What is coming next for the Medical School Headquarters

Hippocratic Oath

Dr. Ryan Gray: I swear to fulfill to the best of my ability and judgment this covenant. I will respect the hard-won scientific gains of those physicians in whose steps I walk, and gladly share such knowledge as is mine with those who are to follow. I will apply for the benefit of the sick all measures which are required, avoiding those twin traps of over-treatment and therapeutic nihilism. I will remember that there is art to medicine, as well as science, and that warmth, sympathy and understanding may outweigh the surgeon’s knife or the chemist’s drug. I will not be ashamed to say, “I know not,” nor will I fail to call on my colleagues when the skills of another are needed for a patient’s recovery. I will respect the privacy of my patients, for their problems are not disclosed to me that the world may know. Most especially, must I tread with care in matters of life and death. If it is given me to save a life, all thanks. But it may also be within my power to take a life. This awesome responsibility must be faced with great humbleness and awareness of my own frailty. Above all I must not play at God. I will remember that I do not treat a fever chart, a cancerous growth, but a sick human being whose illness may affect the person’s family and economic stability. My responsibility includes these related problems if I am to care adequately for the sick. I will prevent disease whenever I can, for prevention is preferable to cure. I will remember that I remain a member of society with special obligations to all my fellow human beings; those sound of mind and body, as well as the infirm. If I do not violate this oath, may I enjoy life and art, respected while I live, and remembered with affection thereafter. May I always act so as to preserve the finest traditions of my calling, and may I long experience the joy of healing those who seek my help.

Introduction

This is The Premed Years, session number 200.

Now, welcome. If this is your first time joining us, session 200 is a special one. Obviously 200 episodes is huge, but every fifty episodes we have read this modern vision of the Hippocratic Oath that was written in 1964 by Louis Lasagna- I don’t know how to say his last name. Lasagna, maybe. He, I think is maybe the current dean at Tufts, if not he was the dean at Tufts. But this oath- I like to read it every fifty episodes because it reminds us of our journey to medicine, and why we are here. And if you get lost on your journey, if you struggle to remember why you are on this journey, go back and either listen to the beginning of episode 100, 150, 200, or just Google Hippocratic Oath modern version, and read that. Because everything it talks about in there is stuff that we talk about here on the podcast, and how to be a good premed student, and talk about- when we talk about what medicine is like, and even the discussion that we had a couple weeks ago, or a couple months ago now at this point, when Allison and I were talking about the neurology resident that was fired in Miami after being videotaped intoxicated and fighting with an Uber drive. This oath talks about being a member of society with special obligations. Special obligations. You are expected to be an upstanding citizen, and you’re held to higher standards, and this oath talks about it. It talks about everything, which is awesome.

Now session 200, it’s just going to be me today, and I wanted to talk about where we have gone, what we have seen, and where we are going in the future here at The Premed Years, the Medical School Headquarters, at Old Premeds, and the Med Ed Media now as the network of all the podcasts that we’re doing.

Last Fifty Episodes

In the last fifty episodes or so since we’ve done a recap like this, I’ve published a book; if you didn’t know, The Premed Playbook: Guide to the Medical School Interview, it’s the first book in a series that I will write. This one was picked up by a publisher and will hopefully be in bookstores June of 2017. Right now you can get it on Kindle, go check out www.MedSchoolInterviewBook.com. It’s a nice long URL for you. www.MedSchoolInterviewBook.com, and you can check out the book there, or just go to Amazon and search for ‘medical school interview,’ and scroll down the list a little bit and find the book there.

So that was a huge accomplishment in the last fifty episodes or so, and I’m already getting amazing feedback. So kind of what we have seen I wanted to talk about to. But the whole goal of me starting the Medical School Headquarters was to help you on your journey to get into medical school, to be that premed advisor for you if you don’t have access to one or if you just don’t jive with the one at your school like I didn’t at my undergrad institution. The book- I’ve gotten messages from students saying, ‘I read your book, I went into my second interview so much more prepared than my first one. Thank you so much.’ The feedback has been awesome, so the book is just one more outlet for me to help you. Obviously these podcasts are here for you every week for free, the book you have to buy, but I think that’s okay. It’s a great compilation of many, many months’ worth of work, and I know it’s worth it. So take a look at the book if you haven’t.

