Advice

Welcome to WashU School of Medicine and congratulations! Take a moment to reflect on everything you’ve done to get here. Medical school can be a transformative time — I was in your shoes not too long ago, nervous but excited about what was to come. I moved far away from home, and, naturally, the start of medical school was challenging. I soon found a close community of friends and mentors who supported me through this journey and helped me figure out what excites me about medicine! Here are a few thoughts about how to navigate this time:

1. Continue to do the things that make you happy — whether that is going for runs in Forest Park, binge-watching the latest Netflix show, or trying out new restaurants (there are so many gems here)! Medical school is all about finding the right balance for you, and it is so important to take care of yourself. Take those mental breaks from studying, so you can recharge. Don’t feel guilty about doing so.

2. Take advantage of all the opportunities here — WashU School of Medicine has so much to offer. The clinicians and researchers here are extremely passionate about their field and love mentoring students. This is the time to explore and make those connections. And don’t be afraid of cold emailing! Although terrifying, many of my most meaningful experiences and mentors have come from randomly reaching out to a faculty member I thought was doing interesting work.

3. Find the study habits that work for you. It may take some trial and error during your first couple of months to understand how you learn best. Don’t be afraid to try out new techniques! What works for someone else may not work for you, so try not to compare yourself to others.

4. Reach out to your peers, who are navigating this exceptional and challenging journey alongside you. Reach out to faculty, to Dean Moscoso, to mentors, to loved ones, to friends, to anyone. You’re not alone, and there is a huge community of people rooting for you and celebrating your successes.

Most importantly, keep your friends and family close. Go on those road trips, travel back home for that reunion, or get on the plane for your friend’s wedding. Your life doesn’t have to be (and shouldn’t be) on hold because of medical school. Have fun, enjoy this time, explore your passions, and challenge yourself. You deserve to be here.

Being a physician is an incredible and humbling experience. You will be invited into the most intimate moments of life with people you may have never met, but whom you will never forget, and who will certainly never forget you. You will become an integral part of their life stories, forever entwined in their most life-changing moments. It’s quite a privilege, and it comes with responsibility that can seem overwhelming at times. With that in mind, my two biggest pieces of advice as you embark on this journey are to invest in relationships and to take care of yourself.

Relationships are essential to the practice of medicine. The relationships you develop with patients, peers, faculty, and other colleagues will impact the care you are able to provide. These relationships — along with those in your personal life — will also help keep you balanced and bring meaning to your work. In every interaction, pause to think about what biases you may have and how you can mitigate their impact, what barriers to care may exist and how you can help overcome them, and above all — remember the person inside each patient, caretaker, and colleague. When we’re tired or stressed, it’s easy to forget that they all have their own stories, but one of the most important things we can do as a physician is to ensure that people feel heard and cared for. Remember the wise words of St. Louisan Maya Angelou: “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

In addition to investing in relationships, take care of yourself in other ways — physically, emotionally, and spiritually. There’s a reason they tell you on airplanes to put your own oxygen mask on before helping others; if you aren’t taking care of yourself, you won’t be able to take care of anyone else. So be yourself and make time for what matters to you, whatever that may be. Give yourself grace when things are hard, and ask for help when you need it. There are so many people at WashU School of Medicine who truly care about you as a person and want to support you however we can. Remember what motivated you to attend medical school, and keep your eye on your long-term goals. As you experience different specialties and career paths, reflect on what brings you joy, what energizes you, what it is that makes you excited to get out of bed in the morning — because a career becomes a calling if it’s your heart’s work. Finally, remember that nobody knows everything; being a physician means committing to lifelong learning. So never stop learning — about science, medicine, cutting edge technologies… about life, death, joy, grief, hope … about what it means to be human and to share the human experience with others.

I look forward to accompanying you on this exhilarating journey.

Welcome to St. Louis and WashU School of Medicine! You have many opportunities ahead and I am so glad you chose to study here. I want to start off by inviting you to remember how blessed you are to be here. Not only are you in medical school, but you are at a phenomenal institution with incredibly caring people in an amazing city. Start and end each day with gratitude for all that surrounds you. I have absolutely loved my time here and I know you will too.

