The new start, yMWIA 2013

[Hyunyoung Deborah Shin]

Hello yMWIA executive members,

 

This week is Thanksgiving day of the lunar year, one of the big holidays in Korea. During these days I have thought of yMWIA how we can make it better and progress further and further after Rosemary's contributions. Here are some of my ideas, also I would like to hear your opinions. Let's have brainstorming time for the blueprint of yMWIA for the upcoming three years.

 

1. Membership verification process

In the facebook community, when we get request from new members, how can we verify them? How can we confirm that they are medical students or doctors?

What we can have is only the information the appliers give us. How can we make the membership process more clear and reasonable? 

When we get a request it through the webpage, what is the next procedure? And do we need to improve the procedure? I hope Charlotte could answer to the question.  

 

2. Membership lists

Do we have membership lists? If yes, how can we manage and update it? For the distribution of yMWIA newsletter, regularly updated list is needed. Using google groups is a good method to control it, but there might be other options you can recommend. Dr Ime and Charlotte, please share your ideas and let us know the way how we have done. Furthermore having statistics such as how many members we have in each country or what is the percentage of medical students would be great to know ourselves.   

      

3. The interval of newsletter

Since last three years yMWIA has published yearly newsletters. Linda suggested to increase the number of publication more often. We all know short interval newsletter is effective to advertise our activities but we need to check feasibility first. Please give your ideas on this and the way how we can improve the quality and the quantity of the newsletter.

       

4. Distribution of yMWIA newsletter

Linda also suggested there are better ways (mailchimp?) to distribute yMWIA newsletter instead of group mailing what we have done. In my opinion, when we make a membership list in google groups, it could be a good tool of it. If you have better ideas, let us know.

       

5. Communication with executive members of MWIA 2013-2016

I'll do my best to communicate with Exco members of MWIA which is the major responsibility of the yMWIA chair with the help of our advisor, Rosemary Ogu. yMWIA opens to all the members and can give the opportunities whatever they plan a project for the young and women medical professionals.  I would like to suggest all of you to have time to think what you can do for yMWIA in your position and how you can contribute during the upcoming three years and then please share your plan and vision with us.

       

6. Joy ji-eun Shim and the division of medical students

Although there was a trial to set up a separate division of medical students, because of some different opinions, Joy will remain a member of yMWIA. However she is eager to contribute to yMWIA in some ways, she promised to actively involved in the yMWIA activities as a member. I expect she will be a core member of yMWIA in the near future.

       

7. 2013-2016 yMWIA Officers introduction to MWIA Exco and yMWIA members

Dr Lee, the secretary of yMWIA is under the process for it, so the introduction mail will be distributed soon.

       

8. yMWIA Webpage update

Dr. Shelly is in charge of the homepage, www.MWIA.net. I can see some miss-spells on the current webpage so I will ask her to correct them later.

If you have any bright ideas to make the webpage better, let us know.

       

I would like to express my appreciation to all the executive members, hopefully the legacy can be continued by ourselves.

       

Sincerely, 

       

Deborah

 

[Ime]

Thanks Dr Deborah,

Good start.

We will all work on the suggestions and get back to you ASAP.

Warm Regards.

Dr Ime Okon

Sent from my iPhone

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[Charlotte Röhrborn]

Hello ladies,

I hope you are doing well these days. Luckily my labwork has incubation periosds, so I am using those to write back.

Concerning 1.  

1. Membership verification process

In the facebook community, when we get request from new members, how can we verify them?How can we confirm that they are medical students or doctors?

What we can have is only the information the appliers give us. How can we make the membership process more clear and reasonable? 

When we get a request it through the webpage, what is the next procedure? And do we need to improve the procedure? I hope Charlotte could answer to the question. 

We can't verify facebook group information, as facebook itself has no verification process. In the past we have had some trouble with people spamming in the group, but there is no certain way to know wether the person signing up is a legit medical student. Also, while we are growing, I don't feel like it is a wise decision to keep entrance into the group as strict, as we also have some premed students that we wan't to encourage to go into medicine.

Facebook is informal in itself, so if we want to formalize things, we will have to do that via the mailing list. We can then ask for information about schools or occupation. If we want to do so, we need a formal sign-up mask on the website, because it is hard enough to keep track of these things, and I surely don't have the time to personally email back and forth with individual members, even though I have done so in the beginning to encourage membership.

However, if we want to formalize membership, we need to take into account that formal membership and the feeling of belonging to a group like ours may be an attractive idea in your countries, but I can assure you that the opposite is the case in Europe. Here, formalized membership has a stint of bureaucracy, and is usually not helpful in attracting members, it is actually hindering. That is one of hte reasons why we wanted to keep the barrier low, so we could attract members from all continents, and not only from a few elusive ones where this kind of system works. If we want to formalize things, I would like to remind everybody that this is an international organisation, and that in different countries the manner in which students organize themselves is very different, so tread gently.

2. Membership lists

Do we have membership lists? If yes, how can we manage and update it? For the distribution of yMWIA newsletter, regularly updated list is needed. Using google groups is a good method to control it, but there might be other options you can recommend. Dr Ime and Charlotte, please share your ideas and let us know the way how we have done. Furthermore having statistics such as how many members we have in each country or what is the percentage of medical students would be great to know ourselves.   

So far I have had the membership list under control. I will update an excel file soon and upload it, but I haven't yet the information from the juniors who signed up in seoul. Statistics is a bit difficult, but we can try by creating a survey, containing questions about country and academic status.

3. The interval of newsletter

Since last three years yMWIA has published yearly newsletters. Linda suggested to increase the number of publication more often. We all know short interval newsletter is effective to advertise our activities but we need to check feasibility first. Please give your ideas on this and the way how we can improve the quality and the quantity of the newsletter.

Here I have to say that the frequency of the newsletter is solely limited by contribution. It is very difficult to get articles that are in any manner of a quality that warrants printing, and we often have a lot of editing to do. At this point, may I suggest that each of you contribute a 250 word max introduction of themselves? As mentioned before, we would also like a letter from the chair. Concerning distribution, let's look into this when we have updated the mailing list.

Also, I don't know of any activities yet that we could write about. I'd like to take into consideration though that international activities are very difficult to organize, since, as we have learned over the past years, most of the national organizations don't have a formal junior group of any kind. For starters I think this is hanging a little high, especially since we were founded as an umbrella association that is supposed to connect the national branches. When this is achieved, maybe we can revisit that topic.

I find it most useful to keep communication completely open, since usually, new perspectives come from all sides. The google group I think is  a good way of achieving this.

I hope you find my thoughts useful.

Sincerely, Charlotte

2013/9/20 Hyunyoung Deborah Shin <shy8...@gmail.com>

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Charlotte Röhrborn

Georg-August-Universität Göttingen

Universitätsmedizin 2015

[Linda Wang]

Hi everyone,

I think we need to start with an online way of signing up for membership. This can be as simple as creating a form in Jot-form. It will give us the ability to have further reach, and, as Charlotte mentioned, decrease the barrier to entry.

I also agree with Charlotte that we do not want to be exclusive. Regardless if someone is a physician or medical student, as long as they support yMWIA's mission, they should be allowed to join. 

In terms of communication, I think we need to start having html newsletters versus PDFs.

Lastly, on the website, I'm listed as Dr. Linda Wang, but I don't actually get my MD until May 2014, so if that could be changed to "Linda Wang" that'd be great.

Thanks,

Linda