But there’s been a lot of other changes in the last fifty episodes. We launched the Old Premeds Podcast, which is phenomenal. That’s on its fortieth episode as of today as we’re releasing this podcast. Now Old Premeds has been a site dedicated to nontraditional premed and medical students, and it’s been around for a long time, and Richard Levy who was the director over there and the publisher of the site decided to step down and retire, and I took over the site as of I think January of 2016, and even before I took over the site we had launched the Old Premeds Podcast as a collaboration between the two of us before he decided to retire. And that has been an amazing addition to The Premed Years here. It’s a different podcast here at The Premed Years, it’s a lot of interviews, a lot of long forum discussion with people, with Allison, with myself talking about different topics in the premed path, or about medicine in general. But the Old Premeds Podcast is a short forum podcast, question and answer podcast. We take questions from the Old Premeds forum which students go and ask questions there anonymously, kind of like that other website that I never recommend you going to. But the Old Premeds forum is completely different. You need to- if you haven’t and you’re a nontraditional student, go check out the forum over at www.OldPremeds.org. It’s very collaborative, not cutthroat, not negative; very, very helpful community of students over there. And your question might get answered on a podcast which is awesome. Why would you not want to do that?

So the Old Premeds Podcast has been something new in the last fifty episodes since episode 150. That’s going strong, again we haven’t missed an episode yet over there, I’m not planning to anytime soon. We’ve done 200 episodes here at The Premed Years without missing a single episode. That’s through lots of trials and tribulations, some stuff we don’t talk about here on the podcast, but things happen in our life and we’re here every week for you to keep plugging along.

So another thing that we have been doing in the last- I think it’s now episode seven or eight as we are releasing this podcast episode, is the MCAT Podcast. Obviously the MCAT is a huge hurdle, huge pain in the butt for premed students to getting into medical school. It’s one of those necessary evils unfortunately, unless you’re one of the lucky ones that gets an early acceptance to a program that doesn’t require the MCAT, which is phenomenal. But the MCAT is a huge problem, and so I teamed up with Blueprint MCAT (formerly Next Step Test Prep) to do the MCAT Podcast. And so far we’ve talked a lot of nuts and bolts about the podcast- or about the MCAT, but we’ll start to dig into more content, breaking down passages, and reading through passages, and understanding what we should be looking at, or what you should be looking at. Not we anymore, I’m done with the MCAT, but what you should be looking at as you are reading through passages and trying to understand what the test writers are wanting you to look at. And so that has been a phenomenal addition to the Medical School Headquarters, and now what we’re calling Med Ed Media; the network of podcasts and other stuff that we’re doing. And so if you ever want to stay up-to-date with what we’re doing at Med Ed Media you can check it out at www.MedEdMedia.com, you can go in iTunes and just search ‘Med Ed Media’ and see what pops up there.

What’s in Store for Medical School Headquarters

But you’ll see, kind of talking about where we’re going, if you go to www.MedEdMedia.com we have two new podcasts in the works, and those are ones that I think are very important to add to the discussion. One of them might be a little bit more for medical students, but I think is still very relevant for premed students, and that one is roughly titled ‘Specialist Stories.’ It’s something that I had started- or had the idea for back when we initially opened the Academy which is now closed, but we did some interviews with different specialists; an orthopedic surgeon, an ENT, a- I don’t even know all of them off the top of my head, but we did a handful of interviews. But I think they- and they were video interviews, I think they would be amazing podcast episodes. It would be more of a structured format, more of a structured Q&A with some free flowing conversation as well. But I think it would be awesome to hear from a cardiothoracic surgeon, an oncologist, an orthopedic surgeon, and the different subspecialties in there as well. So an orthopedic surgeon that specializes in knee replacements, an orthopedic surgeon that specializes in hand surgery, an orthopedic surgeon that specializes in oncology. So there are so many of these specialties that are out there, and I would love to have conversations with different physicians, and what they do on a day-to-day basis, and what are they happy about, what aren’t they happy about, what would they tell their younger self as they were picking a career? What would they love other specialties to know about their specialty so that moving forward if you go into a different specialty you could remember, ‘Oh I remember that podcast with that orthopedic surgeon now that I’m an internal medicine doc, and I know he would have wanted me to do X, Y, Z before referring to ortho.’ Those are the kinds of conversations that I think would be awesome for premeds to hear and be motivated, but also for medical students as they are picking what specialties they want to apply for for the match.

The other one that you’ll see at www.MedEdMedia.com is another podcast that’s roughly titled ‘Medical School Open House,’ and that name came from somebody in the hangout. If you’re not part of the hangout, www.MedicalSchoolHQ.net/group is the place to go for that. It’s a private Facebook group just for listeners of this podcast, and anybody who happens to stumble upon our group. But it’s a closed one so you have to click on ‘Join’ and I’ll accept you as soon as I can.

