I did, however, want to put in a plug for a fantastic new Healthy Debate article called How Specialty Positions are Allocated for Medical School Graduates.

For students applying to medical school, it’s hard to imagine that there could be difficulty and challenges after you get in. The truth is that medicine, like any other profession, has its own unique problems that you cannot avoid.

For one, there is no guarantee that you will become the type of doctor you desire. The only guarantee is that you will be some kind of doctor. Want family medicine? Sure, you’ll get in somewhere, as it has hundreds of spots and is one of the least competitive programs in Canada. But want plastic surgery? Well, there are only ~25 spots in Canada. Good luck.

On top of that, even if you do become the type of doctor you desire, where are you going to work? Being a doctor doesn’t guarantee a job. Health care is like any other industry. Surgeons can’t just start operating – they need to have privileges at a hospital with an operating room. It is not uncommon for some physicians in Canada to graduate and be unable to find a job in certain specialties.

The article does a great job of explaining some of these issues, and I highly urge you to read the article and reflect on some of the challenges it brings up.

Related posts:

1. Is there a “perfect” medical specialty?
2. 2 Years Down, 2 Years to Go – A Long and Much Needed Update
3. Are you succeeding? If not, maybe you’re measuring success the wrong way

Just wanted to quickly promote an article from HealthyDebate called: Why Don’t More Doctors Do House Calls?

In the middle of the article, it mentioned a survey:

…Akhtar’s sentiment is backed by a recent survey she sent to the family medicine residents at the University of Toronto about the perceived barriers to doing house calls in their future practices. In her survey, lack of experience and mentorship were among the most frequent responses…

I actually worked with Dr. Akhtar on a research study this past year, and the survey mentioned was one of the pieces of our project (I’m hoping to write the paper up for this soon). It’s nice to see our work highlighted, but it’s even more important that the oft-forgotten topic of physician house calls (which I believe is a necessary component for our health care system for certain patients) is being more and more brought into the discussion.

It’s a good article and I encourage everyone to check it out =)

P.S. I’m also happy to answer any questions people have about physician house calls if anyone was interested.

Related posts:

1. 2 Years Down, 2 Years to Go – A Long and Much Needed Update
2. How are residency positions allocated among specialties?
3. The Evolution of MedHopeful

It’s now been just over 3 years since I first started this blog. It’s amazing not only to see how much this blog has grown and evolved over the years, but also in reflecting, I’m fascinated by how much I have changed as well. I’ve written or thought things several years ago that I do not believe at all anymore. Most of these changes in thought are related to my views on medicine, health care and where I see my future in medicine. It’s funny to look back and see how much I have grown. Perhaps the funnier thing is that as I learn more and more, my views are only going to continue to shift. I wonder where they will settle?

The statistics for this blog suggest that it’s reaching quite a few people (we’re average about 400 unique visitors a day), but the cooler thing to me are the funny stories I hear. One of my friends from undergrad mentioned hearing someone talk about this blog at his McMaster MMI interview. Another undergrad friend of mine recently told me how she was at her UofT interview this year, asked one of the 2nd year med students if they knew me, and another applicant piped up saying “of course, everyone knows Josh!”. Apparently my friend had to explain that she actually knew me in real life. Haha. It’s crazy how access to the Internet has not only revolutionized access to information, but revolutionized the impact we can have on people miles away. If this blog has helped you in any way over the past 3 years, that’s awesome, and I’m really glad.

Now that the 3 year anniversary of MedHopeful has just passed, I thought it would be fun to look at how this blog as evolved. Before I get into these key moments and milestones in our short history, I want to thank you, the readers, for being a part of this experience and journey with us. I hope you continue to stick with us no matter if you are a “medhopeful” or not. It’s been a great ride, let’s keep the fantastic journey going!

The Beginning – July 2008

I started this blog just over 3 years ago because I just felt like I needed a place to write. I wrote random notes on Facebook when I figured I might as well have been blogging instead. I was planning to apply to medical school that fall, so I decided I might as well keep a bit of a journal for myself on my progress. I also had many ideas on undergrad admissions and scholarships that I believe worked for me, and I wanted to share them with other students. I really enjoy teaching, mentoring and sharing what I know. I didn’t really have a plan for this blog, I just said what the heck, let’s try this.

