12 Tips for taking a Student Led Medical Education Program from Concept to Curriculum

Abstract

The choice of a future career specialty has always been a stressful decision for medical students. To mitigate this stress and assist students in making more informed career decisions we developed the Pre-clerkship Residency Exploration Program (PREP), a two-week summer elective program that provides students with the opportunity to gain exposure to specialities that traditionally do not receive a lot of attention in medical school. To initiate this student led program we faced many obstacles, suffered many failures, learned a tremendous amount and eventually found success. In this article, we offer 12 tips on how to create a medical education program that is sustainable, effective and receives strong buy-in from faculty and administration. Our tips come from the perspective of students starting their own program but are translatable to anyone interested in taking an innovative idea and seeing it through to fruition.

Keywords

• Medical education
• pre-clerkship
• twelve-tips
• physician shortage
• curriculum
• career decisions