Three Tufts students were elected to positions at the American Medical Student Association's (AMSA) 57th Annual Convention, which was held in Washington D.C. from March 7 to 11.
Twenty-two students from Tufts' premed chapter attended - making it the largest one represented. Sophomores Prakhar Agarwal and Jessica Awerman, as well as current Tufts School of Medicine graduate student Ahiyana Nariani, who also graduated from the School of Arts and Sciences (LA '06), all won elections.
Agarwal, who is the vice president of Tufts' Pre-Medical Society, beat out three other candidates for the position of premedical regional director for a region that includes New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Maine, Rhode Island, Connecticut and Canada.
In his new position, he will coordinate the various premedical societies in the region and help start chapters at schools that lack them.Nariani was elected as the medical trustee for the same area, giving Tufts students a regional presence.
Awerman is the new premedical representative for the Child and Adolescent Health Specialty Forum. One of her goals, she said, is to use her new position to get Tufts students more connected to important discussions. "I'm trying to use the program to help promote other programs on Tufts' campus already involved in child health," she said.
Like the rest of the Tufts students elected, Awerman will hold her position for one year. After that, she said, she is unsure if she will seek re-election. "I might possibly run again for it next year," Awerman said. "I'll see how it goes this year, and if I feel I can really help the issue, I'll go for it again."
The convention, which was entitled "Health Care Justice: Pursuing the Dream of a Healthy Society," featured several notable guests, including Dr. Paul Farmer and Dr. Sanjay Gupta.
Farmer is the Presley Professor of Medical Anthropology at Harvard University and a founding director of Partners in Health, a charity organization that aims to provide direct health care on an international level. Gupta is a senior medical correspondent for CNN.
Tufts' Associate Dean of Undergraduate Education and Program Director for Health Professions Advising Carol Baffi-Dugan also led a lecture about "revising the premedical curriculum to highlight the more qualitative attributes of individuals interested in medicine," Agarwal said.
During the convention, students attended discussions on issues such as human rights in North Korea and AIDS. According to Agarwal, the discussions and the event as a whole had several goals. "The whole purpose of going was to enhance the premed experience, to learn about what it takes to apply to med school, to interact with med students and to find out [about] other aspects of medicine like activism, advocacy and humanistic medicine," he said. An overarching message, he said, was that future doctors should adopt a holistic view of medicine.
"Medicine isn't a vacuum focused on disease. It's also focused on a broader social context - like a political context, an economic context - and that's what a lot of attendees realized at the convention," he said.
-Lilly Riber contributed reporting to this article.