York University Strike – November 2008

When York University went on strike for a few months, I had a lot of free time. I had basically no real commitments – no student could because for all we knew, the strike could be over within a week. So what did I do? I honestly spent most of my time on NBA Fantasy and on this blog. You can tell from looking at the archives that the three months York was on strike were the three most productive months at MedHopeful in terms of blog posts. I was average about a post every other day during that period. And I’d like to think I was writing some pretty high quality advice posts too. I continued to give advice on scholarships, studying, and overall random personal development concepts that have helped shape me.

I’d like to think the York strike was a blessing in disguises. Some of my most popular blog posts ever were written during that period. It gave me the time to really create a foundation for this blog, and since then, it’s really bloomed.

Med School Interviews – February 2009

Over January and February 2009, I started receiving med school interview invites. My blog posts became less about providing advice and more about tracking my interview progress as the idea of medical school started to become more real. Over the next few months I reflected on my interview experiences. As the York strike ended, so did my free time, and I started to blog less.

Med School Acceptance – May 2009

On May 15, I received some news that completely changed my future – I got into med school at the University of Toronto. A lot happened that day, and it’s a fun read if you haven’t read it yet.

I had three months of summer before med school started, and while I didn’t blog that much, it was at this point that I started blogging my thoughts about the medical school admissions process.

The Start of Med School September 2009

I spent the first few months of med school busy adjusting to my new learning environment and not really blogging much. After reflecting on the first few weeks of med school, I just stopped doing that. The first semester of med school was tough – anatomy, histology, embryology – needless to say, it was probably the most challenging and least interesting semester so far.

Med school is busy and I started lacking the time (and perhaps even the inspiration) to write quality posts anymore. I don’t think people realize this, but it takes hours (at least for me) to write a quality advice post. I still tried to write when I could, but it was tough for those previously mentioned reasons.

MedHopeful becomes a Collaborative – April 2010

In April 2010, Shelly Luu, a med school classmate of mine, joined me in running MedHopeful. She brought of fresh life to the blog, not only in terms of writing and perspective, but also in increasing our web presence and helping us build traffic through accounts on Twitter, Premed101, etc.

The Start of 2nd Year of Med School – September 2010

To be honest, nothing particularly important happened throughout my second year of medical school in terms of the blog. I averaged a couple of random blog posts a month as usual.

I had probably more personal evolution than anything. I spent my first year trying to find my place in medicine, sometimes even unsure if I should even be here. I jumped around from neurology to cardiology and all over the place. The only thing I felt pretty sure about was that I didn’t want to do any form of surgery. It just doesn’t interest me.

By the time my second year of medical school started, I decided I wasn’t particularly interested in a very specific part of the body and saw myself becoming a generalist. I also came to terms with my passions for innovation, entrepreneurship and program development. I became attracted to satisfying these interests through engaging in system change and quality improvement in health care. I spent all of this past year thinking that family medicine would be the best route to satisfy all of this. I figured the family medicine lifestyle would give me the most flexibility to pursue a lot of these side interests on top of my clinical commitments as a physician.

Eye-Opening Summer Internship – June 2011

This summer I am completing a 10 week internship at UHN’s Centre for Innovation in Complex Care (CICC). I entered this internship with my eyes set on family medicine, and as I sit here typing this, my experience this summer has significantly shifted me towards pursuing internal medicine.

I had a 4 main goals entering this internship: 1) develop a better understanding of how the Ontario health care system works, 2) build my network, develop mentoring relationships, and support my career development, 3) develop new skills and improve upon old ones, and 4) do work that is meaningful, has value, and provides positive impact.

My experience here has completely shattered any expectations I had or goals I set for myself. My understanding of our provincial health care system and the challenges we face today has been completely changed – and in a good way. I have become to understand the complexity of our health care system and why progress and improvement is so difficult. While the complexity can makes things frustration, I find something fascinating and motivating about trying to create positive change and improvement in such a complex system. The importance of leadership, team work, and understanding overall human behaviour in improving systems has never been more clear.

One of the fascinating aspects of my project is that much of the knowledge I have acquired has come from interviewing individuals from all sectors of the health care system for my project. From front line health care providers to high level management, from community care to hospital care, I have gained unique perspectives from across the continuum of care. And getting this insight through discussion is a lot more fun (and in many ways more productive and insightful) than from simply reading. The desire I have seen to improve quality of care for patients by stakeholders across this entire continuum is truly inspiring and makes me hopeful for what will be achieved. These experiences have significantly expanded my network in medicine and health care, and have created a foundation for me to pursue a career in an area that I’m very interested in and excited about. I am very grateful for the relationships I have developed through this experience.

