‘#myVUSM’
An End and a Beginning: Three VPIL teams reflect on Capstone projects, interdisciplinary teamwork, and the future
Apr. 30, 2021—by Emma Mattson For M2 Bushra Rahman, this April meant saying some bittersweet goodbyes. As a first-year med student, Rahman joined the Vanderbilt Program for Interprofessional Learning (VPIL). In the almost two years since then, she’s worked on an interdisciplinary team alongside nursing, pharmacy, and social work students to provide holistic care to clinic patients....
Project VINE offers med students a new avenue for holistic patient care
Apr. 26, 2021—M3s Alan Grusky, Christian Nguyen, and Santiago Angaramo kickstarted a new student organization at VUSM this spring: Project VINE, the Vanderbilt Initiative for Nutrition and Exercise. The student organization, which will work closely with the Shade Tree Clinic and other community partners, uses education, advocacy, and community service to equip med students to provide holistic...
M2 Eki Olumese and VUMC leaders speak at ceremony to unveil Vivien Thomas Way
Apr. 8, 2021—by Emma Mattson An April 7th celebration unveiled Nashville’s newest street sign: Vivien Thomas Way. The street’s name was changed this spring from “Dixie Place,” an old moniker of the Confederacy which had lingered on Vanderbilt’s campus for decades. VUSM leaders and members of the Committee to Rename Dixie Place spoke at the outside ceremony,...
Why you should count teaching as an essential part of your medical journey
Apr. 5, 2021—by Emma Mattson M4 Daniel Pereira has a message for med students: teaching is part of your calling. Pereira, who will begin orthopedic surgery residency this summer, has maintained an enthusiasm for medical education for years. In the past academic year alone, he engaged in translation work for Nashville’s Department of Health, taught a beginner’s...
Behind the Scenes of the M2 Practical Skills Elective
Mar. 25, 2021—by Emma Mattson The unique Practical Skills elective starts its third session of the year next week, and three new leaders are joining the team: Amany Alshibli, Lex Erath, and Jessa Fogel. M4s Peety Kaur, Andrew Rees, and Hannah Kay have led this two-week elective, which runs three times each year, through the 2020-2021 academic...
What does it take to make a change? Med students publish a toolkit to end racialized medicine
Mar. 21, 2021—by Emma Mattson This month five Vanderbilt M2s published an online toolkit sharing how med students led the charge for a VUMC-wide elimination of race-adjustment in a key measure of renal function. The resource, entitled “CAR Toolkit to End Racialized Medicine: eGFR Edition,” breaks their process down into manageable steps so that med students at...
WICP brought telehealth to Shade Tree before the pandemic— and their hard work paid off in unexpected ways
Mar. 8, 2021—by Emma Mattson When med students Austin Triana and Kaustav Shah kickstarted an interdisciplinary consulting program back in 2019, one of their first projects addressed telehealth opportunities at the Shade Tree Clinic. The team had no idea how relevant their project would quickly become. Since its creation in 2019, the Wond’ry Innovation Consulting Program has...
“Med students can’t be sidelined.” Lessons from volunteering during a pandemic.
Mar. 2, 2021—by Emma Mattson This month marks a year since the start of the COVID-19 Volunteer Initiative, a drive that included over 300 student volunteers completing more than 2,350 volunteer hours. We sat down virtually with the med students who started it all: M4 Catie Havemann and G3 Thao Le. They share the lessons they learned...
Chapman mentor Dr. Clair and med students head initiative to change “Dixie Place” to “Vivien Thomas Way”
Feb. 22, 2021—by Emma Mattson This summer Chapman mentor Dr. Walter Clair and a group of med students headed an initiative to change the name of a street on VUMC’s campus from “Dixie Place” to “Vivien Thomas Way.” Per M1 Alex Lupi, who collaborated on the project, the initiative originated in VUSM learning communities in the weeks...
Meet the first matriculated graduate of the VUSM Short Pipeline: M1 Dominique Mosley
Feb. 15, 2021—by Emma Mattson Sometimes a chance conversation can change your path forever— or at least, that’s what happened in M1 Dominique Mosley’s story. Mosley attended Spelman College, a historically Black liberal arts college for women, located in Atlanta, GA. Early on as an undergraduate, Mosley had been interested in both engineering and medicine, but a...