Tag: Internship

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The NSMC internship is back

The Nephrology Social Media Collective Internship (NSMCi) is looking for interns. The NSMCi is a year long social media training program. It is not an introduction to social media, we expect some basic knowledge of how to use a computer, engage in social media, and how to write. What the internship does is provide recurrent opportunities to be public physicians.

You will learn how to creatively and effectively use Twitter to communicate. You will learn how to create visual abstracts. You will get involved in the inner workings of NephMadness. You will become familiar with every aspect of NephJC and produce summaries of articles, curated summaries of chats and even run the @NephJC account for a chat.

But listing the opportunities the the NSMC internship provides, misses the most important part of the internship. Joining the NSMC means joining a community of people that care about the field. You will get to work and learn from a motivated, international cohort of people who want to make nephrology and medicine better by sharing their knowledge and enthusiasm.  This cohort is not just the faculty but also the interns themselves provide a lot of the insight, education and inspiration during the year.

Applications are due by the end of the year. The application is just a couple of questions and a CV. Be thoughtful with your answers. We read every one of them. Don’t think that because you are friends with Edgar Lerma you’ve got an inside line. (One of the first lessons of the internship is that everyone is friends with Edgar.)

We have been doing this for four years and we think the internship works best for nephrology attending and fellows, but we have had success with residents, nurses, PhD candidates, and medical students, but it is harder for them. We all speak fluent potassium. Be prepared.

Apply to be an Intern 

If you have questions Tweet me up. I’m looking forward to a great year. We have done some rethinking of the curriculum and it is going to be great.

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The Nephrology Social Media Collective internship is accepting applications

The NSMC internship was created a few years ago to assure that nephrology had a surplus of dedicated people creating varied, compelling, and creative FOAMed resources. In the early years of Social Medicine, I believed that digital natives would join #NephTwitter and quickly and effortlessly create original content without guidance.

The medical school class of 2016 began high school the same year Facebook was launched. They literally have been using social media for their entire adult life.

However after a few years I became impatient with how fast young doctors were joining #NephTwitter and wanted a way to incubate these digital natives so that they could become contributors quicker.

The Digital Native Myth is the belief that young people will intuitively understand how to contribute to FOAMed.

The 90, 9, 1 rule is that for any social media experience 90% of people just consume, 9% will comment on other people’s content, and only 1% will contribute content. The idea behind the NSMC Internship is to move as many people as possible to the right. We want to move doctors from the 90% to the 1%.

A few weeks ago in New Orleans we graduated our third class of interns.

This class was our largest yet and some of the graduates are already standouts on #NephTwitter.

The interns provide us with detailed feedback to further develop our internship. Based on that feedback we are going to be adding a new module to the curriculum to teach interns how to build a website as part of a complete social media presence. One of the roles that our graduates have repeatedly been asked to fill, is to develop a social media presence for various projects. This may be for a large study, or an institution like a division or fellowship program. Our feeling is that many programs created twitter handle and that is where they stop. In order to have a real social media presence, Twitter needs to be backed up by by a website and a blog. We are now going to teach our interns how to do that in either WordPress or SquareSpace. Additionally we will teach them how and when to use Medium.

So drop an application and join us. It will be great.