Clinical Skills

The Clinical Mentoring program starts during your first module. You are paired with an M4 who brings you into the hospital to observe and practice your clinical skills. There are four required sessions, but you can work with your mentor to do as many as you want — it’s what you make it! You will be in the hospital, working with patients, practicing your history taking and physical exam skills, and getting feedback in a low-stakes, not-graded environment. Also, your M4 is an amazing resource, they have been where you’ve been and can give you advice for all aspects of your medical school journey.

One of the first courses I signed up for as an M4 was Clinical Mentoring. It is a really unique opportunity to help students through their first clinical scenarios in the hospital and is fun for me, the patients, and my two M1s (I hope!). It has also been an amazing chance for me to reflect on how much I have learned since starting three years ago and take pride in my own progress while supporting others on their journey!

I think most WashU students would agree that the Clinical Skills thread is one of the most engaging parts of the Phase 1 curriculum. It can be easy to get bogged down in the basic sciences that we have to learn and forget about the interpersonal side of medicine. Clinical Skills gives us a chance to learn how to be a physician, through discussions on everything from the different components of a routine History & Physical Exam (H&P) to the complex task of delivering bad news to a patient. These lessons are reinforced during our standardized patient (SP) encounters, which are low-stress, ungraded opportunities to practice what we learn during our Clinical Skills lectures with professional patient actors. Clinical Mentoring is another opportunity to develop our doctoring skills and involves pairing up with an M4 who works with you as you practice taking a full H&P with a real patient at Barnes-Jewish Hospital. Finally, Dr. Yau and Dr. Mullin, the leads of Clinical Skills, are exactly the kind of people you want teaching this thread, as they make learning these important skills fun and introduce new concepts in parallel with our science-based curriculum.

At WashU, many of the various clinical departments invites students to join them at their weekly Grand Rounds or Clinicopathological Conferences (CPC), both in-person and over Zoom. These sessions can be a wonderful opportunity to see how physicians work through real cases and to continue developing your own clinical reasoning skills. Additionally, many of the Grand Rounds are on topics broader than just clinical cases, including global health, health equity, and systems-based practice. Many of these events also have free breakfast/refreshments — bonus!

Shadowing is a great, low-stakes way to explore a specialty, establish relationships with potential mentors, and help you reflect on what you want your future career to look like. Thankfully, many of the faculty at WashU are eager to have medical students join them, especially since they get to sell their specialty to you. Whether it’s via specialty interest groups, lecturers, research PIs, coaches, or just cold-emailing faculty, most opportunities are just an email away. They can get you fairly involved too; when I shadowed cardiothoracic surgery, I got to feel a patient’s heart while the physician was placing them onto cardiopulmonary bypass!

The one thing WashU is amazing at is giving students so many opportunities to get involved in hands-on events super early on. I am only one semester into medical school and I have already participated in over six different procedure events in many different specialties, which has been invaluable as someone who is still unsure about what they want to go into. During the annual OB/GYN procedure night I had the chance to learn and practice a variety of hands-on skills with residents and faculty, including IUD placement, deliveries, cauterization, ultrasound, laparoscopic practice, endometrial biopsy, D&Cs, and more. With the Association of Women’s Surgeons I got to participate in their Sawbones event where I got hands-on experience with power tools and learned more about the experiences of current orthopedic surgery residents. With the Emergency Medicine group’s SimWars events I got the chance to practice clinical decision-making in a fast-paced, low-stakes environment with emergency medicine physicians. Through the cardiovascular group I got to attend an endovascular surgery simulation session (think, wires, catheters, balloons, stents, and aortic repair) and another anastomosis lab where I got to practice stitching two simulated vascular tubes together. And this is just to name a few of my experiences!