Mini Doctor in Mini-Med School

Lemme be honest: it is impossible to find healthcare-related opportunities in Illinois. Other than volunteering at the nearby hospital, it's incredibly difficult to find organizations and events that provide a deeper understanding and experience with medicine. As a high school student who's very interested in becoming a doctor as an adult, it is frustrating cruising the internet so often for medical opportunities only to find none that are local and accessible. So, it was a blessing in disguise when I found Dr. Rubin's Mini Medical School because it was the perfect antidote to my desire to get involved with healthcare.

The point of Mini Medical School is to provide a very quick but detailed overview of the different fields of medicine alongside hands-on experiences and lectures. Over the course of the six 3.5 hour sessions every Saturday, I learned how to read EKGs and the different tests doctors use to find certain things in their patients, amongst many other bits of information. I got to practice laparoscopy, or surgery with the use of cameras and tools, with beads and a rubber band, simulate delivering a baby, stitch a square and surgeon's knot with real surgical thread, and help make a cast for the forearm. No doubt, I got to experience A LOT of activities that I thought wouldn't ever get to try out until medical school, and I learned a lot of information that I never would've received until medical school, as well.

To be more specific, every session had a different set of subjects to go over. For example, our first session was a lecture on taking patient history and then practicing taking vital signs such as blood pressure on our peers (I was, unfortunately, very bad at taking blood pressure). That same day, we dissected sheep organs including the eye, brain, heart, and kidney. I know for some people cutting into organs might feel kind of queasy, but when I cut into the heart it was actually a lot of fun. In fact, feeling each of the organs and comparing them to each other was really interesting, and an experience you very rarely get to live out. I can tell you from my dissection that the brain was softer than the heart, which had a very tough tissue to cut through. I also discovered that you could stick your finger in the heart's aorta and it would actually come out the other end which was inside the heart, and I could see my finger come out once I cut the heart in half.

So, every session had a similar pattern: listen to a few lectures on different subjects like genetics, pharmacology, microbiology, virology, pathology, anesthesiology, radiology, surgery, orthopedics, and/or internal medicine. After the lecture, there was always a hands-on experience like giving a physical exam, making casts and splints, organ dissections, practicing sutures on mannequins and the previously dissected organs, and my favorite, clinical rotations. The rotations took place in our third session, and it was a very busy day. It wasn't necessarily rotating through different specialties, but rotating through a variety of skills like intubation, laparoscopy, injections, IVs, abdominal exams, listening to simulated heart, lung, and stomach sounds, interpreting clinical cases, and delivering a baby. That was my favorite day because I found it so interesting to do every single rotation, and everything was a new experience for me.

All in all, Dr. Rubin's Mini Medical School was perfect for me because it gave me the experience I needed to really solidify my goal of becoming a doctor, and in our graduation ceremony, I received really helpful information about going into college and medical school. I really did look forward to going to every session because it was exciting to learn and do so much new stuff. Everything I experienced was something I hope to try again in the future as a doctor in the field, and I am so lucky to have gotten such a good opportunity to learn and try out so much.