In terms of skill development, I’ve had the opportunity for workshops on stakeholder mapping and brainstorming. Thanks to the diversity of the team I work with, I have learned many skills outside my normal career path. I’ve learned simple but important concepts around the way we simply email others to open channels of communication. I have had the opportunity to improve on my presentation and speaking skills. Several weeks ago, I had the opportunity to present at monthly rounds on some of my own past research and my thoughts on the issue of physician home visits to a group that included one of the physician leaders I most admire.

Most of all, I am very glad that I am doing work that I find both internally and externally meaningful. Without divulging into details yet, I really believe that the work we are doing is providing real value and is going to lay the foundation for some key future projects. For me, this is just the beginning of my foray into the area of health care innovation, system change and quality improvement. I plan on staying involved both with this project and the overall field in the long run. I am excited to see what will come out of all of this and where things will head.

Clerkship and Beyond – August 2011

On August 22, I officially start my third year of medical school. After three weeks of class, I will begin working clinically full time as a clerk, starting with a pediatrics rotation. To be honest, I am loving summer and the work I am doing right now, so much so, that I’m not even thinking about clerkship. I’m going to let that wave hit me as it comes.

What’s going to happen over the next few years? What residency will I end up doing? Where will I be living a few years from now? I have an idea of what I would like to happen, but absolutely zero certainty over what will happen. All I can say is, I am excited to see what my next reflection post looks like 3 years from now.

Related posts:

1. 2 Years Down, 2 Years to Go – A Long and Much Needed Update
2. HD: Why Don’t More Doctors Do House Calls?
3. Are you succeeding? If not, maybe you’re measuring success the wrong way

Applying to medical school is tough. Really tough. There are more qualified applicants than there are spots. The number of applicants is increasing every year (and subsequently, the number of qualified applicants) while the number of medical school spots isn’t keeping pace.

But if you want it bad enough, with a lot of hard work and a little bit of luck, you will get there. No matter how good an applicant you think you are, there is always room to be better, and ways to increase your chances of getting that medical school acceptance.

Feel that you’ve done everything you can? Looking for the next thing you could work on? Then this article is for you. I present to you: 10 things you can do right here right now to make yourself a better applicant to medical school.

1. Study
Whether it’s for tomorrow’s exam, the MCAT, or for a quiz five days from now, studying a bit more can’t hurt – it can only help. The truth is GPA and MCAT are the two most important factors for getting your foot into the door of a medical school, so academic excellence should be at the top of your list of priorities.

2. Review your application and identify areas of improvement
It’s always a good idea to review your progress as an applicant and find holes in a future medical school application. Are you very involved in your community but lacking direct leadership experience? Are you missing 1 or more of the 3 strong referees you need for letters? Are you overly-involved in the community but struggling in your university courses?

I am strong believer in self-reflection to figure out what your next steps should be. If you have extensive leadership experience, there’s no point joining the executive of another club (unless you really want to). Try something else and make yourself an even more well-rounded and interesting applicant. Not to mention trying new things will increase your skill set and often give you added perspective on life.

If you want to know what you need to work on as a medical school applicant, don’t ask me – I won’t know the answer. You need to spend time looking at your own progress and identifying what’s missing from your application.

3. Look up the latest information on medical school admissions
Admissions requirements can change from year to year. The MCAT cutoffs are the University of Western Ontario’s medical school change every year. In the last few years alone, McMaster added the Verbal Reasoning component of the MCAT to their admissions process and McGill University completely removed the need to take the MCAT.

Smart students are resourceful students. Keep up to date with the latest admissions information and don’t miss out on opportunities. I wonder how many potential future doctors didn’t apply to McGill this past year just because they didn’t realize they didn’t need the MCAT anymore.

4. Ask friends and family members to review your application
As the authors of our applications, we know exactly what our words and sentences mean, even if they aren’t necessarily written well. It’s always good to get a second (or third or fourth) pair of eyes to read over your essays and applications. From small things like spelling and grammar to large things like ideas and themes, it’s good to get someone else’s perspective – someone other than you is going to be evaluating your application, right? So it makes sense to see that your work is understandable to complete strangers.

