Advice

Welcome! I hope each of you takes a moment to take pride in your accomplishment and to thank those who have helped you to achieve it. You have earned your place in this class, you absolutely deserve to be here, and we are so glad you are here. I have had the privilege of teaching, mentoring, advising and supporting medical students and residents for over 20 years now- it has been one of the greatest gifts of my life. Here are a few things to consider as you progress through medical school and the rest of your career:

Reflect on what you enjoy and what you don’t enjoy. When you have a really great day, ask yourself what about it made it great? When you have a bad day ask the same. Look for patterns so that you can know what things really motivate you and will keep you happy and engaged in your career for the next 50 years- yes, it likely will be that long. Your coaches and coaching groups will be really helpful partners in talking through this.

Learn about the different specialties and what the day to day of work in those careers is like. Often, we come to medical school with fixed assumptions about what we want to be or what specific careers are all about. Try to push those biases aside and really experience it and what it would be like for you if you were doing that work. Talk to people about their jobs, what they love about them, what they like less. See how much those things align with your own self-realizations about your passions and interests.

Take care of yourself. Each person has different things they need to be well- exercise, time with friends, reading for pleasure, cooking, etc. For me it’s exercise and time with family that really ground me. Figure out what yours are and prioritize them. You will struggle to perform well if you are not doing well. You will benefit from these habits and patterns for the rest of your career.

Get to know your patients. We can get wrapped up in only learning the medicine, but our patients have amazing personal stories and those stories help us understand who they are and what they really care about, so we can help tailor their care. Moreover, when patients feel seen and heard, they experience better care.

Get to know each other and the other students on campus, the residents and fellows you work with, and the faculty. You are part of an amazing community of people who care deeply about your education and your interests, but also about you as a person.

Ask for help when you need it. We have a variety of resources from peer advisors, to the medical student government, to Student Affairs and the Student Success Team, the ombuds office, Dr. Winters and Student Health Services, and, of course, your administration, faculty and peers. We are all here to support you!

Finally, enjoy the ride. You will work hard- likely harder than you have ever worked in your life.  You will see and experience things that are unfair and unjust. You will have the privilege to share some of the happiest and saddest moments of your patient’s lives. You will learn more than you ever thought possible. And, you will serve others and feel the joy that only a career of service can bring. Ultimately, you will help to make the world a better place. What could be better than that?

 

First, congratulations on your acceptance to Washington University School of Medicine. We are so happy to welcome you to our community as our colleagues and future outstanding physicians! Choosing a residency is a distant decision for your class. However, it may be something that is on your mind as you decide where to attend medical school. As a fourth year medical student applying into pediatrics and couples matching with my fiancé, who is matching into dermatology, I hope to share my experience and explain how WUSM has phenomenally supported us both in choosing and applying to our residencies.

From our first year, the WUSM faculty have been incredibly supportive as we both explored specialties. It is not uncommon for lecturers to offer shadowing and research opportunities at the end of class or for a cold-turkey email to blossom into a thriving mentor-mentee relationship. This extends to clinical spaces, where faculty have been eager to mentor us and write us strong letters of recommendation. Now as fourth year medical students, Dean Diemer and the Career Counseling Office have been out-of-this-world cheerleaders, counselors, and advocates. We would not be in the position we are now, in terms of number of interviews and finding our residency program fit, without this incredible support team. I hope I can assure you that wherever you want to go after medical school, WUSM will help you get there.

A LOT is going to be thrown at you over the upcoming year, that’s for sure. The biggest piece of advice I have is to keep an open mind, be flexible, and relax. You might not find your ideal study strategy from the get-go, you might not get the score you wanted on the first exam, you might not get an answer from that doctor you wanted to do research with, and that’s all completely OK. Use M1 as a way to better understand what YOU want, both from yourself and from your career, and don’t focus so much on getting every question right on the exam or memorizing every factoid in First Aid. Also, time is going to fly even faster with a 1.5-year preclinical phase, so really spend time with your friends, travel if you can, go out and have fun! You’ll have less time for that once you start clerkships until you’re done with residency interviews, and that’s quite a long time!

As you embark upon this next stage in your lives, it is normal to feel a weird combination of excitement and fear. Changes are tough and, for many entering medical students, medical school will be the most challenging period yet. Given this, it’s important to remember that medical school is not only about working hard, it’s also about community and personal and professional growth. Over the coming years, you will come to understand yourself better than you may have before. You will likely face many challenges, both personally and professionally. Remember to see these challenges as opportunities for learning. And when you have particularly tough moments personally, remember caring for yourself is a priority.

Self-care is critical to the work we do as physicians, but it looks a bit different for everyone. Sometimes it’s finding a way to socialize or exercise. Sometimes it’s spending time alone or resting. Take time (start now!) to reflect on how far you’ve come already, and what gives you fulfillment and peace. Find ways to purposefully integrate those fulfilling activities into your new identity as a medical student.