My dad constantly emphasizes two life mottos that I want to pass on to you:

1. “Enjoy the Journey”: Medical school is definitely a journey. You will quickly realize how much there is to learn and will feel stressed at times. However, you are not asked to be perfect on the first day … or even the last. As you give effort and enjoy the small moments, you will be able to look back on your progress with fulfillment. And don’t forget part of that fulfillment includes Ted Drewes frozen custard, St. Louis BBQ, Cardinals games, and visits to the zoo. These four years go by way too fast not to enjoy them!

2. “See the Possibilities”: At WashU, the possibilities and resources are endless. I have experienced this myself. You can choose any field and get involved with any project or activity you can possibly imagine. Try new things, make some mistakes, branch out, get out of your comfort zone, and who knows where you’ll end up. You’ve got this.

Congrats on being here! You’ve made the right choice. Now go make the most of it, have fun, and become the best doctor you can be.

Welcome class!

It is a pleasure to have this opportunity to connect with you. I hope you are as excited about getting started as we are to begin another year.

Other contributors on this page have shared many valuable insights and lessons learned. I agree with it all, but want to share a few things that shaped my own path and academic priorities. I was an MSTP student and have always been excited by science, and particularly biology. For me, medical school was transformative. I had the opportunity to take deep and often independent dives into human biology, the mechanisms of disease, and investigation. I loved it and it was these experiences that ultimately lead me to pathology and independent research, eventually to laboratory management, and increasingly to medical education.

Regardless of your current goals, it is important to find and follow your passions, and when special opportunities present themselves to explore new ones and evolve. Nearly every physician will confide that medical school provided the best opportunities to do that exploration. It is an unfortunate reality that you will probably never find a better time. Demands of work and life will inevitably pull you in many directions. The broader the foundation you build today and the more learning skills you master, the easier it will be to succeed in your career, whether as a physician, scientist, educator, and/or advocate.

As faculty, we spend more time than we can sometimes imagine trying to create a curriculum that will prepare you for your future careers in medicine. Although it is important to achieve the stated educational objectives, it is just the beginning. There is just too much out there and so many new and important things to learn. Plan to take full advantage of the unique opportunities that Gateway will bring to you.

If you would like some assistance, just seek us out. We are always here for you.

Happy learning, happy exploring…

Welcome to Washington University! I am one of a handful of current administrators who graduated from medical school at WashU. When my wife, Andrea, and I were medical students, we used to laugh at the faculty who would stand up and describe themselves as “WUMS 21” (this means a 21st-year WashU medical student). Now, we are those people.

Some things were different twenty years ago. First-year lectures were given in Moore Auditorium, and second-year lectures in Erlanger. There were a LOT of lectures, usually three hours in the morning and three in the afternoon, unless we had lab or small groups. Erlanger didn’t have enough seats, so some of us would sit in the aisles. There was no video recording, but we would make an audiotape, which someone would have to remember to flip halfway through the hour. Then someone in the class would type out the text, and we would get a printout in our mailbox. We paid for the privilege of joining the student transcript service.

Some things were not different at all. The gross anatomy lab has been frozen in time for decades. Forget about any “dungeon” stereotypes. The lab is on the top floor of one of our historic buildings and still has windows on three sides that we used to open up on nice days. If your eyes get blurry from too much dissection, you can look up at the cabinets of oddities that people have collected over the years. Then you can look back down and keep rolling up little bits of fascia to reveal those nerves you couldn’t find before.

The Legacy Curriculum actually appealed to me as an applicant, but the Gateway Curriculum is better. We’ve become much more thoughtful about what students need to know and when they need to know it. We’ve added more explicit teaching on social science topics, drawn on a wider variety of pedagogies, and activated the talents of our master educators. I can’t possibly summarize everything that has changed, but I hope that some things about the WashU experience will stay the same. Our students are very active and creative. If you’re here, it’s because our faculty has recognized that you have amazing gifts that will let you contribute to the future of medicine. We want you to take up that charge and explore what your unique contribution will be. I also hope you will see that academic rigor is a virtue. Don’t be afraid to go to the primary literature. Use evidence to guide your practice, evaluate evidence with a critical eye, and learn to contribute to the body of evidence, too. Sometimes, doing a bit more than is required — reading an extra article, or staying a bit late to help with one more operation — will be very rewarding.

