VCU news

By Erin Lucero
Office of Development, School of Medicine

Jennifer Tran is sharing her second year of medical school with the world.

She’s writing about her experiences as part of a blog project conceived by the Association of American Medical Colleges. Called Aspiring Docs Diaries, the project is designed to inspire and educate young people who are interested in becoming physicians. Tran, who is part of the VCU School of Medicine’s Class of 2016, is one of two medical students blogging for the site, which has attracted hundreds of followers.

She discovered the blog last year when she read a few posts from a student blogger from Harvard.

“I thought it would be neat to share my own experiences and contrast it to what the first year of medical school is like,” Tran said.

So when she saw a call for student writers go out this summer on the AAMC Facebook page, she decided to reply. Turns out, the AAMC blog staff were happy to take her on.

So far she’s written about a volunteering experience that, she says, took her out of her comfort zone. At the start of her second year, she made the more than six-hour drive from Richmond to Wise, Va., to take part in a three-day Remote Area Medical (RAM) expedition. The RAM expedition provides vital health care to residents of southwest Virginia and surrounding states.

“Each day of the clinic, I met patients who had been up at four o’clock that morning, so that they would be one of the first hundred in line for the opening of the clinic at six o’clock,” Tran wrote. “We were able to provide preventive care and other specialty services in over 3,000 patient encounters, giving people health care they would have otherwise gone without.”

In addition to discussing chronic health problems such as hypertension, diabetes and obesity, she also heard about the socioeconomic obstacles patients face on a daily basis.

In her second post, Tran blogged about her small group encountering a simulated patient in the school’s newly opened simulation center.

“Walking into one of the rooms at the Center for Human Simulation and Patient Safety was like entering a typical hospital room,” Tran wrote. “I noticed the gowned patient in the bed, the vitals monitor, and assorted medical equipment. Although our patient was a mannequin, he could blink, breathe, produce a pulse in various parts of his body, and even talk!”

Faced with an overdose scenario, Tran’s team pooled their collective pharmacology knowledge and arrived at a diagnosis. She reported to her blog followers that they delivered treatment with three minutes to spare.

Tran is the eldest child of Vietnamese refugees who fled their homeland 30 years ago. She’s the first person in her family to attend college.

Tran says that she first became interested in medicine after her grandmother died from cardiac arrest.

“Her death made me realize that medicine was the one field where I am intricately connected to patients, learning about their lives and helping them in health and sickness,” Tran said.

Read more about Jennifer Tran.

 

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