"A World Outside of MSIH" by rising second year student Chelsea Powell


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 inhibitors as we ran.  We had a great time running, and we both passed the quiz.

 
 
During our break over Passover, some classmates and I hiked from the Mediterranean Sea to the Sea of Galilee, a classic 4-day backpacking route in northern Israel.  The North is very different from our home in Beer Sheva.  Instead of the desert, the landscape is wooded and wet. We fell into a hiking pace with two people from Hebron who spoke no English, and who were very patient with our Hebrew. The route combined history with nature; it’s not every day you pass Byzantine ruins on a hike.

 

 
I also participated in a mobile clinic at a school in the West Bank with Physicians for Human Rights.  This was my first foray to the West Bank, and I learned a lot about the health care system there.  Listening to the stories of Palestinian patients provided valuable first-person insight on life in the West Bank.  After we finished seeing patients, the residents of the town we worked in invited us to eat dinner with them.  So there I was, a first-year American medical student, listening to Israeli and Palestinian doctors sit together and discuss barriers to health in the West Bank.

 

I hope this convinces you that you will study hard at MSIH, but also that your life as a medical student in Israel can be both productive and fun.  (And never underestimate the power of your arms as study sheets.)

 

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