2021 is history and 2022 is getting started. 2021 was the first year overshadowed entirely by the COVID-19 pandemic. While we hope to see things improve this year, it is always hard to accurately predict the future.

To navigate these uncharted waters and uncertain times of 2021, it was important to us to continue to connect students, continue to teach and create experiences, and by doing so set IPOKRaTES Students up for the post-pandemic future.

Connecting Students

After many months of meetings and volunteering of countless hours, we launched ipokrates-students.org. With this presence on the web, we want to showcase our seminars and hope to connect prospective participants and organizers with local groups for when we can have regular in-person meetings again.

Many thanks especially to Philipp Müller and Florian Kreuzer from the Munich Group for making this happen.

Teaching Remotely

The launch happened just in time for the announcement of the first online seminar of 2021 on Internal Medicine organized by Filipp Sokolovski and his group from Innsbruck. Florian Kreuzer and the Munich Team followed suit shortly after with Emergency Medicine – online but interactive nevertheless. It featured a great mix of seasoned lecturers, as well as new additions to our IPOKRaTES family. Lecturers that we have gotten to know, yet still have to meet in person. The introduction of Emergency Medicine into our repertoire is another fantastic first for IPOKRaTES Students, and something we have wanted to do for a long time.

Online seminars were completely new terrain for IPOKRaTES Students in 2020 and back then only thought of as a temporary solution for “a couple of months until the end of the pandemic in 2021” – now they turned into a regular thing and the keystone to the future of IPOKRaTES Students. All the organizers really did a fantastic job handling challenges like coordinating multiple dates for multiple people across as many as seven time zones. This allowed us to welcome participants from places where we never even had in-person seminars.

Become an Organizer

Like every year, some of our organizers are graduating this year or have already graduated. Thank you to all organizers, especially to those who graduated and stuck around even while starting their first job after medical school as young doctors. We now have organizers who join and organize remotely, and then go on to graduate without ever physically meeting other organizers, participants, or lecturers. Nevertheless, judging from the feedback from our online-only organizers we are convinced that the experiences and skills gained in the process will be valuable to your future endeavors.

Are you interested in organizing? Get in touch! With borders repeatedly closed due to travel restrictions, now more than ever we see the need to work together, to understand each other, both patients and doctors, and to patiently address patients’ concerns. For that we need well-trained doctors. Doctors who are good teachers. After all, the word doctor derives from docere, the Latin word for “to teach.” Together, we will put this into practice (pun intended), learn how to be better organizers, and help build the next generation of young educators, teachers, doctors. After we put all this together, we will emerge from the pandemic with a more diverse skill set than before.

Stay safe and see you at our next seminar.

Vanessa and David

Header Image: Photo by Dimitry Zub on Unsplash