Dear Pritzker Students:
Catherine Roberts and Lavanya KondapalliClass of 2006
Greetings from your new Pritzker Chiefs! Our Dean for Medical Education, Dr. Humphrey, has kindly given us her usual space to introduce ourselves to you. We're both fourth year medical students, knee-deep in the residency application process. While we are eager to discover what the future holds for us, we're currently enjoying the freedom of designing our own schedules and pursuing our intellectual passions.
When Lavanya was first runner up in the Miss Strongsville, OH beauty pageant and when Catherine won the perfect attendance award in high school, neither event was front-page news worthy. Although disappointed back then, we both feel like it was worth the wait to make headline news now to tell you about our role as Pritzker Chiefs and our new initiatives.
"What's a 'Pritzker Chief'?" you might ask. Inspired by the chief resident system, Dr. Humphrey envisioned that students could function in a similar role in the medical school environment, making a positive impact on the school and working as student stewards to their peers. In our third year, we were elected by our class to serve as senior class co-presidents and plan activities such as the 2006 Match Day and Convocation. Shortly after the election, Dean Humphrey shared her vision with us and asked us to be this year's Pritzker Chiefs. We are honored and excited to contribute to our school in this way.
Someone once said, "A thought which does not result in an action is nothing much, and an action which does not proceed from a thought is nothing at all." It's our mission to achieve a happy union between houghts, ideas, and actions from them. Along these lines, here's what we've done so far and where we're going.
What we’ve done so far…
The new school year kicked off with an O-week that had more inter-class involvement than ever before. We worked with the O-week committee to involve third and fourth year students in the traditional opening day "Clap-In" welcome, the White Coat Ceremony, student-faculty dinners, and the closing day celebration at the International Museum of Surgical Sciences. This year, we have also been newly appointed as voting members on Dean's Council in order to be more aware of active issues affecting the student body, as well as to provide continuity and perspective as senior medical students. Pritzker has hosted a number of prominent national and international speakers this autumn and we've also made it a goal of ours to ensure good student participation at these events which elevate the scholarly environment of our school.
Where we're going…
We're currently working on a number of future projects. Among our ideas are inter-class informal dinners hosted at students' homes, a non-academic book club, and a comprehensive database of current students and their interests, hobbies, and experiences in order to facilitate peer-motivated mentorships. We are also looking at ways to re-involve upperclassmen with the extracurricular activities in which they participated during their first two years of medical school. Finally, we'd like to tell you about out latest "thought put into action." We're starting a student space in the Pritzker Pulse and we want YOU to contribute the topics and the writing for this section. Right now, we envision student perspectives on classes, profiles on favorite faculty, and student-conducted interviews highlighting interesting projects or accomplishments of their peers. The inaugural, student-written article appears in this edition. Third year student Steven Bachta conducted an interview with Dr. Callum Ross, the new course director for the revamped Human Morphology course. Steve also polled several of our favorite faculty to respond to the question, "if you could go back to college for just one course, what would it be?" This is just the tip of the iceberg and we look forward to hearing your ideas for the Pritzker Pulse. Please contact us at pritzkerchiefs@bsd.uchicago.edu if you'd like to be involved with this endeavor.
We hope you’re as excited as we are about the latest developments at Pritzker! We know the best ideas will come from you. Let us know what you’re thinking and what you’d like to see happen at Pritzker: we’ve only just begun!
Best,
Catherine Roberts Lavanya Kondapalli
