Helping medical students become better doctors

QMed always enjoys doing events for or organized by Undergraduate medical students, because they are an audience that loves to learn, and they take great efforts to organize events. Here we share a Guest Post by the students of the SKN Medical College, Pune, who are members of the Student Research Forum. Some of them had attended a workshop by QMed earlier (in an external event) and went back to their College and ensured that they had a workshop for all their colleagues! This post was contributed by the Students Research Forum of SKNMC and Aditya Khanijo coordinated with QMed for submitting this story.

We, the members of the Student Research Forum – SKNMC Pune are a team dedicated to promoting research activities amongst undergraduate medical students and sensitising/educating them about research.

As a part of this effort, we came up with an idea of organising a workshop on Citations, Navigating PubMed and using a Reference Management software (Mendeley), after conducting a basic "Induction to Research workshop" for students. There were no second thoughts and the decision to invite Mrs. Vasumathi from QMed was unanimous, as some of us had attended her workshop through Quest.

We did this in record time. We broadcasted a lot of messages and spread of the word and in no time we got a huge response from about 140 dedicated students who attended the two hour session. Vasumathi ma’am was fantastic, no doubt and we got a lot of positive feedback and comments from the students who attended the session. Our efforts bore fruit and we would definitely advise the future SRF committees to carry out similar workshops for the batches to come. In fact soon after the workshop, some of the junior students showed interest in taking on research projects – something quite encouraging!

This wouldn’t have been possible without the constant support of Dr. P. S. Chawla, the SRF Faculty, Dr. R. S. Bangal (The Dean) and dr. A. V. Bhore (The Medical Director) of Smt. Kashibai Navale Medical College and General Hospital, Pune, who encourage our students to explore new fields everyday.