Sponsorship

2nd Annual Southern California Medical Student Workshop Sympsium (May 2005)

May 1, 2004 marked the inaugural Southern California Emergency Medicine Student Workshop Symposium. The concept for this symposium was born almost a year earlier by three medical students - Warren Wiechmann, Chadi Kahwaji, and Amir Bernaba - with a simple idea...create an Emergency Medicine conference entirely devoted to medical students.

While there were many opportunities for medical students to attend national and regional EM events, there had been few events just dedicated to medical students' needs. Conversely, most medical students had access to events organized by their schools' Emergency Medicine Interest Groups; however, these events varied greatly in scope and in content. With the goal of combining the best aspects from national conferences and local EMIG meetings, they began organizing their unique event just for medical students.

To avoid making the event simply a collection of lectures and workshops, the newly formed Executive Committee gave the event a binding theme...to expose the students to the field of emergency medicine through a full day of lectures and hands-on simulations revolving around common cases and scenarios that present in an Emergency Department. By choosing cases and scenarios general enough to be commonly encountered in primary care or other specialty settings, students were given the unique opportunity to be exposed to management and treatment options from an emergency physician's perspective.

To keep the symposium new and exciting each year, the Executive Committee plans to use a new content theme each year, while maintaining a general presentation approach, so that students of all specialty interests can benefit from the symposium.