Half-baked idea: now recruiting guest posters

Sidenote has exploded over the past month or two. Thanks to my amazing fans. It's been cool to see the page views go up and up. I'm assuming I'll see a downtrend if I don't publish another kevinmd post, either way, it was cool to see all those views. At the same time, for now I don't desire a Pauline Chen/Atul Gawande level following. I figure I should wait until I'm actually a doctor and I know what I'm talking about before I build up to that size. For the time, my real goal is to build community here within MUSC COM2 (crazy, right?). 

So naturally, my most recent half-baked idea is to add guest posters/co-writers to sidenote. Let's be honest, my writing is fairly entertaining, but it centers around an extremely narrow wheelhouse. Physician burnout/hidden curriculum/running diaries/interviews. It's what I love, and I plan to keep writing about it. At the same time, if there's anything that the 'so you think you know' series has revealed, it's that everyone has a story to tell. 

One of the points of sidenote is conveying the med student life. Samuel Shem's great novel on physician burnout, The House of God, keys in on an important underlying truth. The struggle in internship is not just the stress of the job, part of the struggle is how isolating it can be. You move from thinking this (the job, the patients, the red tape) is crazy, to thinking I'm crazy. And when you start thinking you're crazy, then you spiral into mental illness, depression, burnout, suicide. All the good stuff. And that's why the life of the med student - complaints, the highs, the hopes - all of it has to be shared. 

This is what 'we don't believe you. we need more people.' is all about. We need more writers telling the story of life as a med student. We need single students that are out till 5 AM partying, non-traditional students that have had other jobs, female students, black students, students from non-MUSC schools. We need more people. Granted, there are other blog/websites that fit this function, and how is sidenote different? If you go read other med school blogs - there's some good ones, but it's also a lot of fluff, and not enough people keeping it real. sidenote has no financial incentive, and it is not tied to any larger corporations. It's just med students keeping it real, and telling the med student life like it is. 


Please join the movement. So far Paras Patel (M2) from MUSC is going to write about his summer, and two of my friends from Kenyon - Jon Weil (M1) at a TBD med school, and Aaron Yo (M1) at Harvard - are going to be writing about the first year life. 

If you would like to write for sidenote, shoot me an email! ken dot e dot noguchi at gmail dot com. It's not a bad gig - the past 30d we've had 7000+ views, and I think most of the rising M2 class reads it, so the audience is definitely there. Alternatively, if you know someone who would be great for this, let me know! We need more people telling the med student life. 

see you on the other side,

from ken

enjoy sidenote in 140 characters or less @kensidenotelife.