Title: Stories beyond Medical School: A Narrative Medicine Podcast for Humanities Outreach and Education

Authors: April Chen, Jar-Yee Liu, Ashley McMullen, Era Kryzhanovskaya

There is a dearth of resources when it comes to creating, forging, and exploring alternative paths in a medical career, and whether these paths include education outside the scope of graduate medical education, academic training, and residency programming. Non-traditional approaches to medicine are often not highlighted in career development sessions during medical school and often require a degree of flexibility and creativity that is difficult to teach.

To address this gap, our poster showcases the creation of a podcast, “This Wasn’t in Med School!”, to highlight aspects of the intangible skills (some may call these “soft skills”) learned outside of traditional medical school curricula, with a core focus on personal development, relational intelligence, and non-traditional medical careers. Through storytelling, we hope to explore different approaches to career exploration and lessons learned outside of traditional medical school didactics. The range of our stories include decisions to not pursue residency training, struggles in understanding and prioritizing mental health during medical journeys, learning how to comfort patients through extracurricular studies (ie. podcasts, books, etc.), as well as how personal backgrounds inherent to family of origin show up in our professional interactions with patients, colleagues, and mentors alike. Understanding the reciprocal relationship between our lives at work and the core aspects of ourselves and our community beyond medicine is a vital skill that is not commonly discussed, yet universal to every trainee.

This podcast is hosted by two trainees in their fourth year of medical school – Jar-Yee Liu, an upcoming community psychiatry resident, and April Chen, an aspiring management consultant. They bring together a diversity of experiences, Jar-Yee emphasizing emotionality, play, leisure, and interdependence in his outlook and career decisions, while April emphasizes rationality, efficiency, discipline, and self-sufficiency. Together, they create a broader outlook on numerous processes occurring in medicine, including patient care, feedback culture, facilitating difficult conversations, and change management. The intended audience for this podcast includes anyone undergoing, finished with, or considering medical education through institutionalized Western medicine. Through this podcast, we hope to create a space where people can safely question the nature of medicine and the role that medical training plays in accomplishing healing or fulfillment in their lives. We also hope that anyone within the healing professions or with goals of self-improvement, personal growth, and social justice will benefit from hearing these stories.