savoy096

You may have heard that all medical students do is study.   It certainly seems that way at times.   There are, however, opportunities to fit in some other experiences. Here are a few of the things I have done this year:      I’ve always liked to run, and the endless desert trails in Beer Sheva provide great places to train.   In November my roommate and I decided it would be great fun to run the Tel Aviv Half Marathon , scheduled for February.   What seemed like such a good idea when we registered in November, however, became a source of stress as the February date approached, because we realized that the race fell on the day before a pharmacology quiz.   Fortunately, we were able to come up with a creative solution to our loss of study time.   While other runners wrote split times on their arms, our arms sported names of the drugs we needed to memorize.   I suspect we were the only runners in the race who quizzed each other about COX ...

Memorable Moments of First Year First, mazel tov to the MSIH graduating class of 2016!   Although the first-years only got to know you for a few months, we appreciated your willingness to share four years’ worth of medical school wisdom with us.   It is hard to believe that our first year of medical school is nearly over, and that in three short years we will be following in their footsteps.   With 2.5 weeks until the end of year one, I’ll allow myself to indulge in a bit of reflection on some memorable moments of our first year.   1. “If a patient breaks her leg and you put a cast on and discharge her, but she lives on the 7 th floor of a walk-up, you did not do your job.”   At the beginning of the year, one of our professors stated this in a discussion on what it means to be a doctor.   This epitomizes the kind of doctor MSIH nurtures.   William Osler, the “Father of Modern Medicine,” memorably said that “a good doctor treats the disease; a grea...

We often speak of the “MSIH bubble.”  As medical students, we go to class, study, study some more, and then to mix things up, we study.  Since this becomes routine, it is sometimes easy for us to forget our role as contributors to a bustling hospital, as part of a large university, and as residents of a busy city.  This week, however, Beer Sheva could not forget about us, because it was an MSIH-led team that brought TEDxBGU to the city. TED talks are a series of lectures that strive to share, according to their slogan, “ideas worth spreading.”  Speakers offer a unique approach to or proposal for a seemingly intractable problem.  I’ve been the beneficiary of many inspiring TED talks online, but I was naively ignorant of the effort that went into producing these lectures.  Now, having watched my classmates invest incredible amounts of time and energy into making TEDxBGU a reality, I have enormous respect for the process as well as the product.  From sele...