Are there unique aspects to the clinical curriculum at your medical school or niches that your medical school has emphasized with respect to medical education? (Any insight you can give about how your medical school may provide a unique clinical rotation/learning experience compared to other medical schools)
I think rotating at the LA County hospital is a unique experience for many reasons. First, I think it gives you a good view into a lot of the challenges that the healthcare system in the US is currently facing. It really hits you in the face with a lot of the ongoing social barriers that exist in our society. Second, because it is an under-resourced system, medical students are really useful to the teams there. You feel like you get a lot of real responsibility that matters. This means that you can get a lot of hands-on experience as a medical student and really develop your skills, more so than at a lot of other programs.
Recognizing that there is variation across clerkships, how would you describe your role as a team member during third and fourth year clerkships in general? What sort of role did you play in the care of your patients and what were you generally responsible for?
I think one of the best things about going to Keck for medical school is the amount of time you get to spend at LA County Hospital for your rotations. On your clerkships, you’re generally given a decent amount of responsibility, and there are plenty of opportunities to take on even more if it’s what you’re interested in. For all of your rotations, you’re expected to be the point person on all of your patients. Your primary role as a medical student in most places is to be a reporter: know what is going on with your patients and report on any changes that might need the team’s attention.
Of all the clerkships/rotations you have completed thus far, which do you think was the most challenging and why? If you could go back and do them again, is there anything you would do differently?
I think all clerkships bring their own challenges. For example, I found psychiatry to be challenging because I spent time on the outpatient child and adolescent service, where many of the patients face incredibly challenging social issues and traumas that contribute to their psychiatric conditions. Surgery was challenging because it was the most time-intensive rotation with the most erratic hours.
In what way does the learning process change most significantly as you transition from pre-clinical courses to clinical clerkships?
The two biggest differences from pre-clinical to clinical years are time and learning style. There are fairly minimal in-person requirements during the pre-clinical years at Keck, so outside of mandatory clinical sessions during the week, your time is yours to use how you like. A lot of it will obviously be spent studying, but you’ll also have a lot of time to dive deep into research, community service, or any other professional development during that first year and a half. The learning style is just like in college, where you take tests and get scored that way. During the clinical years, you lose that free time component to rotations and the learning style is very different. I think one of the biggest challenges of rotations is that by the time you usually feel comfortable on a service or team, you usually only have a week left of the rotation. As a result, often times during the clerkship years, you have feelings that you don’t know much and that you don’t know what you’re doing, and you won’t really appreciate the amount you have learned until the tail end of your third year. You must put a lot of trust in the curriculum and process and kind of believe that you will come out on the other side with a lot more knowledge and clinical skills.
What clubs and organizations (both academic or non-academic) are you a part of? Additionally, are there any organizations or club events (even if you aren't a part of them) that you think are unique to your school?
I participated in a few organizations and clubs as a medical student. During my first year, I founded the medical computer science interest group, which was aimed at providing medical students interested in learning how to code a space to practice their skills and ask questions. This was the organization that I was most involved with during my first two years in medical school. I was also loosely involved with the Keck Human Rights Clinic and had the opportunity to shadow a psychiatric evaluation for an asylum case. There were also workshops put on by certain organizations like the anesthesia organization (IV placement practice) and surgical organization (robotic surgery introduction) that I attended. Finally, I was president of the medical student soccer club, which organized medical students at Keck to play pick-up soccer every week on Sundays in Pasadena.
Can you give us a brief description of the area surrounding your school? What are some of the more common things you or your classmates have done in the surrounding area during your free time/for fun?
The USC Health Sciences campus is East of Downtown Los Angeles, right where the 5 and 10 intersect. The campus itself is fairly small, there’s not many places to really hang out on campus or within walking distance of campus. If you go to school at Keck, you will definitely need a car. With a car, there are lots of options- LA has an amazing food scene with tons of different cuisines. There are lots of places to go hiking around, with many great trails less than 30 minutes away. The beach is also fairly accessible, with many people picking up surfing, especially during first and fourth year. I also almost always played pick-up soccer on Sundays with other medical students organized through the soccer interest group at Keck.
Some people end up going to medical school very close to where they grew up whereas others move to a completely new place. Depending on your personal experience, can you describe how the location of your medical school relative to your family/support system/home base has affected your experience?
I grew up in Boston and stayed there for college and for several years after graduating college. Coming out to USC for medical school was the furthest I was going to have ever been from family. I think the biggest challenge is the fact that I cannot just go home on a whim during the week or for a weekend.
How would you describe the social scene outside of medical school? (The answer to this question could comment on how tight-knit you feel your class is, how frequently you find yourself doing things with your classmates during your free time, what class activities the school has organized to facilitate class bonding, or the relationship between the different years at your medical school)
This is pretty dependent on the type of person you are. For me, I have always felt that the classes at Keck are all fairly easy-going. It feels that while there are definitely friends groups that form, most people are very open to other people joining them for activities like going to the beach together or for weekend trips. I think the class is closer during the first two years, since you are all together in classes and then gets a little disjointed during the clinical years, as you don’t really see people that are on different rotations than you unless you really make the effort to meet up outside of rotations.
How has your medical school facilitated physical and mental well-being? To expand on this question….Do you think your program has prioritized the well-being of its students? Do you have access to a gym or other ways of exercising? Do you have access to mental health resources?
There is definitely a conscious effort by Keck to prioritize wellness. They have tried to increase the amount of wellness days during rotations and during the year in general to give free time back to students. They are also pretty receptive to class feedback on wellness issues. There is good access to mental health resources through the school, with 10 sessions covered by the student insurance. At times, it feels that the school can be unnecessarily strict about getting excused absences during rotations. It could always be better, but I think in general it is moving in the right direction.