WashU School of Medicine is a family. We are very collaborative, and we try to help each other improve. I hope you will see yourself as belonging to this family. Someday, you, too, will be able to reminisce about how things have changed and how they have stayed the same.

The “reminiscence bump” is a psychological phenomenon where older adults preferentially remember autobiographical information from adolescence and early adulthood. Researchers think this is because these memories contribute most to one’s sense of self. You are now (most likely) at an age that you’ll remember for the rest of your life. Most physicians (this one included) would tell you that their profession is a part of their identity. And your process of becoming a physician starts now. Like it or not, these are the times of your life you’ll look back on often.

That said, my advice is that medical school probably matters less than you think it does. “Being a doctor” will only be a part of your identity. Don’t let yourself believe that your success is solely based on what and how you do in school for the next 4+ years. Don’t forget to focus on life outside of the classrooms, hospitals, clinics, and studying, so that you can have experiences that you’ll want to remember.

Think for a minute about all it took for you to be here starting medical school at WashU: where you came from, the people supporting you, your hard work and commitment to others, sweating the MCAT, capitalizing on what makes you you, crying in organic chemistry lab because you discarded the solution and not the precipitate (don’t pretend that was just me). Each of your classmates had an equally as interesting journey to medical school. The same is true of all your instructors. Even more so, your patients all live interesting lives, and are a part of amazing communities. One awesome privilege you’ll have as a medical student is meeting and developing relationships with people that you wouldn’t have otherwise. Learn from them all. Let them pull you outside of your comfort zone. Be curious. Share yourself with others. The work of medicine will cause you to grow as a person. Let your experiences outside of medicine do the same. Those two things aren’t mutually exclusive. Have fun. The future of your memories depends on it.

You will spend the next four plus years at WashU School of Medicine with your peers, and they will be your lifelong friends and colleagues. Form strong bonds with your classmates, collaborate, and support each other. Get to know the faculty, administration, and staff. We are here to help you succeed. Find an advisor or mentor who takes an interest in you. Your mentor will help you navigate medical school, and if you’re lucky, you may get a home-cooked meal out of it. Stay grounded by volunteering in the community. Have fun and stay sane by getting involved in school clubs and continuing with your hobbies. Get to know St. Louis; there is no shortage of entertainment, including the world-champion Cardinals and Blues, the world-famous Saint Louis Zoo, the Saint Louis Science Center, the Saint Louis Art Museum, and the Botanical Garden. In addition, there is a world-class symphony, many music venues, and plenty of nightlife. Pay attention to your academics. Take your basic science courses seriously. They will come in handy in later years, and your future patients will thank you. Don’t worry about your residency match yet. Most importantly, get enough sleep, exercise, and have fun. Oh, and if you want to do research, just email me (chungk@wustl.edu).

Visit Dr. Chung for guidance on research opportunities and to ask her about her favorite rapper. (Hint: He’s slim, and he’s shady.)

Hello! I can’t wait to meet you. I am one of a team of people who are here to support you on the road to becoming a doctor. There will be many joys and challenges on this journey. As you begin medical school, it will be important to develop a community of support — to celebrate your joys and to team up with you in your challenges. By all means, attend to the important business of maintaining relationships with your people, and be sure to invest in growing relationships here as well. One thing the past year has taught me is the importance of staying connected.

What you have heard is true: Medical school will be demanding. There will be stretches of time when balance will be difficult. However, with a little attention, and assistance if requested, you will learn important tools and techniques to regain and maintain a healthy balance. Here are a few bits of advice that you may find useful:

• Build and maintain warm-hearted relationships. Quality is important here, not quantity. Remember that lifetime friends, colleagues, mentors, and advisors surround you. Let them in — the sooner the better.
• Remember what brings you joy and intentionally carve out time for it.
• Do what you love.
• Respect others in your actions and words.
• Assume positive intent in your colleagues.
• Stay connected to your people.
• Play. Outside.
• Laugh as often as possible. Choose companions who multiply laughter.
• Notice something beautiful today.
• Be grateful for a moment every day.

We are here for you. Ask for our support when you need it.  You may not know exactly what it is you need or what we can provide, so ask and we’ll figure it out together.

