AANS Medical Student Chapter SLU SOM

AANS Medical Student Chapter SLU SOM

In the past, students at SLU SOM have had difficulty when trying to connect with neurosurgical faculty. With respect to research endeavors, the faculty and residents undergo a variety of basic science and clinical projects, but these opportunities are often unaware to interested students, either due to communication issues or logistical obstacles. The research exists and the student interest is present; thus, our goal is to connect the two. Our institution also offers a summer research fellowship. We hope to facilitate interactions between students and faculty and have students apply for these programs under the mentorship of a neurosurgery faculty member. On an institutional level, our goal is to provide medical students with a broad clinical, research, and lifestyle perspective on the neurosurgical career. Neurosurgery is a demanding specialty, and we hope our chapter can teach incoming first year medical students (as well as other students) about the requirements, expectations, and general lifestyle of an academic neurosurgeon.

Our chapter will strive to improve shadowing and mentoring opportunities by using our platform to connect with faculty and facilitating signup and scheduling times. This includes assembling a shadowing database of all the neurosurgeons, their contact info, assistant’s info, clinic/OR days, if they allow students to scrub in, and a place where students can list their experiences. In addition, we will hold an end-of-the-year panel consisting of fourth-year medical students who recently matched into the neurosurgical specialty. This is an excellent event that gives students the opportunity to listen to fourth-year students share their experiences on successful matches into neurosurgery and discuss areas of success and aspects to improve on. We hope to bring faculty or residents in the future to offer a different perspective as well as add to the discussion. In the future, we hope to facilitate more student-faculty interaction. We are interested in creating case studies and career development nights. We also envision procedure nights and dissection workshops, the latter of which students can gain hands-on experience with neurosurgical techniques and equipment.

The SLU Department of Neurosurgery is invested in enhancing student exposure to and interest in neurosurgery, and we believe our chapter can provide a platform to allow students and faculty to better interact with one another.