Electronic Summer 2024 | Issue 59

Meet the IPS Medical Student Committee

By: Nandita Gupta
Chicago Medical School at RFUMS, Class of 2025
Co-Chair of the IPS MSC 

The IPS Medical Student Committee was envisioned and created in 2021 by a passionate group of medical students, most notably Dr. Akshay Patke, then a student at the Chicago Medical School at Rosalind Franklin University and Dr. Austin Gephart, who was a student from Midwestern University Chicago College of Osteopathic Medicine. Since 2021 we have grown to be a collection of enthusiastic and driven medical students from many medical schools throughout Illinois. We provide career development opportunities for students through networking, mentorship, advocacy, and educational events. Our goal is to foster an environment that supports better patient care through establishing professional relationships among medical students, psychiatrists, and community members that will impact psychiatric practices in Illinois for years to come. As future psychiatrists, we are committed to advocating for high-quality psychiatric care and mental health equity for all citizens of Illinois.

Our committee holds monthly general body meetings that include time for peer networking and educational programming. Some of these educational sessions are led by members of our student leadership team. For example, last fall I led a meeting discussing maintaining mental health in medical school. Our student leadership team has also arranged a number of guest speakers who have covered a range of topics, such as advocacy in healthcare or the use of ketamine for mood and pain disorders. In addition, each year we hold residency application and interview advice sessions for M4 students looking to match into psychiatry.

Our committee is always seeking to create new opportunities for student involvement in IPS. For example, in 2022, Eliza Hofman (my current fellow Co-Chair) and Dr. Austin Gephart (who was Chair at the time and is currently in residency) were responsible for proposing the resident/student poster presentation session that took place at the 2023 annual IPS meeting.

Our committee is open to all medical students in Illinois with any level of interest in psychiatry. We are also open to collaborating with other committees and leaders in IPS to further our mission of professional development for students and creating a valuable impact on psychiatric care in Illinois.

If you have any questions or would like to collaborate with our committee, or are a student interested in joining our committee, we would love to hear from you! Please email us at ips.medstudentcommittee@gmail.com.