Dear Sir,
Towards the end of their third year of medical school, students face the difficult task of choosing one of many specialties as a career path. Finding ways to keep students informed throughout the process of specialty selection is one of the challenges facing medical education today. Students and faculty at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine collaborated to create a Careers in Medicine (CiM) website that provides school-specific specialty contact information, information regarding career-related opportunities and events, timelines regarding specialty selection, and a forum for students to interact online with faculty.
The Vanderbilt CiM website (http://www.mc.vanderbilt.edu/medschool/portal/cim) has been successfully utilized by students. There are eleven main features including an interactive specialty question/answer forum. Selected popular features include:
Specialties
Specialty-specific Webpages that include brief descriptions of each specialty as well as Vanderbilt-specific contact information for 92 residency/fellowship directors, 145 specialty physician advisors, 130 student specialty interest group leaders, and opportunities for 111 specialties and subspecialties.
Events
This Webpage allows students to view a current listing of upcoming local CiM events. In addition to the date and time of the events, further details – such as a description of the event, whether food will be served, and contact information – are available.
‘Ask the experts’
This feature provides students with a forum to anonymously ask questions to residency or clerkship directors. A total of eighteen specialties and topics have been featured with 163 question submissions containing 284 unique questions that specialty experts answered.
Administrator pages
This feature allows the CiM website to remain current. Over 150 students, faculty, and administrators are responsible for maintaining the content on the website.
Web-based initiatives such as Vanderbilt's CiM website offer several advantages: ease of access to information, quick distribution of resources and organizational information, a simple interface to update content by students and faculty, and swift communication between faculty and students. We believe that using the Web to provide school-specific career-related information is an effective way to help medical students in the difficult process of specialty selection.
Sanjay G. Patel
Rehan Ahmed
Benjamin P. Rosenbaum
Scott M. Rodgers, MD
Vanderbilt University School of Medicine
Nashville, TN
Medical Student Affairs
201 Light Hall
VUMC, Nashville
TN 37232-0685
Email: [email protected]