During our Summer and Fall semesters of 2020 we took a Clinical Correlations course, in which we were given real life cases to work through with other students and teachers. Our teachers did a great job guiding us, and explaining how they handled each case, while also allowing us to first use critical thinking and collaborative team work to come up with a diagnosis and treatment plan ourselves. I felt it was really helpful to compare what we learned in class and studied for exams to real life scenarios, because sometimes in medicine the two are not the same. We were also able to distinguish between presentations that are pathognomonic for a specific disease versus those that are most common, because again sometimes the two are different.

It was also beneficial that the course was divided into two parts over two separate semesters. That way, we were able to see how we improved from week to week, and semester to semester, in terms of our ability to focus and narrow down our research, present our research in a clear and logical way, and utilize all that we had learned in class to better approach each consecutive case. The teachers also did a great job teaching us how to approach the patients we were presented with, testing our interpersonal skills and ability to break bad news. In doing so, they gave us pointers on how to show compassion and respect for all types of patients, as well as how to focus their attention so that we could get all the relevant information from them especially in the ER setting.

Finally, I found it especially interesting to work through cases that we didn’t focus on in class. For instance, we worked through the diagnosis and management of Lyme Disease, and in doing so spent time researching and discussing the different tick-borne illnesses that we weren’t so familiar with before. With that case, and many others, this class allowed us to expand on what we had learned in our Didactic Phase, and has helped prepare us for the Clinical Phase we are about to begin.