Pulse
In Their Own Words
The Physician Scholar gives medical students a chance to speak their mind and get published.
The Physician Scholar is a little ’zine with big ambitions. The new online journal by, for, and sometimes about medical students seeks to become a publication that medical students everywhere can call their own. The Scholar, or TPS, as staff members call it, is a bimonthly compendium of news, commentaries, and feature stories about topics of interest to its student contributors.
The publication was started by four Mayo Medical School students. Kevin Christensen and Eugenia Shmidt, and Adrienne Grzenda and Scott Thompson had been hatching separate-but-similar plans for a publication that featured student voices before they decided to become a team. “We all agreed it made more sense to work together,” says Christensen.
Before TPS, medical students had no journal of their own. An American Medical Association publication, Student JAMA, which folded in 2004, was less about student viewpoints and more about news.
The Mayo students’ idea was to create a journal in which medical students could share their perspectives on what they saw happening along the broad spectrum of health care. In the first three issues of TPS, writers have addressed wide-ranging topics such as increasing medical school enrollment to offset the growing physician shortage, the power of prayer as a complementary therapy, the attitude of the Islamic world toward science, health care in the Dominican Republic, what to do with the growing mass of unrecyclable medical equipment, and the decline of public health in the final days of the Roman Empire.
“We try to write about things that we know and that are relevant to us,” Christensen says, citing articles he’s done on student debt and the future of health care in the United States.
Grzenda, who serves as webmaster for TPS, says putting together the publication provides the editorial staff with a chance to develop skills they may not learn in class. “For one thing, it encourages us to work in collaboration with one another. Publishing is simply too complex a project for one person. By its nature, it is interdisciplinary, forcing us to broaden our skill sets,” she says, noting that teamwork is one of the more critical skills the students have developed by working on TPS. “This is probably the greatest benefit I derive from this endeavor.”
Grzenda concedes that contributing to TPS also provides students with an interesting line on their CVs, which may help them professionally some day. “It has been ingrained in us since we were undergrads that publishing equals life in academic and research medicine. However, the ultimate purpose of TPS is to allow students to speak their minds and polish their writing skills,” she says.
A Writer’s Journal
The writers who contribute to TPS increasingly are hearing from their readers. A box at the end of every article invites comments. With each new issue, TPS receives more and more letters from medical students, faculty, and other interested parties around the net universe who stumble onto the site, mostly through Facebook.
And those comments have helped shape the publication. For example, point/counterpoint pieces written by Christensen and fourth-year student Naomi Odell on the wisdom of expanding medical school enrollment to address a shortfall of physicians convinced the editorial panel that debate on controversial issues in medicine should appear in every issue. As a result, they created a new section.
Thus far, most of the contributions to TPS have come from students at Mayo; but increasingly, they’re coming from readers at other campuses as well. The most recent issue, for example, includes a piece by students from Creighton University Medical School in Omaha about providing health education and preventive care at the Pine Ridge Reservation. The founders’ plan for TPS is to eventually have a point person at medical schools around the country who will encourage contributions from their classmates.
One of the challenges to making such goals a reality is funding. To date, most of the costs associated with the publication have been paid out of pocket by the four editors.
“The question,” Grzenda says, “was whether we remain independent and pay costs by selling advertising or seek institutional support.” Outside support usually results in loss of editorial control, she says, noting that she and her colleagues are reluctant to see that happen. For that reason, they’re exploring the possibility of getting a grant.
Thompson, who along with Grzenda owns TPS under the business name TPS Media, says that they are already considering the issue of succession: What will happen to the journal after the founding editors, all of whom are second-year medical students, move on? “We haven’t solved that problem, but we’re working on it,” Thompson says. Finding new students who are committed to the publication may prove to be the most ambitious undertaking yet for the founding foursome.—Mike Finley