New Beginnings!

July is always a time of new beginnings in the Cumming School of Medicine: a new class starts up and there is excitement and anticipation in the air. There are the fun things like Med-Olympics in O-week, wondering what name the class will be christened/burdened with, wondering what your jersey name will be and also, what colour will those massive backpacks be this year!

Some students look at this as the first day to getting to be where they have always wanted to be in medicine.  Some are a little daunted or overwhelmed, and trust me, ‘imposter syndrome’ is everywhere.  It’s a fact of life in every med class since Osler rewrote the medical education system.

And some students want to take as many opportunities as they can to broaden their understanding of medicine and their options for a career.  Your classroom is not inside the walls of the med school… its in the people of our province and the three northern territories. Its in communities as small as 725 or as distant as Resolute Bay; and its in our indigenous nations whose traditional lands we are situated on.

Take a chance, push that envelope, leave the city and the big hospitals and meet the doctors who treat patients where there are no MRI’s and there are no stat coronary angiograms. Meet the health teams that work to deliver babies, treat tropical illness, and figure out that undifferentiated headache from scratch.  Challenge yourself and discover how rural medicine can help you be better at whatever you choose.  And if you fall in love with the scope of practice and the people along the way, that’s ok too.

That’s where the office for distributed learning and rural initiatives can help.  Come see how you can use rural and remote medicine shadowing or rotations to become a better doctor.