeah. Patience. With a c e you mean. Yeah. P a t i e n c e yeah. Yes that's a good one. OK. Patience. Yes over there. Good listening skills. That's good. Not being judgmental is another one. OK.. you could do this yourself at home. You could do this with your friends. You might lose a few friends. I am sure your friends are kind of tired of having you being. obsessed with getting into medical school. But at any rate it can be something that you can do with your friends. just sit around or with your family and see how many characteristics you can tick off that you would like to have in your own doctor. And then look back at your own experiences and see how they might show that you have these characteristics. And again make sure that you make that obvious to the person reading your application.. we hope that you will incorporate all these findings from these exercises and from your experiences into your personal statement. Pick a few of these and show us examples and tell us how you are suited to medicine. Which experiences or people have had positive influences or even negative influences. The third thing I want to talk about a little bit in a personal statement and I alluded to this last time is don't make us feel like we're the fourth person you asked to the prom. And let me explain that a little bit. A lot of people do a chronological statement and I'm gonna show you some examples, but what I mean by this... when you were in high school maybe or something, you may have known somebody that asked your best friend to the prom which was not to smart but your best friend said no and then they asked you to the prom next or maybe they even asked someone else in between and then they asked you and by the time they got to you, you knew, because word gets around, that you were the third or fourth person they'd asked and. you were a little annoyed, disappointed, but you know you might have gone to the dance anyway because you really wanted to go. But in the case of your medical school application you want to let the reader know that you are excited about going to medical school and that this is a conscious, purposeful decision. It is not just the next best alternative to something that you were doing before but it didn't work out for you. Now I am going to show you some examples. It's also important in your personal statement to let us know why you think you will be a good doctor not why you think you will be a good medical student. They are a little bit different. When sometimes we have people say I'm going to be a good student because I help other people in class and I work hard and that sort of thing. Generally you want to start off with why you are excited about medicine and then if you need to tell us some negative experiences you have had it is fine to do that but you should start off with the positive and then go into the compare and contrast mode. here is an example of the fourth date to the prom example I tried engineering but the applicability seemed too distant. I tried research but I missed working with people. Medicine will allow me to combine problem solving and discovery with working with people. the next one, also from somebody's application, says pretty much the same thing, but in a more positive way. "Medicine appeals to me because helping people and solving puzzles are both stimulating to me." A few more examples. These are all real. The first one "I have spent my entire life training to be a doctor. All of my toys and friends have been treated by me I am a doctor at heart, that is why I want to go to medical school." Well that really doesn't really tell us anything about the person or what their attributes are or why they think they're gonna be good at it. Here is another very chronological description that again does not tell us anything about the applicant. And I'll sort of paraphrase it "I entered the university with the intention of pursuing a degree in mathematics, my main interest in high school. My first math class was Linear Algebra. It was interesting, etc., etc., etc. This led me through a number of inspiring courses from Physiology to Advanced Organic Chemistry and ultimately to my major in biochemistry which combines both my interests in biology, etc., etc. We can get this list of classes from the transcript and again it really doesn't tell us anything about why medicine it just tells us about the courses that this person took in college.. here's some better ones. And these are excerpted again from real applications. "The prospect of death and the blessing of life occur daily before the final diagnoses. Unshakably moving forward in such slippery conditions, I learned, is a doctor's gift.. this person has done some reflecting and again shows this in the personal statement. Here's another one "Reflecting on my college experiences as well as my current ones. I found that my life seemed most meaningful... when I was working to help a person overcome something beyond his or her control. And another one "Through confronting such a harsh, unforgiving reality. I found a deep desire to both better understand nature's actions and to assist in medical problems like Alice's. After learning that current medical research has found no cure for many illnesses such as Alice's, I found myself on PubMed for hours learning about the research." And what this showed us, this last one, is here is somebody who is very much a self-propelled learner who has curiosity. This person was just shadowing someone and happened to get to see a patient that was had a terminal illness that was a little bit of an unusual illness and. this person decided to do some more research into that just to learn more about the disease.. that told us a lot about that person. Which was very helpful. And I think that's all for tonight and. the next session is gonna be specifically about the interview And we'll now open it up to questions. Feel free to raise your hand and/or write something down and pass it down.
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