St. Louis can be a great place for exploration, growth, and restoration. The parks, museums, zoo, restaurants, breweries, and festivals are unmatched. More locally, our WashU Med community is here to support you in whatever way you need. Reach out. Stop by. Ask questions.

I look forward to meeting you and supporting your needs in scholarship in beyond!

 

Med school is an exciting time and can be all encompassing. But you need a break – I suggest finding something else that really takes your mind away from it. It should be something you can do regularly without too much planning. Ideally the “something else” gives you real pleasure. When you are doing the “something else” you need to let your self be fully present to enjoy the activity. This can be harder than it sounds. For me, the things that work are swimming and ice skating. I’m not too skilled at either one, but every time I swim or skate, I always take a moment to reflect on how happy I feel getting to do something I love. I never regret the time I have spent on these activities when I get back to work.

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.

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.)

It seems like only yesterday that our admissions team was telephoning you, congratulating you and telling you how our Committee on Admissions thought you would be an outstanding addition to this year’s entering class. Some of you cried. Some of you screamed. Some of you were speechless. In that moment I was, and continue to be, so proud of each and every one of you. I’m unbelievably excited to get to walk alongside you as you start a new chapter in your life.

As you begin the journey into the breathtaking, beautiful and completely imperfect world of medicine, my advice is this — be courageous. In the small moments, with your peers, your patients, and yourself.

What does it look like to be courageous with your peers? Once, long ago when I was an early faculty member I was feeling exhausted and worn out. I was feeling all the pulls of a new leadership role, a young family at home, and a heavy clinical load. A colleague and I went to dinner and I was brave enough to tell her my story. She told me hers. Her story wasn’t perfect and really, it was just as messy as mine. Because of her courage, I didn’t feel alone. Be courageous enough, in small moments, to care about your peers and colleagues as you go on this journey together. Courageous enough to really listen, to really care, and to be ready to hear the true answer to the question, “How are you feeling?”

It isn’t just about colleagues. Be courageous, in the small moments, with your patients. Your role on the healthcare team as a medical student is right around the corner. Over your career, you will take care of hundreds, thousands, of patients and you will know, deep in your heart, when our health care system isn’t providing them with the best care possible. Advocate that they have a seamless follow-up plan and the right resources. Push when you think your team isn’t following a plan that’s comprehensively holistic. Be willing to resist the urge to call it a day when you know, deep down, that what your patient needs most is for you to pull up a chair and hold their hand. Do this even when you’ve had a long day and you’re juggling nine million things. I’m asking you to be courageous even when it’s hard.

Finally, I want you to be courageous with yourself. As a person, as a unique and remarkably incredible individual. Our Committee on Admissions has spent countless hours reviewing your applications. You talked about the family members who inspired you to go into medicine, your identity as children who immigrated to the United States, and your pride for being the first in your family to go to college or medical school.

As you embark on your journey in medicine, be courageous enough to celebrate your own story. In a medical world that sometimes force physicians into pathways and protocols, which is often good for patient care, never lose sight of the quiet beauty that comes with being you. Your culture, your passion, your values, and your individual identities make up the fabric of the true diversity we need in medicine.

Entering Class of 2023, congratulations again and I can’t wait to get see you!

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!

 

It’s exciting to be a first-year medical student! You will learn how the human body works in detail, from head to toe, from gross anatomy to subatomic structures. However, some of the current concepts and “facts” you will learn will prove to be wrong. That’s right (actually still wrong!). It’s not that you’re being deliberately taught misinformation. It’s just that we don’t know our own ignorance (yet). Keep in mind, what you’re learning is how we understand things, circa 2021. But we don’t know what we don’t know.

While it is certainly much easier to learn the materials if you just try to absorb it verbatim, my advice is to spend some time thinking about what you’re learning. I can now reflect on the lectures I heard as a medical student touting that the cause of peptic ulcer disease was too much acid. In retrospect, that couldn’t be right because acid is always there! I didn’t think about it then, but I should have, because now we know (I think pretty conclusively) that ulcers are often caused by a bacterial infection! Keep track of things that don’t make sense to you along with those that are incompletely understood. (There are lots of them!) For aspiring scientists, they will be great projects on which to work in the future. For future clinicians, they will be the ones that you will reflect on, and cause you to go back over your old med school texts and notes, if not when you’re practicing, certainly a great retirement project!

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.

You did it!! You got into medical school! Maybe you’ve already celebrated, maybe you’re a little nervous because you’ve heard that the real work begins now. There’s some truth to that — medical school is really busy and can be overwhelming at times. But honestly, you’ve already done the hardest part. Now that you’re in you have access to a truly ridiculous number of resources. There is so much support available, in academics, for mental health, for getting into research, for building a community, and so much more. There are also safety nets in place to catch you if or when things are too much to handle on your own.

