In his afterword to Better, Penn Med’s required summer reading for incoming first years, Atul Gawande provides the reader with five suggestions for becoming a positive deviant. His fourth suggestion: Write Something.
“I do not mean this to be an intimidating suggestion. It makes no difference whether you write five paragraphs for a blog, a paper for a professional journal, or a poem for a reading group. Just write. What you write need not achieve perfection. It need only add some small observation about your world.”
In the last several years, I’ve been reading blogs with increasing regularity. I follow those of friends, friends of friends, people I’ve never met, authors, musicians, other medical school applicants. I truly love reading the tiny snippets or longer vignettes that bloggers post; the freedom of the writer inspiring, the accessibility of the reader exhilarating. I welcome anyone to visit here, and I hope it might contribute to the blogging community I’ve come to appreciate so much.
A pleasure to see you’re still writing (I hope that sounded more sincere than banal). I write a little on the side at mymopinion.blogspot.com. It’s rarely about med school, but when you are on the grind isn’t everything, on some level or another, about the craft?
Hope all is well.
Wow, Maureen! Great to hear from you, and thank you for sharing! It looks like you’re actually a legit writer 🙂 I hope you’re enjoying med school!