PhiDE Love Letter
The month of March is PhiDE spirit month this year, and this in combination with the fact that my time as a medical student is soon coming to an end has inspired me to write a “PhiDE love letter”.
This organization has truly shaped my entire undergraduate and medical school career, and I’m so grateful for all of the experiences I’ve had thanks to Phi Delta Epsilon. I think that it can be difficult at times to put into words the “intangible” benefits of joining PhiDE, but I’ll attempt to do a little of that in this post.
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One specific experience that I’d like to share here was a conversation I had during one of my interviews for residency. I was having a really pleasant and personable interview, and the interviewer stopped the conversation and said, “okay who’s the polished one in your family?” I asked for clarification, and they said something along the lines of, “You just carry yourself really well. Your posture is better than mine, the way you speak is extremely professional and eloquent. Who helped you prepare for this interview? Do you have a parent that’s a CEO or something?” I was extremely flattered at their comment, and answered honestly that no my parents had not helped me prepare. I thought about if for a moment, and as I was answering I was simultaneously realizing the truth behind my words…
The last 8 years of working with, bonding with, and learning from my PhiDE family, especially in getting to work closely with the CEO Karen Katz, must be a huge part of where I have learned how to carry myself as a professional. I shared this briefly with the interviewer, and we moved on to their next question.
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When we’re recruiting potential new medical student members, we share the “tangible” benefits (discount codes, first-aid textbooks, MD pocket reference books, etc.) right away, especially as we’re discussing dues. However, as a medical student, what you can get out of PhiDE is much different than when we were premedical students in college, and I think sometimes that can get blurry. All the way up to the International Board Level, how we serve our medical students and how we keep that clearly defined and different from the experience premedical members get is still a large topic of conversation and something we are hoping to continue improving.
I think one of the main reasons this can get blurry is because the biggest benefits of being part of the PhiDE family as a medical student (and for a lifetime) truly are “intangible”; the biggest benefits come from interactions, leadership, networking, learning from each other, and other things that are just simply hard to quantify, and even occur subconsciously.
Thanks to recent conversations with other Board Members, in this attempt to summarize the intangible benefits I’ll touch on 2 main things:
Professional Development & Fraternity means Family
Professional Development
What does professional development even mean? I’m about to be a resident and I still don’t think I have an eloquent or short answer for this question, honestly. We’re told as medical students that we need to be as professional as possible at all times, which makes sense because resident and attending physicians of course need to be extremely professional. But most medical schools don’t have a whole class called, “How to be a professional 101”, though that might be nice. Instead, as we go through medical school we are just exposed to hundreds (thousands) of hours of situations in which we must act professionally and learn what that means to us as individuals. We’re constantly pushed out of our comfort zones for the sake of learning. We’re almost always in brand new situations seeing patients and pathology we’ve never encountered before. We’re asked to communicate to everyone around us in a professional and polite way, whether that communication is via email, text, zoom, or in person in a clinical setting. Through all of these experiences that are inherently part of medical school, it is generally assumed that we also grow up and learn how to conduct ourselves appropriately.
Honestly the entire way through medical school I felt as if I was “faking it until I make it”. I was always putting my best efforts forward, especially being the first students from a new medical school, and re-reading my emails and texts and relying on my friends for proofreading and guidance. But, through all of this, there was never a point I reached where I thought to myself “okay now I get what it means to be professional”. It was more of just repetition and feedback and trying my best culminating into my current communication style and work ethic, and I definitely know that I have a lot to learn during residency still.
All of this being said, I truly give PhiDE a substantial amount of the credit for the “professional” that I am today.
As I reflect now, I really feel that so much of “professional development” is subconscious and comes from repeated interactions with and long term relationships with other professionals. Watching how others lead meetings and propose ideas, listening to how professionals can disagree with each other and continue to work together, etc. It all comes together and we naturally, even without noticing, will mimic the behaviors and styles we’ve been exposed to. Being part of PhiDE, this values-based organization in which we are all trying to be physicians who hold ourselves and our peers to a higher standard, has provided such an incredible family of professionals as examples.
PhiDE and the leadership opportunities I’ve been honored to have over the years has taught me so much about giving feedback, mentoring, presentation skills, setting attainable goals, and many other things that have been vital in learning what “being a professional” means to me. The purpose of PhiDE during medical school comes down to the whole PhiDE Family truly wanting to support each of us and help us become the best version of ourselves, all while we’re learning how to be “doctors” someday soon. So much of medical school has this implied knowledge, this unspoken curriculum that we’re also expected to learn, and I truly feel that being an active member and leader of PhiDE helps make that part of this journey easier and more defined. I realize that I’m speaking from a privileged perspective, as many of my defining experiences were in-person at leadership institutes and conferences; however, someday when we’re safely able I know that those gatherings will happen again and I can’t speak highly enough of the “professional development” that occurs when PhiDE family gets together.
Fraternity means family
The other intangible part of PhiDE is a lot more mushy, I’ll be honest. One thing that sets PhiDE apart from other organizations is right there in the name, we’re a “fraternity”.
Going through the premedical and medical student times of this journey can be extremely isolating. We all tend to compare ourselves to others in a harsh way, and it can be easy to go down the rabbit hole of considering every peer around you as “competition”. But, from the very beginning, I knew I didn’t want my experience to be focused on competing against anyone but myself, and I found that exact sentiment is shared by most of us in PhiDE. It’s hard to put into words how important the professional camaraderie and support has been along the way. It is always so comforting to have someone who’s just ahead of you on the journey telling you, “everything’s going to be okay” and “you’ll make it through, it gets better”. PhiDE has provided those friends for me, and I hope for many others reading this. We do need each other, especially during medical school, and in current times where we’re missing out on so much interaction I hope we can all continue to keep the PhiDE family sentiment going until our meetings are in-person again.