5. Keep track of your activities and accomplishments
Even if you’re not applying to medical school for a year or two, I highly suggest keeping track of your accomplishments and activities, both academic and non-academic. It could be as simple as a list of these items or a professional resume, whatever you like, as long as it includes pertinent information such as dates, name of activity/accomplishment and brief description of activity/accomplishment.

I suggest this for a few reasons. 1.) It’s easy to forget all of the amazing work you accomplish over the years and you’re bound to forget something as time goes by. 2.) Having all of this prepared makes completing your medical school application a lot less of a pain (especially the 48-item OMSAS autobiographical sketch).

6. When you experience an event in your life that impacts your interest in medicine, take time to reflect and write it down
“Why medicine?” is the toughest question you’re going to have to answer when you write your essay, when you take part in interviews, and in fact, is a question you’re going to keep asking yourself even throughout medical school as you realize it doesn’t actually get easier. The reality is that the answer to this question is rarely going to be one obvious thing. For many of us, the answer to this question is going to be a myriad of reasons and experiences, and if you can keep track of any key revelations you go through, it will make answering this questions (and understanding yourself) easier as you go through the admissions process.

7. Read HealthyDebate.ca
I have been asked about my opinion on the Canadian health care system at both traditional and MMI medical school interviews. Clearly, having a basic understanding of how our health care system works and some key problems we are facing today would be useful for both your interviews and for practicing as a future physician.

In retrospect, I actually think it’s kind of funny that we are expected to answer questions like this. In my first two years of medical school, I have basically learned next to nothing of significance about our health care system, which I think is actually concerning, but I digress and that rant is for another day. I have spent my summer so far working on a project that has significantly increased my understanding and shaped my current perspective on our health care system. If I had to answer those interview questions all over again, questions like “what are the biggest problems facing health care today”, my answers would be extremely different.

In any case, a newly developed and excellent resource for learning about Canadian health care issues is HealthyDebate.ca and I highly encourage you to read their articles. I admit I am probably biased because I know some of their authors, but based on my conversations with them (who by the way have terrific credentials/qualifications), I am confident they are providing you with good information.

8. Work on your ECs
We all have unanswered volunteer emails, club events to organize, and 99 research papers to read for our lab work. Get off this blog and spend an extra 30 minutes today and take care of one of those things!

9. Plan ahead for the future
Getting into medical school is hard. It’s important to have a plan for both getting in and for what happens if you don’t get in at your next attempt. Think about how you are going to spend your summers, how you are going to spend your non-academic life during the school year, and what you might do if you graduate and do not get into medical school. If you are in your fourth year of undergrad, realize that grad schools have deadlines. If grad school is something you are thinking of, make sure you know those deadlines. The same goes for any other opportunities you are thinking of, even if it’s just for a summer – all opportunities have deadlines, keep track of them, and plan ahead.

10. Start completing your application
The earlier you start your application, the less work you have later on, and the more time you have to fix any bugs and fill any holes. Inevitably you’re going to find yourself stressing out the night before your medical school applications are due and telling yourself “I wish I started earlier”. Well, earlier is now, so get cracking!

Any more tips to add to the list? Let us know!

Related posts:

1. Is there a “perfect” medical specialty?
2. Stanford Admissions Video – Medicine, Business, Education and Law

Every action you undertake begins with three things:

1. Motivation – Why are you doing this? What’s driving you? What’s the point?
2. Goal – What do you hope to achieve? What does success look like?
3. Action plan – How will you achieve your goal? What do you need to do?

Most of us understand this template and have learned it at some point or another. However, one key component of success that is commonly forgotten is measuring success.

Measuring success: how do we know we’re getting there?

It’s easy to picture ourselves standing at the top of the mountain, our flag deeply rooted at the peak of Mount Everest. We can imagine ourselves staring at that beautiful 100% on a test. You can picture yourself reading the “Congratulations! Welcome to UofT medical school” email.

It is extremely easy to picture success and the final goal. The problem is knowing how close we are to getting there – how do we measure success? How do we know we’re getting close to our desired outcome? It’s an issue faced not just be individuals, but by organizations and entire industries.

