Brainstorming Workshop with Dr. Chacko
Hi, I’m Haruna Minami, a freshman of Ehime University in Japan. I’m having exciting days in San Francisco now.
Today, I want to talk about the lecture of Dr. Andrew Chacko. He works in Palo Alto Veteran’s Affairs Hospital and he is a designer and innovator as well as a physician. The lecture was about the importance of creativeness and learning from making mistakes. He said that if you want to make something new you have to change the way of making it and if you don’t change the way, it is impossible to get a new result. Then, we did brainstorming practice about “how can a patient go to see a doctor easily?” in two groups. It was really interesting because there were many creative and unique ideas. For example, shoes which take patients to his doctor or special fragrances which help him find his doctor. Of course, creativeness is related to medicine. For example, although some patients have the same symptom, their causes of it differ from person to person. If you don’t have creativeness and just see them as the same way, you can’t notice the difference of them. Like this, creativeness is important in medicine.
Most Japanese, including me, know it is not a bad thing to make mistakes but they hesitate to make mistakes because they don’t want to stand out and be laughed at. But now, I know how important it is to make mistakes and learn from them. I think Japanese can be more innovative if they express their thought and opinion actively. So, I hope this way of learning to be common in Japan.
Thanks to comfortable atmosphere of the CME program, I have made many mistakes and learned lots of things with fun. I’ll learn more and more in the rest of the program days! Thank you for reading my post.
Stanford University Campus Tour
Hi, I’m Haruna Takeda, 1st grade student of Ehime University, faculty of medicine. I am belonging to a table tennis club, magic club, and rescue club in the university. I want to become a good neurologist, and also, I want to engage in a research activity in the future. I want to share about the special experience of visiting the Stanford University. On February 29, our CME participants were visited Stanford University. We had to walk for 20 minutes, ride a train for 50 minutes, and take a taxi to get there. Actually, I searched the Google Map before visiting there, and I was so amazed how large the area of hall facility is, but Stanford was larger than I expected from the Google Map images. We walked around the campus for about an hour and I found many interesting points. Stanford University, established in 1885, consists one of the most important parts of Silicon Valley. One of the reason for that is there is many famous graduates associated with various fields. It was primarily established by Mr. and Ms. Stanford for their passed son who died when he was 16. The roof of almost all classical building has a red roof, which enables their son to find out where they are from heaven easily. At first, when it was built, students did not have to pay tuition for the university, but now, without any financial support, we have to pay for about 500$ per year. I was surprised by the amount of money studying in the university! However, we can receive support from nation, state, or non-profit organizations and most students can go to the university without paying all of the tuition. There are more graduate students than undergraduate students, which means graduate school have larger part of the university. Also, the number of students who are in faculty of medicine is bigger than any other faculty’s students, so I learned that medicine accounts for the greater part in the Stanford University. I heard that many forefront studies are done, which highly motivated me to become a good researcher. After all, it was my first time to see universities in other countries, so I thought that studying in universities in different country will certainly take me to different stage in my lives, so I want to study in school in foreign countries someday. In conclusion, it was a wonderful time for me to learn about how universities in America are and I was enjoyed a lot!!
