This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American
This is a guest blog post written by Ajay Major and Aleena Paul, medical students at Albany Medical College and co-founders of in-Training.
Student media holds a strange place in medical education. Previously transient and devalued as the ‘softer’ sides of medicine, the arts and humanities have recently established a strong foothold in medical education as capable of producing more compassionate and complex physicians. With the professions of physician-journalist and physician-author becoming more commonplace, there is a renewed, deep-seated desire by medical students to write, to create, and to express themselves.
We founded in-Training (Website, Twitter, Facebook), the first online newspaper for medical students, in April 2012 as first-year medical students at Albany Medical College. With in-Training, we recognized the need for a proper forum for medical students to showcase their literary and artistic endeavors. Without such a forum, the knowledge accumulated by medical students who experiment in the humanities would remain fixed and incapable of flowing to peers. Medical schools would continue to sit like islands in the fray of a tumultuous health system, isolated from one another in thought and expression.
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in-Training seeks to meet this dire need for a communal gathering place for medical students. We are the agora of the medical student community, and as such, we strive to publish innovative thought in the arts, politics, science, and literature. We provide a virtual forum for medical students to participate in the shared experience of being a physician-in-training and to learn from the reflections and wisdom of their peers. Since we went live last year, we have published over 100 articles from medical students at over 30 institutions in the United States and Canada.
At its inception, we embraced that in-Training would be an organic publication that advanced with the changing perspectives and passions of the medical student community. We imagine that the body of knowledge hosted on in-Training represents a sort of ‘institutional memory’ of the medical student community, a notion that requires us to be malleable and acutely aware of the shifting needs of medical students. We have already been through several permutations, changing from the news-centric publication we thought we would be to the reflection and opinion-heavy publication we have become.
Unlike other publications targeted towards medical students, in-Training is completely by medical students, and for medical students. Our editorial process is firmly grounded in the peer-review process, with an editorial board consisting entirely of medical students. All articles submitted to in-Training are reviewed by several medical student editors and must adhere to the highest of ethical standards for physician-journalists.
We invite all physicians-in-training, premedical students and medical educators to visit in-Training and join in the discussion. Please email editorinchief@in-training.org with any questions, comments, or if you would like to contribute.
