Dear Prospective Candidate and Aspiring Physician,
Medicine is undoubtedly an arduous path. It requires an equally tenacious mind and spirit willing to appreciate the decades of schooling and training required to eventually don the white coat. In addition to this tenacity, however, there is an ardent need for empathy. Often arising from personal experience with diverse populations, empathy is difficult to teach. But, as students and aspiring “citizens of the world,” empathy is something that we can take the initiative to explore by learning equity in the medical field. This empathy can roughly be translated as a deep understanding and appreciation for the context behind every patient that walks through the doors of the clinic. This context can come in many forms – social, economic, political, geographic context being chief among them – and has the power to speak volumes about how the patient may react not only to their diagnosis, their treatment, but also to you, their physician.
In the modern era of medicine, we have the ability to build this understanding of healthcare equity in our psyche from the very beginning (i.e., starting from high school). We have the power to invest time in understanding how the person behind each patient name can best be treated both from a medical perspective but also from a human perspective. There is a rawness to this understanding, and while a preemptive consideration of patients’ social context is difficult to achieve at the point where you are in your academic career, years out from the clinic, you have the ability to build a strong foundation for that understanding through consideration of the intersection between medicine and anthropology, the arts, economics, gender, government, history, philosophy, and religion. Connecting these eight categories to the medical field will allow you to see the humanity behind medicine in order to build that foundation for understanding patient context. This consideration will humanize patients and allow you to treat them in the most effective manner possible.
It is our hope with this competition to jumpstart your development of socially aware, modern physicians who are able contextualize patient treatment within the broader social landscape. As we are the budding generation of doctors, the responsibility of being physicians bearing a strong, wholistic approach to medicine lies squarely with us – let’s use our years in development wisely and work toward that end goal.
All our best,
Building the Modern Steering Committee Anahita Kodali ’23 (Executive Chair, Co-Founder), Aditi Gupta ’23 (Co-Chair), Audrey Herrald ’23, Juliette Courtine ’24, Nishi Jain ’21 (Co-Founder)
If you would like a pdf version of all the student information, see here. Please note that the PDF and BtMMD web pages change as broken links are noted and updated. If you are having trouble with a link on the PDF, try redownloading it and see if the issue is fixed; if it isn’t, please reach out to us via email!