How has your medical school helped you connect with mentors and how have these mentors helped you? This can be research mentors, career mentors, or other mentors..
I think the school does a decent job finding opportunities to connect students with faculty mentors. There are frequent shadowing opportunities, and you get pretty good facetime with faculty during rotations and if you attend classes in person. I also think that most med students are self-starters and pretty good at seeking out opportunities for mentorship as well. Most faculty react positively to students showing interest in their specialty or field of research, but it’s usually on the student to put in the time to establish those relationships and maintain them.
During your undergraduate studies, did you focus at all on involving yourself in research? If so, can you describe how you found out about the research opportunity, what getting the research position required, and what your responsibilities were for your research position?
I had a few research projects in undergrad but nothing that really lasted beyond 6 months. I usually found those projects through an undergraduate research portal and applied to them that way.
Do you feel that your research experience during your undergraduate studies contributed to your learning experience beyond as an additional component of your medical school application?
During undergrad no but as a graduate student and at work prior to medical school, yes. I worked in computational biology for two years after finishing a masters and I think this was a great experience for me. I learned a lot about how to formulate research questions, test hypotheses, and perform and iterate on analyses. I also saw what it looked like to contribute to manuscripts that went to high-impact journals and saw how slow research projects can move. I also gained a lot of hard technical skills in statistics and computer science that are very useful to have now. It also helped guide the type of research that I want to do in the future. I was exposed to a lot of ideas and technologies during seminars and talks that took place while I was a researcher that made me interested in fields adjacent to the field I was in at the time (cancer research).
In medical school, when did you decide to involve yourself in research and what led you to make this decision? Looking back, would you have gotten involved in research at a different time? Earlier? Later?
I came into medical school very interested in artificial intelligence, which was something I became interested in during graduate school and then even more so when I was a computational biologist. I was very interested in how I could apply it to medicine. I got involved with research almost immediately at Keck after the first block and I would not change that.
Once you decided to get involved in research, how did you go about finding a research mentor and/or a research project to get involved in? What resources were most helpful in finding a research mentor or research project?
The way I found my research was pretty lucky. I happened to meet another medical student (a second year) who was interested in the same field that I was during my second look at Keck prior to my first year. When I started my first year, I reached out to this student who was already integrated in a lab. I knew that I wanted to do some work in AI, specifically focused on imaging analysis, and this lab happened to have just recently generated a dataset of video and needed someone with a computer science background to analyze it. I think in general though, the best way to find research projects is to approach faculty directly, either in person or through email. I think the best opportunity to do this first year is to attend lunch talks put on by the various specialty organizations and chat with the faculty giving the talk afterwards. They are usually very approachable in that environment since they are already spending time speaking to first years during lunch.
What types of research projects do you think are most suitable for medical students to complete on a realistic timeframe? Alternatively, can you describe one or some of the major research project that you are involved in and what your role is?
I try to stay as far away from wet lab as possible. The easiest projects will probably be case reports, which can be done very quickly, like over a weekend, and easily published. I think the best type of project for medical students is working to analyze data for a PI or a group that has already collected and cleaned that dataset. I think research that involves collecting data or creating a dataset is riskier for medical students, as the time frame is usually on the order of many months/years so may be challenging to get any publications for.
My particular project in medical school was to create and analyze a set of surgical videos using deep learning. Essentially, we were interested in showing that surgical video could be a useful tool for surgical education and as another way to provide feedback to surgical trainees. From the time I started on this project midway through first year, we published around 11-12 papers and had several abstracts and oral presentations accepted at conferences. This paper that I first authored my third year summarizes what my work was during medical school: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2790172.
If you are unsure about what specialty you are going to apply to, how would you approach getting involved in research?
I did research in Neurosurgery even though I was pretty sure I did not want to do Neurosurgery. I am now going into General Surgery, although again I did not decide on my specialty until halfway through third year and came into medical school thinking I would never like surgery. For me, I wanted to work on a specific type of research problem in AI and so I was looking for a research project where I could do just that. Since I was undecided on my specialty, I did not really care what specialty my research was in. I just wanted the opportunity to dive deep into the field and to be working with a good dataset. I think if you are undecided on the specialty, the best thing to do is attend lunch talks and seminars and hear faculty talk about their work. If that work seems interesting to you, then it could be worth reaching out to that faculty to see if they have any projects you could join. You can also talk to other medical students in the years above you for advice on who are good PIs to work for.
If someone is unable to get a publication out of a research project, how else can you derive value from a research experience?
You’ll usually have lots of opportunities to at least submit abstracts or posters for conferences. I think there’s also a lot of potential valuable skills you can pick up from research. Learning how to write manuscripts or apply for funding is a useful skill. You could also use your research as an excuse to try to learn a new hard skill, such as coding, statistics, or certain wet lab techniques. Doing research can also give you a better understanding of how to read the literature and how to interpret studies, which you will definitely have to do as a practicing clinician down the line. It might also allow you to get to really know a certain specialty, which could help you decide if that is the right specialty for you or not. You end up building relationships that could also be helpful down the line when you apply for residency.
Do you have advice for medical students about how to balance class-related responsibilities (preparing for tests, etc.) and research?
It is important to always prioritize school over any of your extracurriculars, especially if your classes are graded. No research project is worth an incomplete or failed course to a residency program. The best time to do research (outside of a research year between years 3-4) is probably the second half of first year and first year summer. That’s when you have the most control of your schedule which allows you to balance your schedule the most easily.