But Medical School Open House. I hear from so many students that they have difficulty trying to figure out what schools to apply to, what medical schools to apply to. They talk about reading websites, and reading the MSAR, and the College Information Book- the CIB from the DO schools, and they say, ‘After reading three or four different websites they all start to sound the same. But you know what won’t sound the same? Talking to the school. Having a podcast episode where I talk to maybe the Dean of Admissions, the Dean of the school itself, and maybe a medical student at the school to talk about what their experiences are like. I think it’d be an amazing opportunity for you the listener, for the premed, to get an understanding of what schools you may or may not be interested in applying to. What special programs the school has that maybe aren’t highlighted well in certain areas. I think that’s an amazing growth opportunity for the podcast.

Interview Help

So those are some things that we’re working on. Obviously I wrote this first book, ‘The Guide to the Medical School Interview.’ The next book will be a book about the personal statement, so it will be ‘The Premed Playbook: Guide to Writing a Personal Statement,’ or something along those lines. But- so there’s a lot of stuff in the works. I recently got access to a platform for interviews so that- a lot of what I do now is helping you prepare for your medical school interviews, and that does come at a price, and not everybody can afford it and I understand that. And so I found a platform that I had to invest in, but it will allow me to offer to you at a much, much, much cheaper price the ability to log into this website and select pre-formed interviews, and sit through an interview with me asking you a question on a video on the screen, and then the platform will use your webcam to capture your answer. And I won’t be personally looking at these I don’t think at this point, because again I want it to be accessible for everybody at a much lower price point than my one-on-one stuff that I offer. But having that platform for you to log in and have interviews pre-made ready to go so that you don’t know what the questions are coming, and you go through a full interview, and it records you and you can watch afterwards and grade yourself, and you can share it with friends and family and mentors and whoever else to say, “Hey can you give me some feedback on this interview, or this one specific question?” You can go in and create your own interviews based on- I think it will have 600 plus questions at the end once I have them all uploaded and ready to go. So that’s something that’s super exciting that we’re working on here at the Medical School Headquarters. And I like that I talk about the Medical School Headquarters. You know, all this time it’s really just been me sitting in my- wherever I am. Before we moved to Colorado we were in Boston and I was kind of- there was a basement. Not a basement but a first floor office right off the garage, a small little room. And now we’re in the basement, I’m in a- I guess I would call this a bedroom that I turned into my studio where I have the microphone set up and everything else. It’s just me. I have some awesome people that help me make the show notes page, and help me upload everything, and create awesome images, but full time it’s just me. I’m just here hanging out, and I hope that I’ve made an impact on your life in some way, and I think I have, but I hope I have as well. And if I have, I would love for you to share those stories with me. Shoot me an email, Ryan@medicalschoolhq.net, and just let me know what impact I’ve had on your life as you continue on this journey.

I would love to see- I know a lot of podcasters are asking for pictures of where you listen to the podcast. I would love to see a selfie of you while you’re listening to the podcast, and I want to take these pictures and print them. I think I’m going to print them on a sound absorption panel, like a 2′ by 4′ panel, so I need a lot of pictures. So send me your pictures. It’s the pictures, it’s the stories that I hear from you guys that continue to motivate me every day to create more podcasts, and new podcasts, and good podcasts, and continue to reach out to guests that are interesting and have a good story to tell and information to share with you. So that is what I request of you. Send me stories of the impact that the podcast has had on you, hearing other peoples’ stories has had on you, and send me a selfie of you listening to the podcast and where you are and what you’re doing.

Final Thoughts

I think that’s going to be it for today. The other thing I wanted to mention real quick is while it hasn’t officially crossed this milestone yet, I think technically it has. If I aggregate all of the downloads from different platforms that the podcast is on, but the one main platform that hosts the podcast for me, their number is around 987,000 – 988,000 downloads. And so in the next couple weeks we’re going to cross one million downloads. So I think that’s a phenomenal milestone, and it just goes to show- it has nothing to do with me, or the podcast, it has to do with you continuing to listen, and you continuing to share it with those in your community. So thank you for that. A million downloads. 200 episodes is crazy, crazy to think about. I never thought I would get here back when we started this podcast. I never thought I’d be in the situation as a medical student going through medical school and suffering through that; I never said, ‘One day I’m going to be a podcaster.’ I don’t even know- podcasts were just starting when I started med school. So I started med school in 2005, podcasts started to take hold right around 2005-2006. So yeah, it’s interesting to think where we have come, where we are going, and what we’ve seen along the way. So I hope that I’ve contributed, we’ve contributed in some way to your journey, and I hope we continue to contribute to your journey whether it’s here on this podcast, or a podcast that we’ll produce in the future at some point, to help- continue to help guide you on your journey to becoming a physician.