Sarah Platt, MD

Surviving years of medical training requires a certain personality type—one with a willingness to skip the party, stay home and study, work on both Saturday and Sunday, and switch from night shifts to day shifts and then back to nights without a break in between. Yet, this commitment and lifestyle might be incompatible with starting […]

A career in medicine requires tremendous dedication. From the number of hours we spend training at the hospital to the neverending board exams, it’s a path that is by no means easy. We hold ourselves to such high standards in our careers that it’s often a challenge to equally apply those standards to our personal […]

Are you ready for a study strategy that will consolidate and organize your studying so you can more easily assess your progress, identify weaknesses, and get the confidence to enter your next exam ready to give the exam writers a real taste of who they’re messing with? By the time you graduate from medical school, […]

It’s finally time for your family medicine rotation and you could not be more excited. Although you’re not interested in primary care, you just completed your surgery rotation and are in desperate in need of sleep. A month of outpatient nine to five clinic visits doing well-child visits and reassuring patients that they don’t need antibiotics to treat a viral cold sounds like a piece of cake.

Just as pediatricians need to bring up uncomfortable conversations about sex to keep their patients safe and healthy, isn’t it equally the responsibility of physicians to bring up diet and nutrition?

“Keep your minds open,” the dean announced at M3 orientation, “maybe you’ve always dreamed of becoming an orthopedic surgeon but will fall in love with psychiatry.” As freshly minted third year medical students with wrinkle free and yet to be coffee/pen/bodily fluid stained short white coats we entered clinical rotations much like undifferentiated cells, eager to be shaped and influenced as we transformed into the future physicians we were to become. However, for many students, choosing a specialty is not as easy as dreaming and falling in love. There is a fine line three quarters into M3 year when the reaction to uncertainty about choosing a specialty changes from a response of “you’ve got time” to a reaction that may make you feel like somehow over a few short months you became defective. In the midst of the uncertainty and doubt you then receive an email that it’s time to schedule your fourth year electives and are advised to “choose them wisely” as you are reminded that residency applications will be due just three months into the year. If that story sounds all too familiar of you anticipate that this could happen to you, don’t panic, you’re not alone, let’s get through this together.