As you get settled into medical school, it can be easy to get caught up in how much everyone else is studying, what resources they’re using, if you should be doing research yet, if you’ve signed up for enough shadowing across every specialty that exists. But I would encourage you, as much as possible, to pull back from all that. You are about to be at one of the best medical schools in the nation, and you deserve to be here. WashU is going to get you to the finish line. This is not to say you don’t have to do any work, of course. But you don’t need to get a 95% on every exam — or any of them, for that matter. You don’t need to buy subscriptions to AMBOSS, spend hours in the library every day, or even know what Anki is in order to do well in medical school and end up where you want to go. You are building a foundation for everything from specific study habits to a work-life balance that could last you the rest of your medical career, so try your absolute best not to make anxiety-based decisions or decisions based solely on what your classmates are doing. You are where you need to be, doing what you need to do — and if you’re not, someone will tell you. Make time for yourself, listen to your body, eat a vegetable every once in a while. Make sure that whatever you do works best for you because you are the only person it needs to work for. Slow down, breathe deeply, and remember that it’s all going to be just fine.

Before medical school, I used to scoff at all the different cliches people used to describe medical school — “it’s like drinking from a fire hydrant”, “med school is a marathon, not a sprint”, “lifelong learner”, etc. After completing the preclinical phase of the Gateway Curriculum, I admittedly still scoff at most cliches, but there’s wisdom hidden behind them. There’s so much stuff in medical school. Not just content, but also friendships, research projects, family, student organizations, Netflix shows, rooftop parties, volunteering, etc. With so many opportunities squeezed into a few years, it can be difficult to find any semblance of balance. I’ve found it helpful to stay attuned to myself and trust my body to tell me what it needs. Feeling tired? Take a nap. Isolated? Go get bubble tea with friends. Bored? Explore a new specialty. Stressed? Rearrange the to-do list. It’s been so much more sustainable to work with how I’m feeling instead of against it.

Navigating through medical school can also be challenging because there is a lot of learning, forgetting, relearning, forgetting, relearning again, etc. It’s humbling to search up the name of the right-sided heart valve for the fifth time (it’s the tricuspid) or miss an entire portion of the history during an SP encounter (don’t forget the social history!). Don’t let those blips make you think you don’t deserve to be in medical school or that you won’t be a great doctor; it just shows that medicine is hard and takes time. Thankfully, there’s a long way between now and practicing medicine; hopefully, by then I’ll remember to take a full history.

Medical school means a lot of different things to different people. It’s challenging, fulfilling, draining, edifying, exciting, dramatic, frustrating and one of the coolest things you could ever do — all at once. When you come to WashU, you will be entering a community of remarkable people, all with different backgrounds, personalities, worldviews and ambitions. The one thing they will have in common is a sense of camaraderie and fellowship. When you get to campus, you might find yourself getting caught up in comparison — are you studying enough, studying in the best way, pursuing enough extracurriculars, shadowing enough, or socializing enough? It’s easy to get overwhelmed at first. But take a breath and remember that you’re here. You’ve earned your place here. And you don’t need to do everything everyone else is doing, all at once, all the time. You’re at a place where you can do anything you set your mind to — the people around you are invested in your success and your well-being, and you have what you need to flourish and excel. Rely on your peers, mentors and friends to course-correct you when you need it – and if you’re like most of us, you will need it at some point, and that’s okay.

The transition to medical school can be quite weird. You have to adjust to a new city, new weather (sometimes), new culture, and a different caliber of time management. As someone who often has trouble adapting to change, I’ve found it most useful to embrace the weirdness rather than question it. You’re going to have to work hard, possibly harder than you’ve ever worked. You will be good at some things and really quite bad at others. You will make mistakes, have bad days, embarrass yourself in front of a patient, and question why you’re even here. I’ve only been here a few months, and I’ve done most of those things already — the key is to step back, remember your purpose, and dedicate yourself to getting better each day. Remember that even the most accomplished, most empathetic, and most respected physicians out there were once wide-eyed students like us, and they stumbled and fell during their training too. The most important lesson you’ll learn here is how to get back up and forge ahead. I’m still learning, and I know you will too.

Things I learned in medical school:

1. Lists are an effective and efficient method of communication.
2. Being in the hospital on clerkships can be hard, especially during the first couple of months. It is most analogous to starting a new job every 2-4 weeks, in a completely different role, with completely different people, and in a completely different place.
3. Be kind to yourself, and know that sometimes the best thing to do when you don’t know what to do is to just show up.
4. Don’t sweat the small stuff. Everyone has been a medical student once and done something embarrassing.
5. Try to limit comparing yourself to others; whether that be in how you study, student groups, research, or on rotations. Remember that everyone has their own strengths and will grow into their own identity. There are many roads to the same destination, and it is not a race.
6. These four (or eight!) years will go by in a blink of an eye, and at the end you won’t be sure how you got there, but you’ll know that you’ve grown with a wonderful group of people you are lucky enough to call classmates and friends. When you can, spend as much time as possible around the people you love.