By: Vivian Do, President-Elect

Public speaking is a fear that I often hear cited along with phobias of things like spiders, snakes, or heights. I think of it as very different, though. Those fears are instinctual and evolutionary - it’s not often smart to pick up a snake or stand at the edge of a cliff. Public speaking, however, is typically a good thing. Somebody has decided that what you have to say is important enough that multiple people will want or need to hear it.

It’s the most famous course offered in medical school. Gross Anatomy defines the experience of the medical student in popular culture. As it turns out it is also defining for the students themselves. Many in my class commented that although they received their white coats weeks earlier at a formal coating ceremony, they didn’t feel that they were truly physicians-in-training until they stepped through the doors of the Gross Anatomy lab. I had a similar experience.

Hello everyone! With the start of Spring semester looming and the idea of state leadership conferences beginning in just a couple short months, I thought it might be a good time to check in. I remember being really nervous before my first SLC in 2010 - I was competing in HOSA Bowl and it’s certainly not the most low-stress of competitions. Suffice it to say that I sympathize with those of you who may be getting nervous.

Please resist the urge to immediately close this webpage! Of all the courses required of pre-health students, none is more dreaded than organic chemistry (also commonly known as o-chem or orgo). Most programs require two semesters (thus one full year) of this area of study, and for many students (myself included) it represents the most difficult year of college. In this post, I’ll talk about why I think that is, why I think it’s organic chemistry that’s most challenging specifically, and how I got through it.

When I prepare to write an article for this blog, I typically begin by going through the entries I have already made and determine if there are any “holes” in the information that I’m providing. I think about what else I might have wanted to know about the road toward a health career when I was in high schoolor college. Overall, I’m usually pleased with what I’ve written about so far and I find myself filling smaller and smaller gaps with more specific topics that were more personal to me. But not today!

By David Kelly, Former HOSA President

Welcome back to an exciting new year of HOSA! We (the HOSA Executive Council) hope to use this blog and other forms of social media to interact in a greater capacity  with the nearly 235,000 HOSA members across the globe! The HOSA Blog will feature updates from the Executive Council, information about upcoming HOSA events, spotlights on health careers and opportunities, as well as local and state chapter activities. If you are interested in submitting a blog entry, please feel free to contact an Executive Council Member.

Perhaps the most important attribute of a medical school is its curriculum. It’s interesting, then, that when I look back on my earlier series about how to choose the medical school that’s right for you, I didn’t touch on curriculum format. This is probably because it isn’t something that I considered when choosing where I wanted to go; I imagine that most people don’t. But I’ve come to realize how important it is as I’ve gone through this first year of my program.

With the recent outbreak of enterohemorrhagic E. coli in romaine lettuce (don’t buy any for the time being!), I’m reminded of the Ebola outbreak earlier this decade. During the height of the “scare”, I was an emergency department volunteer at Mount Sinai Beth Israel Medical Center in New York. My duties included assisting patients to their rooms, running samples and medications around the hospital, and ensuring that patients felt as though they were being properly cared for. One evening, though, I arrived to be assigned to a different task.