LADIES UNITE

On Friday, the event that everyone had been waiting for finally arrived: AMWA held its first general meeting!

The officers walked down to the breezeway to pick up some refreshments. For some reason, no other club has ever gotten their meeting catered by Einstein. Like Einstein, AMWA ladies will now be known for their brilliance because we had two dozen cookies and two boxes of coffee cakes. We'll also be known for our strength, because the guys working at Einstein could not believe that we were going to carry these boxes back to school without some sort of cart. They legitimately asked to see our arm muscles before we left.

Who needs a cart when your organization exists to create strong women?! We also made sure to get some delicious coffee. Here is how beautiful a spread can look if women are paying attention to presentation details.

First things first though: we had to erase the evidence of the Fantasy Football meeting thing that remained on the board.

Much better. After we got rid of that, the line to get into the meeting wrapped around the hall! We were so excited to welcome all of our first year ladies!

As everyone walked in, Kathryn played a slideslow featuring last year's activities and our "girl power" playlist over the speakers.

Here's the turnout. Amazing!

Dr. Henson came by to talk about the benefits of joining AMWA. She discussed the mentoring, the support, and the sisterhood. How even though we may be more represented in medicine now than when she joined (our incoming class is 60% women), we still face unique challenges as women.

Her speech was so powerful that even the boys decided they wanted to be part of AMWA:

As well as course directors:

Kathryn gave a presentation going over all of the events put on by AMWA last year and detailing all of our plans for the year to come. Thank you to all of the first year ladies and our incredible advisor for creating such a strong foundation for AMWA--ifour first meeting was any indication, we're at the start of a very exciting second year.

Recruitment

This week, we've been staying busy welcoming the First Second Class to our school. Our excitement over meeting our new class has (mostly) outweighed our oldest-child-syndrome anxiety about sharing all of the attention (#inauguralclassproblems), and our enthusiasm has probably crossed over to the point of being a little overwhelming to our newbies. (But that deserves it's own post).

AMWA hit the ground running this year. The officers have already met to schedule out our goals for the year, which started with recruiting new members from the class of 2016. At our Student Interest Group Fair today, we set up a table to provide information about AMWA (and chocolate) to the new class. Here are some photos from the event!

Rachel explains some of the many benefits of joining AMWA.

Word spread quickly amongst the ladies of the class of 2016!

...and, apparently, the men of the class of 2016.

We spoke about how AMWA enabled us to be surrounded by, and supported us in becoming, strong, empowered women. Our poster provided evidence.

Yours truly became an expert in button making. For those of you who were wondering, "flaming fuchsia" is the FAU Club House's name for "the brightest pink you guys have--no, brighter than that." Said buttons were almost as popular as the chocolate.


By the end of our lunch hour, our list of interested students contained 35 out of the 37 ladies of the class of 2016. And also one or two of the men. I'd say that's the sign of a successful start.

Interesting

If our incoming class had any remaining dreams of "free time" after four days of orientation, the student health fair today has probably squashed them. Today during lunch, the M2s put on a Student Interest Group Fair to share with our newbies all of the opportunities that await them outside of the lecture hall. They bravely faced South Florida summer weather to spend an hour perusing the tables that we'd set up outside, finding out which organizations they were interested in joining (or at least which ones had the best candy). The M2s also had to float around quite a bit, since it appears that we all have pretty divided loyalties (or just a shared hatred of spare time):

Each of the organizations had a table set up. Many had posters, powerpoints, and other educational materials to provide to the first years:

The second year interest group members wore T-shirts indicating their interest group loyalties. Most of them also gave out candy. Team Peds got bonus points because they gave out candy while wearing T shirts that showed them giving out candy.

In an effort to limit how many of our classmates develop diabetes, Internal Medicine gave out candy only to the one person who could correctly guess how many M&Ms were in the jar.

Global Health displayed evidence that its members had the best summer experiences.

And Medical Spanish demonstrated that language ability is probably encoded pretty close to whatever gene controls button-making skill.

Meanwhile, HealthC.A.R.E. stirred up excitement for our upcoming Health Fair!

