Kidney Week 2015 may be remembered for a number of different social media moments. The Tweet-Up was a raging success and finally broke through to become what Matt and I envisioned at the Denver Kidney Week in 2015. The success of the tweet-up was largely driven by Satellite Healthcare and their invaluable assistance with promotion and logistics. We can’t thank them enough. Additionally Kidney Week 2015 was marked by both a NephJC and NephMadness poster presentation. This Kidney Week, Matt was invited to give a talk on electronic medical education and he crushed it. But the biggest event, the one I hope we remember 2015 for, was the graduation of the first class of interns from the Nephrology Social Media Collective (NSMC).
Matt, Scherly and Chi with their diplomas and #DreamRCT mugs
We had four very different interns and they each had individually unique experiences with the internship:
Scherly Leon is in her last year of nephrology fellowship and is on a mission. She was already the ASN Public Policy Fellow when she started the Social Media internship. She is tuning her Twitter feed to be a carefully crafted curation of nephrology and social justice content. If you aren’t following Scherly (https://twitter.com/SLeonMD), you are doing it wrong. I think everyone is excited to see what she does with her growing skills as a public physician.
Chi Chu was the only intern who was not a nephrologist and we needed to apply more thought on how to make his experience particularly relevant for him. Chi participated in all of the events and his Which nephrotoxic antibiotic are you? was epic. Likewise his DreamRCT entry was equal parts creative and audacious. He will make an awesome nephrologist someday...if we are lucky enough to get him.
Hector Madariaga was a natural for the NSMC internship and did great work from day one. However, by June it was clear that we were under-utilizing him. So we brought him into NephJC in a more formal way. For the last six-months Hector has been NephJC’s chief archivist. He is in charge of creating the Storify’s from every chat. We hope he will continue to be a key member of the NephJC team. Future editor-in-chief?
Nikhil Shah is the intern who least needed the NSMC internship. He was doing great work before the internship and we just hitched our wagon to his shooting star. His SocialKidney project is an essential tool for tracking social media conversations online. His inspirational story on how he got hooked on nephrology was picked up by MedPage today. It will be great to have his creativity on the NSMC team in the future.
There were several more interns in the inaugural class:
The fifth student was us. We learned a lot about what does and does not work in a social media internship. We are going to be better next year. We got lucky by requiring participation in NephJC, that turned out to be an exceptional learning tool. But only because the interns didn’t merely tune in and lurk, but actively participated and engaged in the chats. It was a great (if not accidental) flipped classroom experience.
With the graduation of our inaugural class we are excited to open the application period for the second class of NSMC interns. If you are interested or have questions, feel free to send us an e-mail. If you want to apply for a spot drop us an e-mail and explain:
- Who you are
- Why you want to do the social media internship
- What experience do you already have with social media (Do not be embarrassed to say none. Do not be embarrassed to say you are really good at Facebook quizes)
The due date for the application is January 24. We will make our decisions and start the program on February 1