 

Congratulations and welcome! You made it! It took a lot of time and hard work to get here, so take a moment to reflect on that, celebrate, and thank those who helped you along the way. Getting into medical school is the toughest gate; the hard work never ends, but now that you are here, it gets better and more rewarding. At WashU School of Medicine, you’ll be challenged but well-supported every step of the way. Here’s my two cents on things to hold onto on this journey:

• While you may have answered this question ad-nauseam on your interview trail, jot down the real reason of “why you want to become a doctor.” Who and what inspires you? Think of the qualities and values you want to uphold as a doctor. Tuck those away for a rainy day. Once you start your clinical experiences, add to this list the stories of meaningful patient interactions you have that remind you why it’s all worth it.
• Remember: 1) it’s a marathon not a sprint, and 2) trust your training. Everyone says med school is like drinking out of a fire-hydrant. But you don’t have to do it all at once. Trust the process; repetition in medicine is key. Medicine has its own language, and you will have a lot of firsts (aka make a lot of mistakes, at first). Give yourself lots of grace and patience. You will eventually learn the jargon and start to recognize the patterns, and then the motions will start to get easier. It is very natural to think you will never learn it all, but just take it one day at a time. Many generations of WashU medical students have come before you, with similar fears and anxieties; and like them, you too will one day walk away in a green graduation gown.
• Because it is a marathon, you must find ways to re-fill your tank. Feeling burnt out is likely to happen at some point, so you need to 1) be in tune with yourself enough to notice how you are feeling, 2) find ways to fill your cup, and 3) prioritize caring for your wellness (don’t wait to do this; practice proactive prevention). Yes, you will have a lot to study, but don’t feel guilty for taking time to do things that re-energize you; find out what these things are and plan to do them (e.g., getting enough sleep, exercising, calling home, painting, hanging out with friends).

• “It’s all about relationships.” My soccer coach would say this often, which sounded cheesy at the time, but it truly is the friendships, mentorships, and positive patient interactions that will get you through the long and physically, mentally, and emotionally demanding days. Connection helps prevent burnout and makes for a more fulfilling, enjoyable time, so invest in building relationships from the start and continue building them throughout.
• Pay attention to the “how.” There’s a lot of things you will learn in medical school; arguably, the most important are not in a textbook. Sometimes it’s not what you do, but how you do it that can make all the difference to a patient. Empathy, kindness, and presence … these are not taught, but you will see them modeled; practice incorporating them into your own style.
• Finally, try to enjoy the process (instead of just chasing after the end or a specific test result), re-read #1 when you need to, and take time to reflect and write down (or talk about) events and interactions that stir up something inside you. It will help you make meaning of this special journey, and it will be helpful for your next application season — to residency this time.

Be yourself, and nobody else — if I could guarantee that only one thing was truly learned by all medical students, this would be it.

In the summer of 2020, right before starting my clerkships, I began the awkward but exhilarating process of social transition to my true gender. I was entering a new phase of my education in the midst of a pandemic, and I realized I could not go on hiding who I was from myself and from the world. Looking back, I can see that a lot of what kept me performing a gender that was not mine and trying to be anything but myself was the pressures of the medical field. These are pressures a lot of us feel, to conform to one historical and imaginary idea of a “doctor” for fear of hurting our careers. In a school with so many driven people, it can sometimes feel impossible to be different and to shake our perceptions of “what a doctor should be.”

But those perceptions are wrong! The fact that you are here at this school right now proves that YOU are what a doctor should be. For us to truly serve our patients, we need doctors whose hopes, dreams, identities, and drives are just as diverse as our patients’. This place is big enough for all these driven people to be one big community together, all striving for our big goals but without anyone getting pushed aside. The beauty of med school is that you have the time, space, and resources to figure out what it is that makes you unique, what issues or topics excite you the most, and what kinds of patients pull on your heart in ways unique to you.

Take this unique time and space to figure out what drives you, not only in medicine, but especially in your life. You can and should have a life outside of med school! It will likely take conscious effort to protect these things; medicine will always take everything you give it, so be sure not to give it everything! There will always be another patient, another procedure, another opportunity to learn; but there will not always be another time to take care of yourself and those you care about.

It’s hard to believe that I was in your shoes only four years ago! I remember lots of nerves, anxiety, and anticipation, but even more support. Lean into your classmates, learn what drives and excites them, and show them what drives and excites you. Together, you can not only survive, but truly thrive in med school.

