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Medical training and practice will be hard on you, and on your peers. Surviving the stress takes preparation and awareness.

We'll hear how one medical student used self-care to prepare for her transition to medical school, and AMSA's Rebekah Apple explains the importance of resilience and some steps for building it up.

Biases in medical training are affecting medical students, but many--including you--may not appreciate that it’s happening. Fixing the problem won’t be easy, but some trainees themselves are working to address pervasive bias in medicine from the ground up. For the students trying to intervene, the first step in addressing bias in medical training is getting everyone to recognize how deeply--and sometimes subtly--ingrained it can be. Medical students Tehreem Rehman and Jes Minor started the Systemic Disease project. Among other goals, the project aims to gather stories from those exposed to or victimized by bias in medicine to start a conversation and increase awareness. To learn more about the Systemic Disease project, visit their website at http://www.systemicdisease.com or follow @systemicdisease on Twitter. You can also find Tehreem (@tehreemrehman) and Jes (@jes_minor) on Twitter as well.

As a physician, you won’t be able to solve all of your patients’ problems. Some of those problems, especially systemic ones, will remain just out of a doctor’s reach. In this episode, we learn how to extend that reach.

When it seems like medicine isn’t enough, that caring for patients goes beyond the scope of your abilities as solitary provider, or that the problems facing your patients are deeper and more entrenched than medicine can possibly address, those thoughts can be demoralizing. It may even make you question medicine as a career choice.

But you aren’t the first to come to that realization, and today we have some concrete advice for you from Dr. Leana Wen, commissioner of health for the city of Baltimore.

It no longer seems impossible, or even unlikely: What happens if your medical center itself comes under attack? Have you thought about your role? What would you do? What should you do? Would you have time in the moment itself to weigh ethical considerations, personal safety and protocol? Probably not. In this episode, we get an inside look at a training exercise preparing health care providers for an attack on their own institution, and learn about the bioethics of just such a situation.

Have you ever advised a patient to eat healthy and exercise, then hit up the McDonald's drive-through on the way home from work? Maybe it’s time for a wake-up call. Hear from one student who had a wake-up call while driving down the highway with a cup of curly fries, and how she made a fitting realization that would improve her life as a med student and she hopes will improve her relationships with patients.

Are you being taught how to help patients understand all of the overwhelming medical messaging they’re getting? Though the way that medical students are taught has changed gradually over the past century, the way patients learn has lurched forward. Arguably, the modern physician’s job has changed accordingly. The question is whether the physician will be ready for that job. Dr. Rishi Desai found himself on the leading edge of creating useful health information for patients and future physicians alike. Today, he’s the chief medical officer of Osmosis, a learning platform for medical students, where he is one of the people outside traditional medical education helping to shape the way medical students actually learn.

You’ve spent months on a complex research project, from conception to designing your study, to collecting data and coming to your conclusions. It’s all enormously complicated—now, explain the whole thing in 60 seconds. In the 2016 Match, fourth-year M.D. match applicants in the U.S. listed 4.7 presentations, abstracts or publications in their professional profile on average. Though the importance of those experiences may vary by specialty or even residency program, the ability to boil your project down to a quick explanation tailored to your audience is critical.

Med students get pretty serious about the resources they use to study. What goes into making some of these tools? In this episode, med student Sarah Smith spoke with the founders of OnlineMedEd, Dr. Dustyn Williams and Jamie Fitch, about the videos and other resources they put together to help medical students.

What have you heard about primary care? That there's "too much paperwork?" Or that you're "too smart" to go into it? Or, paradoxically, that "there's too much to learn"? In the spirit of National Primary Care Week, let's talk about the so-called stigma of primary care, and its effect on med students' career choices. Dr. Wanda Filer, a former president of the American Academy of Family Physicians, addresses the "stigma" head on--and touches on the joy a family physician can find in life-long care of patients.

Even as the definition of a “nontraditional” med student has shifted, there are outliers. Elaine Luther is one such outlier. But medical school isn't just about the medical career that follows. It is itself an accomplishment—and a statement.

Here's Elaine's story about what stood in her way, and the night that refocused her on a dream she'd been denied.