On being a pathologist: a pathway to pathology practice; the added value of supplemental vocational training and mentoring in college and medical school.

On being a pathologist: a pathway to pathology practice; the added value of supplemental vocational training and mentoring in college and medical school.

Hum Pathol. 2018 Sep 26;:

Authors: Weinstein RS

Abstract
Traditionally, vocational training and liberal arts (and premedical) curriculum have been separate education tracks. This personal profile describes a program that evolved from the partial fusion of vocational training and a premedical education track. My personal health issue, visual impairment, which presumably resulted as a complication of congenital toxoplasmosis, hampered my ability to read in grammar school and necessitated my placement in remedial reading classes until eighth grade. My father created an independent home-based vocational training program that ran in parallel to my traditional school education all the way through college. In this case study, I provide an overview of this hybrid education program, which we refer to as the Vocational Training/Medical College Curriculum of the Future (VTMC). This term implies that the education of a student from K-12 school through medical college is a continuum. I find it useful to conceptualize a single education continuum beginning with vocational training and ending with medical education, with a large overlap area in the middle. In this paper, I describe a set of my work experiences that leveraged and reinforced my didactic education experiences. Mentors who supported aspects of the VTMC program have included a college president, a U.S. Congressman, a Nobel Laureate, and a Massachusetts General Hospital leader in academic pathology. Elements of this innovative VTMC program have been utilized in K-12 public schools and in non-medical graduate school programs.

PMID: 30267777 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]