The Foundation Course for I MBBS students – conducted by every medical college since the year 2019 – has an objective of sensitizing fresh medical students with the required knowledge and skills for their professional environment. It stresses on the medical graduate preparing to be a lifelong learner and developing strong leadership and communication skills.
In November, we received a call from AIIMS Kalyani – a medical college in the Eastern part of India, asking if we could deliver a lecture for their newly admitted I MBBS Students. We were delighted to take up this and I gave a one-hour presentation titled:
“Enjoy Learning with Extra Reading: An orientation to finding the best information resources using IT”
I stressed on the need for reading beyond textbooks. I explained about journals and other resources. I introduced them to some of the Indian textbooks and told them about the editors of these books. I stressed how each one of them read a lot, learnt about, and did lots of research. As a result of their efforts, they were on editorial teams that created textbooks which were important to all medical students in India.
I then introduced them to the fundamentals of searching online. I gave them a bird’s eye view on how tagging search terms and using Boolean operators could make a difference
AIIMS Kalyani has subscribed to QMedCourses and so I explained how students could learn in more detail from www.qmedcourses.in . The new curriculum introduced in the MBBS stresses on the need for self-learning, in addition to syllabus-based learning.
To encourage students, I asked them for a commitment to
1) Finish the first two courses in their first year (this would take just about 2-3 hours)
2) Finish the other two over the next couple of years (an involvement of about 5-6 hours)
The students have promised to go ahead. I explained how these courses could help them a lot during the MBBS as well as PG courses and then during their entire career span.
The feedback received was excellent – majority agreed that the session was effective and that they were very interested.
QMed thanks AIIMS Kalyani for organizing this session. We now plan to make a fresh recording of this talk and encourage every medical college to share it with their MBBS students