The Tri-Institutional MD-PhD program's incoming class of 2020, despite the challenges of beginning their training remotely during a global pandemic, came together as a class to organize a new journal club. Taking as their focus issues of social justice and anti-racism, the students formed the club and held their meetings remotely during their first semester at the Tri-I.
Danielle Isakov, first year MD-PhD student, described their motivations and activities:
In the summer of 2020, just as the Class of 2020 was matriculating into the Tri-I MD/PhD program, marginalized communities in the US were facing the dire consequences of pervasive institutional violence. The recent and recurrent state-sanctioned violence, police brutality, and healthcare inequities Black people face were only amplified by the toll of the pandemic. Amongst the protests and calls to action, our class believed it was more important than ever to challenge and change the existing curriculum to incorporate anti-racist learning and reflection. With this journal club, we aimed to begin learning how to recognize and reform our own internalized racism and biases, identify how modern-day institutions enforce racial oppression, and discuss concrete solutions for us to implement in the medical and scientific field and beyond, given our positions of privilege as future physician-scientists.
Drawing upon the incredible resources that academics, historians, journalists, and artists (many of them BIPOC) have put together over the years, we created a syllabus that covered a breadth of topics on the history and current state of unjust practices in public policy, science, and medicine. Working together in small groups for each topic, we held bi-weekly sessions focusing on discussion and reflection on both chosen materials and our lived experiences. We finished each session by brainstorming a list of tangible action items to follow up on. The journal club was not only effective and informative, but served as a bonding experience for our class, a way to have meaningful conversations and check-ins in a virtual environment.
Our class facilitated short journal club sessions for the interviewing students, which were met with great conversation and positive feedback. Our journal club has also inspired other MD/PhD programs to start similar initiatives. Moving forward, our class is planning on having monthly journal clubs to continue learning and reflection, and choose several action items to implement, working with other students, the administration, and community partners. One of our main goals is to have our journal club become a part of the curriculum for all incoming Tri-I MD/PhD classes, in order to prioritize and commit to anti-racist reflection and change within the MD/PhD community.
Category:
- Student Highlight