Residency Symposium.

Last weekend (and this week!) was a busy one and that's why I'm just now getting around to writing a blog about it.

We had the memorial service for the families of the people who donated their bodies for us to use during anatomy. It was done well. It was nice to see all of the families and friends that were affected by our very first patients, our very best teachers.

On Saturday was the Residency Symposium that the AMA puts on at UNMC every other year. It was pretty overwhelming. For anyone that knows me even a little bit, you'll know that I tend to get myself over-involved. The morning lectures were all about building your résumé by getting involved in different extracurriculars. Unfortunately it made me feel like I wasn't involved enough (but let's be honest, that couldn't be further from the truth) and that I'd never get into a residency program. I can only imagine how my classmates were feeling as the end of the school year was looming over their heads with finals and a paper left to write. As bummed as I am to not be in school right now, I have to say that it's really nice not to be stressed to the max currently.

Throughout the afternoon at the symposium, we had small groups with different specialities to learn all about their residency training. I went to the med-peds (you get board certified in both internal medicine and pediatrics), neurology and infectious disease talks. They were pretty great, although I have to admit that they pushed me back towards wanting to go into neurology more than anything. We shall see...who knows what the future holds.

No one can predict where healthcare will be in the next 10-15 years, so it was sort of hard to give us cold, hard facts about what to expect. I personally find this unknown exciting, but I'm sure that many others find it frustrating and annoying. The one thing that we do know, is that how we practice medicine and how we train our doctors is changing.

There is all sorts of research and talk about changing the way in which we train future medical professionals. There are several residency programs that are moving more towards a skill-based assessment of residents instead of a temporally based one. Eventually this shift will work its way down to medical schools too. Eventually the way students learn in the pre-clinical years will be different too. Medicine is reforming. And it's about time. We have taught our doctors in the same manner for 100 years now. And medicine is vastly different now than it was in the early 1900s.

I was a speaker earlier this spring who told us that the only thing you have to do to become a doctor is to stay out of trouble and pass 6 large multiple choice exams (MCAT, USMLE Step 1, USMLE Step 2 CK, USMLE Step 2 CS, USMLE Step 3, and your respective boards), but that we have doctors who are terrible clinicians because they haven't learned all of the skills they need to by the time they finish their residency or they struggle interacting with humans. There was an interesting article in the Times about this earlier this spring.

So all in all, the residency symposium was good, albeit overwhelming. I know now what things I need to work on still to make my application all the more strong. Lucky for me, I have a whole extra year to make and implement those changes!