Building the Modern MD: Program Overview

This competition was intended to facilitate the marriage between healthcare and the humanities by providing a hands-on introduction to the research and academic review writing process. It is our hope that this experience will honor your interest in the humanities, introduce you to concerns in the broader clinical / public health field, and emphasize the importance of maintaining an interdisciplinary pre-medical education not only in college, but as early as high school. 

This research competition is open to all current high school students who have an interest (robust or cursory) in the pursuit of medicine. As participants, you will choose a topic in healthcare that is connected to one of eight humanities categories (anthropology, the arts, economics, gender, government, history, philosophy, and religion) and explore it at great length using scholarly journal publications (e.g., the use of music in psychotherapy would relate to the ‘arts’ category, or policy concerning the Medicare / Medicaid would relate to either the ‘economics’ or ‘government’ – more examples can be found at the end of this booklet in descriptions of these categories). Through this exploration, we hope that you will gain a greater appreciation for the intersection between medicine and your choice of the eight humanities fields. Such an appreciation is essential for developing a contextual understanding of medicine and is greatly celebrated in medical education. We understand that scholarly journals are often fairly pricey, so we have put together a list of open-source options that can be found at the end of this guide under “Resources.” 

Based on your findings from scholarly journal publications, you will compose a 2000 – 3000-word review article that will summarize your findings. Although similar in scope to a research report, these articles are expected to be written at a higher, collegiate level. To guide you through this writing process, our steering committee has arranged for a series of video trainings to help you through the process. You can access the video training by clicking on the links to each training (please see the training section of this website). Additionally, if you have any questions during the writing process you, we encourage you to write to our team at dujs.dartmouth.science@gmail.com and we will get back to you at our earliest convenience. For questions that may require a meeting we will offer the opportunity to sit down with a member of our steering committee. Additionally, if you are interested in seeing example papers, you are welcome to poke around the Dartmouth Undergraduate Journal of Science website for papers related to healthcare and the humanities! 

You will submit the abstract of your paper here by May 27, 2022; after this submission you will be assigned a PIN (Project Identification Number) via email that you will use for the ultimate submission of your article in place of your name and any other identifying information. We ask that you submit your abstract with your name and your paper with your PIN in order to maintain a record of your contact information with your abstract. There will be no connection between those who see your abstract / name submission and paper / PIN submission. If you have more questions about this, please do not hesitate to reach out to us. Your paper will come due 1 week later on June 3rd, 2022 and will be submitted here, after which point it will be graded. 

All submissions will first be screened by the steering committee to ensure that they are properly cited using APA citations. Papers that are properly cited will move onto our committee of student selectors (composed by medical school students and upperclassmen pre-medical students who are majoring or minoring in the aforementioned eight humanities disciplines), and then ultimately finalists will be finally given to professor judges. While we cannot speak to the exact evaluation criteria in the competition, a good place to start is AP Research Rubric that was published in 2021, which can be found here! It captures the essence of collegiate writing and is in the same spirit of what we will likely be evaluating as successful with this competition. 

Our steering committee will review all applicants. One winner from each category will be published in a special issue of the Dartmouth Undergraduate Journal of Science! Additional honorable mention awards will be given to applicants who presented strong papers that were ultimately not chosen to be published.  

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!

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