MD & DO What's up, Gen P (for post-COVID/pandemic)?

[Mr.Smile12]

This is meant to be an anonymous, self-reflective thread. This original prompt could get reposted to different student communities.

In various professional chats, many faculty/health educators have been commenting that "students are different since the pandemic." No one is able to really put a pin on what is different about "the culture", but many of their comments address challenges when it comes to how students relate or bond with each other. I'm sure the COVID year had thrown a wrench into a lot of people's college/prehealth experience.

The Class of 2023 is the senior class who were freshmen during the spring 2020 shutdowns and had to endure the restarts of hybrid/restricted campus life. That means this M1 class marks the first arrival of "Generation P/Pandemic" to medical school.

Whatever your class year, if you graduated medical school in 2020, or wherever you are in the training continnum: how are you feeling? What is happening with student morale, faculty involvement, or administrative culture-building? What is working and what is not?

Are there more students seeking mental health/wellness checks? More LOA's? More failures or remediations? More professionalism issues? What is going on that makes the faculty give me these impressions?

Please share and encourage your peers to post.

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[2020NonTrad]

I think the pandemic crushed the means that culture was established/maintained at schools. The convenience of virtual meetings means that many things that were once in-person (interest group meetings, orientations, small groups, etc.) are now done over Zoom with students not even having to get out of bed to attend. They're never 'forced' to interact with each other, to get to know each other, or to be a part of the school. Everyone is their own island, just checking the boxes to get through. It's no longer a "shared experience." Despite the pandemic being 'over,' the convenience factor (and student resistance) has kept schools from returning to the way things were. It makes me think of the study where people were randomized to talk to strangers during their commute. Even though people didn't want to talk to strangers before doing so, the human interaction improved their well-being. People don't want the inconvenience of having to show up in person for things, but I genuinely think it's worse for everyone in the long run to make everything a Zoom meeting. On that note, the cultural expectation of "showing up" is never established and for many students, clerkships are the first time they are actually expected to be somewhere on a regular basis.

Anecdotally, I think there are more failures - definitely for Step 1. A significant portion of my class (more than previous classes) also took an extra year because they didn't feel prepared for residency application.