The reason why it’s so important to be measuring your success correctly is because how well you are doing should inform the direction you take moving forward. If you’re climbing Mount Everest, it’s easy to measure success – how high did you get this time?

However, what if you were measuring success incorrectly – what if you were measuring success by how far horizontally you were moving around Mt Everest’s perimeter? You would be achieving distance and think you were succeeding, but the reality is that you would be going in the wrong direction and actually nowhere close to achieving your final goal. If you measure success wrong, then you will be tracking your progress wrong, and you will not achieve your goals.

While that might sound like an absurd example, much of the time measuring success can be blurry and we can get it wrong.

Example: Measuring the success of Team Work

One of the problems in our current education system is how we’re often measured based on individual metrics – even in a group situation. When put in group situations in school, we tend to be marked by how much we say. The more you participate, generally, the better your mark. And let’s not kid ourselves – this seeps into the highest levels of education.

But hold on for a second – what was the goal of the group activities? Was it to inform the school who the most active participants are? If it is, then great, the metric of participation works just fine. Somehow, I doubt this is the case.

Maybe I’m naive, but I think (or hope) this is not the goal of school group activities. When teams are formed, they should be working towards a common goal. In the real world, teams are measured by their performance on achieving their common goals and not individual metrics. So why are we educating this way?

Health care teams

In the health care team, the common goal is providing the best care for the patient. We measure much of our success in health care by patient outcomes.

The best teams aren’t necessarily the ones where everyone is highly participatory for the sake of participating. If we measured the success of health care teams by the ones who spoke the most words, we’d be in serious trouble.

The best teams are the ones where everyone works together to care for the patient in the best manner possible. Depending on the team, that might mean certain individuals saying more than others and certain individuals doing more than others.

In order to succeed, you need to make sure you’re measuring success the right way. Otherwise you’re going to be rounding Mount Everest at the base. Which is fine if it’s actually Mount Everest you’re running around, but it’s not okay if it’s a patient. We certainly can’t afford to measure success wrong in health care and other industries.

Related posts:

1. 2 Years Down, 2 Years to Go – A Long and Much Needed Update
2. Why do we fail and how do we move forward from it?
3. Is there a “perfect” medical specialty?

It’s been almost a month since I last blogged. It must seem strange to some of you, since it’s true, I am on “summer vacation” right now. It’s even hard for me to believe that I’m almost three weeks into the start of the summer. It really doesn’t feel like it.

Blog Changes

I’m sure you have seen by now the changes at the top menu of the blog. I’ve decided to re-organize the blog with categories for the various posts. I hope this makes the blog more organized and easier for you guys to navigate. It’s a change we were planning for a while, but somehow tonight, I realized a simple way to do it in the span of less than half an hour.

What do you think? Like? Dislike? How could we make it better? Please, let us know!

P.S. I know I have quite a few emails and comments to respond to, I’m on it guys!

Reflection on Year 2 of Medical School

I’m at that interesting turning point in medical school, the “1/2 MD”. I’m half way to being a doctor. It feels strange to type that, almost surreal. The last two years have flown by pretty swiftly, and I expected the next two to fly by as well. But if time is flying by, that’s got to be a good sign, right?

Two years of preclerkship down – two years of primarily classroom based learning, with a sprinkle of clinical experience. This fall I begin two years of clerkship, of clinical training, in hospitals and clinics everyday. I don’t feel ready, and I probably won’t ever feel ready. But one day this fall I will take the plunge, and boom – I will be on the wards, caring for patients and finally part of the health care team.

But for now, I am in that no man’s land, that halfway point between preclerkship and clerkship- the “final summer”.

If Year 1 was the “year of being lost” then Year 2 was certainly the “year of finding myself”. I spent the first year of medical school trying to find my place in medicine, sometimes unsure if I should even be here. I bounced around trying to envision myself in various specialties. Cardiology, neurology, internal medicine – I thought about so many different things.

In my second year of medical school, I started to be more honest with myself and what I wanted out of my future career. I realized that I wasn’t passionate about one specific field of medicine. I wasn’t drawn to neurology or cardiology or dermatology or anything in particular really. I started to settle on the idea of being some sort of generalist, be it family medicine, emergency medicine or internal medicine.

