Part 2: Representin’ at the AAFP conference, Kansas City
08.13.07
Want to make Casey happy? Then ask me to travel to a great city with my friends (and colleagues) to talk on and on about a job and place I love. Just look at how much fun we had.
Join us next year!
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| Harbor Family Medicine heads to Kansas City! |
Only one thing can beat that, and that’s having the chance to meet dozens of enthusiastic, engaging medical students from all over the country ready to take on health care and transform family medicine.
Even while we physicians and residents grumble and lament over a crumbling health care system, inefficiencies, inequalities and stagnation in health and medicine, medical students can reignite our idealism and passions for change. Below is an account I wrote from last year’s AAFP Resident and Student Conference that details just what I mean. I’m happy to finally have the chance to share it!
Every year medical schools around the world graduate young physicians eager to continue the beautiful struggle. It is a pleasure to watch them work and to work with them. We owe it to them to help keep their (and our) dreams alive.
~Casey
Title: The future of Family Medicine is bright, I gotta wear dark-rimmed glasses
Subtitle: Report from the AAFP Resident and Student National Conference, Kansas City, MO 8/2 – 8/5/06I’ve been known shine about the joys of working with med students. After all, I was one for 4 years and worked exclusively with them for 5, now going on 6. What is it about working with med students? Why is it SO darn fun? Maybe it’s their energy, their idealism, their readiness to take action and make change as we as docs struggle to keep from melting away.
Well, I went on and on and on about this all weekend at the AAFP Resident and Student Conference. How could I not? We’d been chatting it up with only the most stellar med students and soon-to-be family docs out there, and to Jose and Linda, my dear fellow resident recruiters, it became quickly apparent that I had had my share of acquaintances there at the conference, thanks to AMSA. I was being recognized somehow. Few times by face – maybe a talk I’d given at their school. A lecture I’d hosted. More often it was the email address that gave me away.
We had reached a lull on Friday afternoon in the exhibit hall and the Harbor crew was chatting it up about all potentials we’d met when from around the corner and at high speeds comes zipping Justin from Vermont. He’s hard to miss: Stylish and slender even in his V-neck undershirt (the kind I could only get away with wearing, well, as an undershirt or when paired with black dress socks and Ray-Bans, a la Tom Cruise in Risky Business). His scruff and dark-rimmed glasses reminiscent of Elvis Costello though he really doesn’t look a thing like Elvis Costello but name someone with dark-rimmed glasses who doesn’t recall Elvis Costello. Physical attributes aside, what draws one to Justin is his energy: pure, creative, and infectious. With the speed at which he approximated our booth, I knew he was up to something – something big – and that I was in for trouble…