Of course, HUGE thanks are in order to those who made the Student Interest Group Fair (and student interest groups) possible:

In addition to providing our new class with information about the opportunities that await them, the fair gave our class a chance to appreciate what we've accomplished. We got to take a step back and appreciate how far our clubs had come in their first year of existence-- a year ago, these organizations existed only in our heads. With 64 enthusiastic new members of CESCOM, our second year is sure to be even more successful. Good thing we have people to document it:

AMWA, minus the "American"

On our first day in the hospital in Kathmandu, we were greeted by the director, Dr. Samira Khan. During her introduction of the hospital, Katie leaned over to me and whispered, "we have to tell AMWA about her." Brilliant, determined, strong, and beautiful, the only thing setting Dr. Khan apart from the other equally inspirational AMWA members we know is the fact that she's not American. To read more about her take on the benefits and challenges of being a woman in medicine, head on over to  The Doctor Weighs In, where she is featured in an article for "XX in Healthcare Week," celebrating women in medicine. 

Dr. Khan takes time to tend to our own wounds in between patients. 

Jake was more worried about Dr. Samira dripping betadine on her beautiful clothes than he was about his wound. 

After an afternoon of seeing patients.

Dr. Samira arranged for us to go see the construction of the new teaching hospital, where she'll be directing the OB/Gyn department. 

Future delivery rooms where Dr. Samira will be practicing.

One challenge she mentioned specifically? Lack of equipment. To find out how to help Dr. Khan and the other physicians at Manmohan memorial, contact Sara Teichholtz at sarateichholtz AT gmail DOT com. The OB/Gyn department is most in need of an ultrasound machine, a doppler, and a colposcope. 

On Wednesdays, we wear pink

 AMWA at CESCOM is proud to show off our new T-shirts!

Of course, we had some pretty stellar inspiration:

Photos from the South Florida AMWA Tea--post to come!

AMWA does AMWA [Conference]

This past weekend, six members of AMWA at CESCOM made the journey south to the 70th Annual AMWA Conference, which was being held conveniently in Miami! Our branch may still be in its infancy, but we were welcomed with open arms by the strong ladies of AMWA and have no doubt that we are on track to become a valuable part of this national association. Here are some of the highlights from our trip! 

Right before we had student AMWA Elections! Hopefully next year  we'll have some FAU women on the ballot!

Every table had an experienced physician to help guide our suturing. 

Katie practices her suturing skills on a pig foot.

I was so excited to get a picture of a wisened AMWA woman wounding the pig foot that my finger got in the way.  Also please note the plates and glasses-- Even when suturing up pig feet, AMWA ladies have proper table settings.

Nikki makes sewing pig feet look so glamorous that this photo made a cameo on the Palm Beach Medical Society facebook page!

AMWA brings great joy to medical students with the suturing workshop! 

When you're a first year med student, this finished product gives you the same sense of pride I imagine parents must feel when seeing their offspring voted into the White House.


The biggest thanks to all the members of AMWA who made the conference possible (and for existing). Our small branch is proud to be a part of this organization!

AMWA: Race for the Cure 2012

In the wee hours of the morning on January 28, 2012, members (and honorary male members) of the American Medical Women's Association at Charles E. Schmidt College of Medicine traveled up to West Palm Beach to partake in the 2012 Susan G. Komen Race For The Cure.  Our goal: to support the Susan G. Komen foundation "to better the lives of those facing breast cancer in the local community." 


Race day started early, with the more ambitious ladies in our group starting the women's competitive 5k at 7am.  Forty five minutes later, our valiant male classmates led the pack of the competitive men's 5k. An hour after that, the more laid back AMWA members began the (still incredibly strenuous) 5k walk. Here are some images from our day!

Here we are walking to the start of the walk. Note how peppy we are, even after some of us have just run SUPER speedy 5ks.

The boys look forward to walking the course they had SPRINTED half an hour earlier. 

And we're off!

Your loyal historian was too distracted by all the good company to take any other photos during the first half of the walk. 

We made it! Here we all are together, after covering a combined 100k distance!

and JUST when we thought the day couldn't be any better, we passed the puppy tent on the way out.

HUGE thanks to our valiant president, Kathryn, for organizing our first official AMWA outing, and to all of our members and supporters who participated. Stay tuned for information regarding future events with AMWA at CESCOM!