That being said, I remained attracted to entrepreneurship, project development, innovation, creativity, and solving the next big problem. The truth is that I can’t satisfy these desires through clinical medicine alone. But I do see opportunity to satisfy these interests in medicine and health care overall. There are many problems in our current health care system and there are opportunities for innovation. Most importantly, satisfying these interests in health care allows me to do work that I find meaningful and that will benefit others – that is really important to me. My work this summer is giving me a glimpse into what that future might be.

Centre for Innovation in Complex Care

This summer I am working at the University Health Network’s Centre for Innovation in Complex Care (CICC). The CICC, through the efforts of a diverse and interprofessional team, conducts innovative research to improve the process of care for patients. The goal is to develop health care solutions that are generalizable, such that these new best practices can be shared and lead to improvements in health care across the board.

The issue I am taking a crack at is a longstanding problem in health care. Since the mid-1950′s, it has been known that a small percentage of the patient population uses up a hugely disproportionate amount of health care resources. For example, data from the late 1990′s in British Columbia showed the top 5% of patients accounting for 30% of costs. Similar numbers are seen across health care systems of developed nations around the world.

Data tells us that these high user patients tend to be the aging population with complex chronic disease. The problem is that our health care system was originally designed for acute care. Partly due to better health care, people are living longer, but are living longer with chronic disease: diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular disease, and so on. Our health care system hasn’t fully adapted to meet the need for better care of chronic illness.

My project at the CICC this summer is Super Users, which aims to improve the process of care for the most expensive patients, with the ultimate goal of providing better care while reducing health care costs. In the initial phase of the project, I will be conducting interviews this summer with key stakeholders and thought leaders to better understand the current state of the problem and how these patients currently flow through the health care system. This will lead to a clearer understanding of the issue and, subsequently, recommendations for the design of a future system of care and/or additional research. The challenge of super users and tackling chronic disease is huge and is a problem people everywhere are trying to help solve. My project this summer of course won’t solve the issue, but the hope is that it could help lay the foundation for a long term project.

A fantastic opportunity and a perfect fit

I must say, I am very grateful for the opportunity to work at the CICC anymore. The philosophy of the group alone just fits me perfectly, and it’s something that took me by surprise. It is a very high performing group, with a strong focus on organization, communication, creativity and skill development. I am regularly asked to speak up if I’m ever dissatisfied with the direction of my project and ever since I was told they want to make this the “optimal” experience for me, I was hooked – I could tell early on by the language used and the philosophy that drives them that the CICC is the real deal.

Before the summer started, I had a meeting with the CICC to outline what goals I wanted to achieve. I told them I wanted the opportunity to be creative, that I’m always looking for the next big challenge, and I wanted to solve problems that were meaningful. A few months later I have this amazing opportunity to start a potentially long term project tackling one of the biggest problems facing our health care system today. On top of that, the team here is super nice and brilliant and supportive.

Two weeks into this summer internship, and of course I am only at the tip of the iceberg of this issue. In reviewing the literature, the complexity of the issue is clear, which is what makes it daunting and exciting at the same time.

Nonetheless, things are moving, things are exciting, and we continue to see new opportunities to explore. Just minutes after presenting my project for the first time to the group this week, I am connecting with a very supportive Ministry of Health consultant. Yesterday I am sitting in on a meeting with Dr. Edward Wagner, who is credited with developing the Chronic Care Model. Next week I will be learning how to do stakeholder analysis.

This summer is busy, but also full of great opportunity. I have no idea how this project will look at the end of summer, but I’m excited to find out.

Related posts:

1. HD: Why Don’t More Doctors Do House Calls?
2. Are you succeeding? If not, maybe you’re measuring success the wrong way
3. The Evolution of MedHopeful

This past Monday and this morning, I was at the 2011 Canada-Wide Science Fair encouraging this year’s participants to try out the brand new SMARTS website. (When I started SMARTS in 2004, it was a plain website with information on a couple of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) opportunities myself and a few peers has been to. Over the next several years, we became a part of Youth Science Canada and grew into a network of over 200 schools and student volunteers. This week, we launched SMARTS 2.0 – an online community to connect and support young Canadians interested in science)

We had a display booth in the science fair exhibit hall, and our goal was to provide demos to the science fair participants walking around and encourage them to join. While I didn’t start with a particular spiel, I had a well-refined elevator pitch about SMARTS by the end. For those of you unfamiliar, an elevator pitch is basically a very brief summary that you present to people to capture interest when you don’t have much time.

