The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) is well known to premedical students. Founded in 1876, the AAMC — comprised of all 151 accredited U.S. medical schools and 17 Canadian medical schools — is a not-for-profit organization that coordinates medical school applications, the Medical College Admission Test and the Electronic Residency Application Service, which is(...)
About Pranjal Gupta
Posts by Pranjal Gupta:
Learning to Walk
The hospital turns worlds upside down, for both patients and for care providers alike. Luckily, I haven’t yet been a patient in a hospital, but I can only imagine how jarring it must be for patients to leave their daily routines and enter the bustling, complex machinery of the hospital, largely for circumstances out of(...)
The Beginning and End of an Era
Medical school curriculum has traditionally been split into two halves: preclinical and clinical years. Preclinical years generally include the first two years of medical school, when topics including anatomy, biochemistry and organ system-based physiology, pharmacology and pathology are taught in lecture halls. At most schools, clinical years encompass the last two years of medical school,(...)
Students Impact AMA’s National Health Policy
Aloha! Being a medical student has its perks. Over the past semester, my medical school experiences have taken me across the country. I’ve traveled to various conferences in Chicago, Washington, D.C., Boston, and this month, Hawaii, where I attended the American Medical Association (AMA) Interim Meeting in Honolulu. The AMA is the largest coalition of(...)
Everyday Antibiotics May Reveal New Therapies to Treat Your Breast Cancer
New therapies to treat metastatic breast cancer may lie within one of the most commonly used agents in health care across the world: antibiotics. Sonal Chaudhari, a second-year medical student at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, recently spent her summer working under Richard Jones, director of the Bone Marrow Transplant Program, co-director of the(...)
The Hidden Joys of Medical School
I finished my first marathon last week, a personal mental marathon that took hundreds of hours to complete—my first year of medical school. Our last lecture on that final Friday afternoon was followed by a barrage of claps, applause, cheers, celebratory pictures for Facebook and Instagram photos, and a general sense of urgency to leave(...)
Bringing Medicine to Politics: MedChi and Beyond
We live in a tumultuous time for politics across the country. Although our country may remain divided on key issues, we can all agree that with rapid legislative changes and dynamic dialogue about an uncertain future, it is ever more important for people to engage with legislators and lawmakers to shape the future they want(...)
Changing the Game: Bloodless Medicine and Surgery
The concept of bloodless medicine first arose in the 1970s, when Denton Cooley, the legendary Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine alumnus and cardiac surgeon, performed operations on a group of patients that most other doctors turned away: Jehovah’s Witnesses. According to their doctrine, Jehovah’s Witnesses are not permitted to receive blood transfusions, largely due(...)
Discovering Medicine Through Filmmaking
The power of photons is amazing. In fact, every day, photons are trapped with sensors and converted to matrices of millions of numbers. By rearranging these matrices and converting them to electrical outputs and, eventually, back to new photons for our eyes to see, these photons can trigger powerful emotions in us—anger, laughter, happiness, even(...)
Magical Mentorship
When I turned 11, the only thing I wanted for my birthday was a letter from Hogwarts, the magical school from the world of Harry Potter, telling me that I was a wizard. To my dismay, no such letter arrived but little did I know what the future had in store. Eleven years later, I was(...)
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