The Evolution of Undergraduate Medical Student Research Activities: Personal Experience of a Developing Nation’s Uprise

Excerpt

Revolutions are swift, while evolution is typically a slow, incremental process. One of the most notable things that happened after the Egyptian 2011 revolution was the explosive uprising of youth. Regardless of the political turn of events, which is surely not the subject of this piece, it was becoming increasingly clear that something beyond politics was radically changing the academic landscape, particularly among university students. What started as a “revolutionary” interest in science and research quickly transformed into a continuously changing “evolutionary” process. As a final-year medical student who spent half of his medical school before the revolution, and half of it after the political turmoil, I was lucky to be one of the earliest “experiments” demonstrating the value of strong mentorship on developing an early aptitude for research. One year before the revolution, an oncology summer rotation was developed at the National Cancer Institute (NCI, Cairo University), designed to test the applicability of incorporating oncology rotations into the core medical curriculum in medical schools in developing countries [1]. I joined the course in its second year; the year of the revolution. The course instructor—who later became my long-term research mentor and is co-authoring this opinion piece—integrated an academic writing component into the rotation, as a way to stay in par with the then-budding interest in research among the revolution youngsters. The result was a published literature review article that he and I co-authored on the very same topic that the oncology summer school addressed: oncology education for medical students in developing countries [2]. …