Doc in Training Learn Medicine with a Medical Student

More About HST

As I've mentioned before, I am in the Health Sciences and Technology curriculum at Harvard Medical School. This is a joint venture between Harvard and MIT, and I thought I'd explain more about it here.

The primary goal of the program is to train physician-scientists. Ideally, the graduates will both manage their own laboratories while seeing patients, although some graduates tend to go entirely into medical practice or research. A large component of what we learn is therefore cutting-edge research in the field. Each week in all our classes we will probably have at least four scientists in the field explaining their work and the state of the field.

This means that what we learn is not directly relevant for medical practice or for our medical licensing exam, but the point is instead to train a system of thinking about medical science.

Within the rest of the medical school, the HST student is stereotyped as being nerdy, less attractive, and bookish. But this is OK, as we have fun stereotypes for the other programs as well.