Hi everyone!

Being officially out for summer is a strange feeling -- mostly because I am enjoying a brief respite from headphones and streaming lectures.  According to our lecture video homepage, there are 481 recorded events for 2013-2014, so I'd say during the M1 year I watched a solid 400-425 from the comfort of my apartment, the med school, my home, or any of the multiple cities I traveled to for AMA conferences and other various events, namely Indianapolis, East Lansing, Washington D.C., Baltimore, Boston, New York, New Haven, Hanover...and probably other places I missed. That's the most unique part about being a preclinical student in medical school -- so much flexibility to travel and take part in very collaborative projects, the defining extracurricular for me being policymaking and leadership development through the AMA.

I recently had the privilege to join hundreds of other medical students in Chicago for the 2014 Annual AMA-MSS meeting, alongside my classmates Jonathan Li, Adriana Coleska, and Vince Pallazola, pictured below

I helped write a few resolutions (policy proposals) that were heard in Chicago, one of which asked the AMA to support STEM education and programming, which had been approved back in April at the Michigan State Medical Society's meeting and subsequently sent to the AMA by our state, and the second asking the AMA to work with the NBME in addressing some of the changing trends in medical education. The former was officially adopted into policy, and the latter was adopted by the Medical Student Section and will be heard by the AMA in November.

In addition to policymaking, these meetings are an excellent opportunity for jumpstarting leadership development. I am excited that during the coming year, Adriana and I will both be serving on our Region 5 Executive Board (representing ~17 schools from Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, and West Virginia), and Vince will be serving on the executive board for the AMA Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the AMA. Each of us will represent the University of Michigan to our very best during the coming year, and use these experiences as an opportunity to build relationships with students all over the AMA.

Of course, a trip to Chicago (only 4.5 hours by Amtrak from Ann Arbor!) is incomplete without a run along Lake Shore Drive and a bit of sightseeing, so I've included a few photos for completeness: