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Queenie Lu is the President of the American Medical Student Association (AMSA) at the University of Houston.
Nothing makes the American Medical Student Association’s chapter at the University of Houston particularly unique compared to any of the other pre-health organizations on campus. There are well over 40 pre-health organizations that exist on our campus, and we’re just one of the larger ones due to our name. Because of the sheer number of organizations that assist their members in studying for the MCAT or building up their applications, we’ve actually taken a step back from this and focused more on expanding our reach. To be more specific, we’re doing more to support students who feel like the “traditional” route to medical school isn’t best for them, while also dedicating more time and resources to reaching students who were previously unable to attend events or interact with other members due to scheduling issues or transportation.
As president, my job is just to oversee my organization’s operations. I make decisions on what events we can organize, programs we can establish, or collaborations we can participate in. I think that in terms of my role/responsibilities, that’s standard for any society’s president. What I’ve done specifically was just make changes to our organization’s structure so that we had more people participating in our events. In previous years, our rules were very strict regarding attendance for both members and officers alike. This year, I wanted for everyone to feel like they were supported even if they weren’t physically present, so I changed our channel of communications to encourage conversation and questions, started hosting our events earlier in the day, and made our attendance requirements more vague.
Truthfully, I haven’t been honest with people about why I initially decided to pursue leadership with my organization. I joined AMSA-UH in January of 2022 (when my campus started to open back up after COVID-19) and started working towards a leadership position because I felt dissatisfied with our pre-medical clubs at the time. I felt like the communities weren’t as close-knit as I was led to believe by their recruiters and that they were mainly offering things that I wasn’t yet interested in. As a freshman, I wasn’t particularly concerned about buying an MCAT course or getting discounts on buying scrubs. I hadn’t met people in person in a long time, and it wasn’t easy to make friends in my science courses. When I heard about AMSA-UH, I attended one of their socials and was shocked by the lack of conversation happening between the other attendees. That’s when it occurred to me that I could become an officer and try to improve things.
I was an ambitious freshman—I met up with several officers of the organization at the time, including the president, vice president, and the next year’s president. I wanted to get an idea of what we used to be and what they aspired to be. From there, I started drafting up several ideas for how we could grow our membership, better communicate with our members, form a tight-knit community, and improve our events. I wanted people to feel welcomed, and I also wanted our events to be even more accessible to our students since we’re a commuter school. It was also important to me for our members to be comfortable with asking for help. A lot of students I know are considering a more ‘non-traditional’ route to medicine, but they have no idea how to go about it, so we’ve been more open in discussing options and opportunities for students who don’t plan to matriculate right after completing their bachelor’s.
Over the course of the next three years, I continued to work to improve our organization. I wanted to instill a sense of lifelong learning and continuous improvement in my officer team. It was important to me that my team consistently strived for a better organization for the sake of themselves and for the sake of the community that we were building. At every meeting, we reflected on both our successes and our setbacks, and this reflection allowed us to continue to find a way to better serve our members. If your leadership is only participating for the sake of a line on their resume or an entry on their medical school application, it reflects in how they execute the vision for that year. People can always feel the sincerity of your intentions as a leader—if you genuinely care about your community, you’ll find that they will care about you too. I’m immensely grateful to my team for making my first-year dreams come true and growing our organization to where it is today.
To cut a long story short: if you’re dissatisfied with your situation, take initiative and do something about it. Don’t wait for the possibility that someone else will come along and change things for you. Brave your fear of failure and try anyway—others out there will see your intentions and support you in your efforts. You’ll never regret doing what you can to help those who you care about.
Everyone has their own path to medicine. Don’t be discouraged if you were unable to take a specific prerequisite class this past semester or if you didn’t score a high enough average to meet your target GPA—there are other factors beyond this that medical schools are looking at when considering your application. Many students fall into the trap of focusing on the numbers, and they can lose sight of themselves in pursuit of becoming the perfect candidate. When you’re starting out as a first-year student, many of your concerns are just about completion—“Have I taken all the classes that I need? Will I be able to volunteer for enough hours? Will I be able to secure a research position?” From what I’ve heard from admissions officers, the stories that they remember are deeply unique and personal to each student. Do the things that you enjoy, not what you feel like you need to do to check a box, and you’ll later find that you’ve grown immensely as a person and a candidate.
From what I’ve gathered in my time with my local chapter, our members will set aside at least three months (ideally more; three months was considered by some alumni to be the bare minimum) to dedicate to full-time MCAT study. They’ll initially start with content review, and some also add practice questions and problem solving during this time. A suggested timeline would be doing daily UWorld practice content in the last three months leading up to the exam, as well as at least one CARS passage every day, and then focusing on AAMC for the last month. This can be supplemented with an MCAT course if students need the additional support. Multiple students have recommended not spending too long on content review and focusing on doing practice full-length tests—part of the difficulty of the MCAT is the testing environment. So going somewhere quiet and without distraction, using noise cancelling headphones to emulate the headphones available in the exam room, taking breaks during the practice, etc. AAMC has two free full-length practices and four available for purchase, and there are other third-party services that have practice full-length exams (AAMC also has the Fee Assistance Program, which can help with the cost). From there, they go over their practice exams and fill in any knowledge gaps. On the side, they’ll use Anki to keep up with reviewing content whenever they can.
This is a difficult question for me to answer since I feel like we’ve changed and introduced a lot of things recently for the sake of our members. My favorite initiative is our new emphasis on the medical humanities. We’ve invited guest speakers to speak on various topics that don’t necessarily involve the science of medicine but rather adjacent fields that we feel that future physicians should be familiar with. Additionally, we’ve hosted a medical ethics workshop and some book club events where we read a selection of articles related to a particular subject to discuss later. For example, we’ve covered topics such as health insurance, government involvement in healthcare, and health disparities within Texas, specifically maternal mortality rates. We were also fortunate enough to be able to work alongside the University of Houston’s Medicine and Society program to be able to recommend courses to students interested in learning about specific subjects in further detail. This program will be expanding further to cover more topics, including but not limited to racism in medicine, the experience of chronic illness, reproductive health, and patient autonomy. This initiative was started in hopes of better equipping our members with knowledge that will serve them in the field of healthcare, and I’m glad that we’ve seen a continuous, growing interest in this initiative, both at the undergraduate and graduate level.
As a student, you can learn professional skills, like how to improve your resume or how to give an impressive interview. Additionally, there are some workshops that we host where you can learn skills that you can get certification for, like Stop The Bleed, Basic Life Support, First Aid, etc. As an officer, you learn how to organize events, coordinate plans and efforts with other officers, and work on some public speaking or presentation skills.
In my opinion, aside from these skills that can obviously help you in applying to medical school, the real benefits of joining a student organization are the students. Some of the members that I’ve met are truly inspirational—their work ethic is incredible, they serve their communities in exceptional ways, and they love the people around them like no one else I’ve ever met. I’ve seen our members band together to support others through heartbreaks, failing grades, and family losses. This is what makes a student organization so appealing to me. Learning how to become a team player and support your peers is perhaps the greatest skill that we have to offer.
I learned that my heart is always with my peers and my community. No matter how hard my classes or extracurriculars get, I know that I will always be happy as long as I can support them in some way. A particularly touching (and funny) moment that I think about often is that one of our interns had recently asked who they could go to for help if they didn’t know what to do, and several of my officers answered, “Queenie.” It’s funny to me because my officers sometimes exasperate me when they’ll ask for help while I’m in the middle of class or at the crack of dawn, but it really warms my heart to know that they think of me as someone who they can count on. It feels like my efforts to support them have paid off.
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