My Clerkship Experience– A Deep Dive

By: Carlos Chan (c2021) It’s my first ER shift as a clerk. I’m not as wide-eyed and mystified as I was when I first started. I’ve seen my first death, I’ve seen my first birth, and I’ve made countless mistakes in between. Of course I have yet to see a […]

Developing Grit in Medicine

By: Lauren Lin (c2022) Grit, a term coined by psychologist Dr. Angela Duckworth, is the passion and perseverance people have for their long-term goals. Individuals with grit are strivers. They have an enduring sense of interest and dedication for what they do, as well as the willingness to keep fighting for it even after […]

How do we deal with human genetic modification?

By: Malavan Ragulojan (c2022) Although the future of the infamous He Jiankui has been decided in a court sentencing announced late last December, the ethical pandora’s box he unleashed has yet to be fully appreciated. In February of 2019, He Jiankui of the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, China shocked the […]

What My Brain Tumour Taught Me

By: Noam Raiter (c2022) My name is Noam Raiter and I am a first-year medical student at McMaster University. I have wanted to be a doctor for as long as I can remember, and I’ve been a patient for even longer. Specifically, at age 5 I was diagnosed with a brain tumour. I often […]

Lost to Follow Up

By: Laura Spatafora (c2020) The first thing that struck me about Anna was her age; she was only 28 years old, but she had the longest chart and medication list of all the patients that we’d seen in clinic that day, all of whom were also much older than her. I remember thinking to myself, […]

How my experience as a cancer patient shaped me as a medical student and future health provider

By: Raafia Siddiqui The surgeon asked me for the second time, “So are you here alone?” “Yes,” I answered, a bit impatiently this time. I was a 20-year-old who felt I had better things to do than be at this appointment. My family doctor had noticed a lump on my throat and insisted I […]

Get Out of Your Own Head

By: Carlos Chan (c2020) At McMaster University, we prize the ability to engage in self-reflection and learn from our experiences so that we can become better physicians. We dedicate an entire morning to it every week in pre-clerkship (professional competencies), we have required writing assignments centered around the idea (our reflective physician portfolio), and it’s […]