At some point or another, all of us need to be able to deliver an elevator pitch, or at the very least, be able to describe something in as few words as possible, but still be highly valuable in content. Maybe you are marketing a product to a potential customer. Perhaps you run into a legendary researcher in your field and you only have a few seconds to share your idea. Or maybe you are trying to convince people to donate to a cause you are fighting so hard for.

Based on my experiences, I’d like to share with you 5 thing I’ve learned about making a successful elevator pitch.

1. Introduce yourself – create a connection

You would think this is obvious, but it actually doesn’t happen enough even though it only takes a few seconds. “Hi I’m Josh” *extend your hand for a shake*. That’s all it takes, but connecting with your audience is powerful, it attaches a human presence to your idea. It brings you and your audience onto the same plane. It’s no longer a stranger marketing a product, it is Josh, this personable individual who is sharing an idea with you.

It’s even better if you can state a clear connection between the two of you. For example, when I introduced myself to the Canada-Wide Science Fair (CWSF) finalists, I said, “Hi, I’m Josh, I’m a CWSF alumni from about 5 years ago. What’s your name?” In a matter of a few seconds, I went from this unnamed stranger to Josh, a student who had been in your exact position 5 years ago.

2. Keep it brief

Again, this should be obvious – elevator pitches are based on the idea of giving an idea during a short 30 sec to 1 min elevator ride. But unless you prepare a short, concise speech, it’s so easy to go over time. Keep it to 1 minute or less if you can. I usually tell people “can I have a minute of your time?”. I don’t want to lie!

3. Describe your idea in one sentence before moving on to any details

Before you throw out any details, you should be able to give the main idea of your message in one sentence. Trust me, you can. You just need to find a way. For me, it was: “SMARTS is an online community for young people interested in science”.

4. Tailor your message to your audience

Very often your idea is big or complex and is useful to many kinds of people. You need to tailor your elevator pitch to that exact person you are talking to. Only mention things about your idea that are relevant to that person. You have less than a minute, don’t forget that.

Think about what drives the specific population you are pitching to. What would be incentives for them? What would be disincentives? Drivers? Turn offs? And tailor your message appropriately.

When I was speaking to a student, I would say “SMARTS is here to help you guys stay connected with each other after the science fair.”

If a teacher dropped by, I would say “SMARTS is a great way for your students to learn about new opportunities beyond science fairs”.

Both of those statements are true, but I am sharing the most relevant aspects of SMARTS with the most relevant audience. The biggest thing on the minds of science fair participants this week is how awesome a time they had, and how much they’re going to miss the friends they made. While they will likely be interested in learning about new opportunities some time or another, that’s not the biggest thing on their mind right now.

5. Thank the person at the end, whether or not they are convinced

Always thank the person, whether or not you are able to convert them into a believer in your idea. Often, people need time to think, and will come around later. Stay positive, be nice, thank them for their time. If you don’t, you really might have lost a potential supporter you never realized you had.

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“February 8, 2011 – The deans of four Stanford graduate schools discussed the values of a liberal arts major and how that might impact a student who is interested in applying to professional school. They also talked about how their admission process searches for a diverse range of students with differing experiences.”

NOTE: The medical school part starts at 13:30

Enjoy, and thanks Gagan!

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If you are a student, teacher, conference organizer or event planner interested in hearing me talk and share my experiences, about anything ranging from leadership to volunteerism to medical school, let me know! I’m happy to do anything from keynote talks to panel discussions.

I’ve created a Speaking page which has some more information on what I do, what I’ve done, and how to reach me if you’re interested.

I will also be actively developing presentations for new topics (and modifying old topics to make them better and more exciting) and applying for speaking opportunities beginning this summer. I’m looking forward to sharing new ideas, meeting new people, and improving my speaking skills!

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At first I had the talk recorded as a video, but I wasn’t happy with the quality of how it turned out, both in my speech and in the quality of the video. So I decided to record the talk on my own and show it here.

I hope to keep producing some more videos like this in the future, including both full length talks as well as short, random thoughts on my mind. Enjoy, and let me know what you think!

Interested in hearing me speak?

I’d love to do more speaking and I’m open to sharing my experiences and doing talks on a variety of topics. If you’re interested in having my speak at a conference, workshop, school or anything of that nature, send me an email at medhopeful@gmail.com and let me know!

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