Be yourself, and nobody else!

Welcome to WashU School of Medicine! My name is Tim Yau, and I am one of your clinical skills director for the Gateway Curriculum. Our team is here to teach you all the “non-science” stuff that is necessary to becoming a great physician.

The qualities that will make each of you outstanding doctors is so much more than test scores, which all of you already are capable of. We’ll teach you all the things you expect — how to talk with and examine patients, how to formulate diagnoses, how to interpret labs and tests. But you will also learn how to see your patients as individuals, how to involve them in patient-centered decisions, and how to navigate the complicated societal and structural barriers to their health. The amount of information you will learn in the next four years is both staggering and intimidating. Your learning will not end with medical school, and we hope to light a fire for you to never stop learning!

During medical school you will have opportunities over the next four years to do things that you may never again do in your lifetime. I am a kidney specialist, but I still delivered plenty of babies as a third-year medical student! Learn for the sake of learning (rather than just to pass the test) and you will find the pursuit of knowledge more worthwhile, more meaningful, and longer lasting. Your individual path to fulfill your potential to be a great doctor will be decided by you. Faculty like myself are your mentors, role models, guides, and colleagues in this journey.

Lastly, we hope you are eager to learn, but also want you to ENJOY your medical school experience. Some of the strongest bonds are forged here, and you will need support from family, old friends, and the new friends you will make. Get outside, eat some good food, and have a drink to relax. Take time to enjoy things that make you happy, whatever they are! This advice sounds generic, but I live by my own words: Playing music kept me happy during medical school, and even now at the age of 40+ I enjoy competitive video gaming. In 2018 we even started the official WashU Gaming Club! Even with all the craziness of the pandemic, we’ve been able to play plenty of Among Us. When things get back to normal, I have instruments and consoles in my office, and you’ll be welcome to stop by for a game or to play a tune!

 

Welcome to Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. On your arrival, you will be captivated by the history, vitality, and progressive spirit of the Central West End, our home. You will also find that not everyone in the St. Louis region is reaching their full health potential. Several blocks from the medical center you will find neighborhoods grappling with generational poverty, food insecurity, joblessness and unsteady housing, and health disparities. The COVID-19 pandemic laid bare the roots and immoral nature of those racial and ethnic health disparities. Early in the pandemic, it became apparent that COVID-19 cases were largely clustered in medically underserved regions in North St. Louis City and County, regions that are overwhelmingly African American. Subsequent analyses noted that testing inequities existed, and that those inequities were a driver of the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on communities of color. As the pandemic reached full steam, the data confirmed that Black Americans are three times as likely to become infected with COVID-19 compared with whites, and twice as likely to die from COVID-19.

We now know that those modifiable factors contributing to the COVID-19 disparities also include structural racism.  The pandemic creates an opportunity for you to acknowledge and address past injustices by learning how to engage in clear and honest communications with your patients, prioritize transparency and meaningful community partnerships, and advocate for accountability with Black and Brown communities. The path forward must recognize past bias, both overt and unconscious, and include “radical collaboration” with the communities that have been hardest hit to ensure we do not see another generation of unjust outcomes. It starts by placing a racial equity lens on our efforts to understand and mitigate health inequities, particularly the spread of COVID-19, including measures to increase uptake of the COVID-19 vaccine. Within St. Louis, due to deep-seated distrust, only 30-40 percent of the African American community plans to take the vaccine. Increasing trust in the community will require extraordinary leadership, including clear and honest communication by health care providers, policymakers, and both secular and faith-based community leaders.

As an incoming student, you should indeed immerse yourself in the fascinating world of scientific discovery and medical innovation, but you should never forget the true purpose of medicine is the uplift of the human condition. The new Gateway Curriculum will assist you in gaining the tools you need to become empathic healers. The skills you will gain to address the racial disparities are urgently needed and need to be systems-oriented, community-driven, and guided by the unique social and historical context of race in the St. Louis region. In your years in medical school, make every effort to connect to the greater community, experience the tremendous personal satisfaction of service, and acknowledge the marked difference you can make on the lives of those less fortunate. Allow yourself to be trained, in essence, in a medical center without walls. Your overall experience as a medical school will then be much more rewarding, at Washington University.  In St. Louis.