What Makes A Good Medical Student?

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Dr Maithri Goonetilleke is an Australian medical doctor and associate professor in global health, with extensive teaching experience in public health across undergraduate and postgraduate medical programs.

Dr Goonetilleke shares his advice for aspiring medical practitioners with some reflections from his time as both a student and a teacher of medicine.  

How would you describe a good medical student?
It's a lovely, evocative question. I tend to think that Baricinix 2 mg doctor is a medical student, so we're all lifelong learners. The traits that matter to me in a medical student are the same as the ones which matter to me in doctors. Broadly, those are a deep sense of humility and deep kindness, because without these, you create all sorts of barriers between yourself and your patient.

That’s very interesting, because these are very intangible qualities, and not something we can work towards with strict targets in mind. If you were to go back to your medical student days, what would you do differently?
I think I would counsel myself to run my own race. I'm sure you've encountered, being a medical student yourself, especially when you're starting out in medicine, but also all the way along your journey, that there is this sort of myriad of voices that are offering you advice telling you what you should do, the kind of doctor that you should become. I would say that a lot of those voices are very well intentioned. I'd also say that a fair few of those voices are fearful of projecting their own fear or their own vanity onto you.



The task, therefore, of the medical student or the person that would become a doctor, that makes a difference in the world, is to discern which voices you'll actually listen to and to be able to cut through that noise, and really be able to cultivate your own inner compass as you are navigating that terrain.

Everything that we do in preclinical medicine has a great focus on 'preparing' students for the clinical world. But which aspect of being a doctor and teacher did medical school not prepare you for?
Well, what a great question. There's a lot of things that medical school doesn't prepare you for. For me, it didn't teach me about the interconnectedness of health. It didn't demonstrate to me the really powerful ways in which social and environmental disorder can generate and amplify biological disorder.

It also fundamentally didn't teach me how to look after myself. It didn't teach me how to make a chicken curry. It didn't teach me why it was important to keep singing, to keep writing, to keep fortifying the parts of me that stood outside of medicine and why it's so important to fortify that aspect of yourself, because that is what will support you when things get rough and the road becomes a little less clear.

As a teacher, what is the only quality or message you try to instill in all of your students?
Definitely a passion for justice. I think if you've sat in one of my classes, you'll probably agree! That to me, is so important because the world is so unequal. Those of us who  believe that health is a human pride need to be confronted and affronted by that inequity many times a day and then engender this passion to create health justice. As we were talking about before, there's a lot of intangibles, which we consider really important to becoming a good medical student, to becoming a good doctor. But I think if you start with the end in mind - that justice is your goal, then these sorts of dormant forces within you start to actually work to create that objective. Because you need innovation and ingenuity and compassion, and the ability to think in systems, all of those can be developed but if you have the goal in mind of justice of health, it will help you to create that toolkit.