The end of Combating Climate Change (just the column!)
(05/08/23 6:13pm)
Dear Readers,
Published by the Students of Johns Hopkins since 1896
May 29, 2023
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Dear Readers,
Over a year has passed since I started searching for students preparing to apply for medical school for Project MD 2027. It’s hard to believe that, when reconnecting with three of these students in the past month, all had already received their acceptances to medical school. While a year is still an awfully long time to wait, as a writer, it has felt like time flew by.
Recently, President Biden has come under criticism for considering support for the Willow Project, a $6 billion new oil and gas drilling project that would take place in the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska. The Willow Project is led by ConocoPhillips, self-proclaimed as “Alaska’s largest oil producer.”
In recent decades, there has been increased attention to the growing prevalence of clinician burnout in the U.S. A 2012 national study of burnout among U.S. physicians found that rates of physician burnout are alarmingly high. Physicians in specialties at the front line of care access — emergency medicine, general internal medicine and family medicine — face the highest risk of burnout. Compared to other U.S. workers, physicians not only work longer hours but also significantly struggle with work-life integration.
Earlier this month, President Joe Biden delivered his State of the Union Address, noting that there is a still lot more to do for climate change reform. Looking at this remark as a climate change columnist, I recognize there has been some headway in climate change reform, but it seems that President Biden glossed over properly discussing the issue of climate change. This makes me wonder: Are we doing enough?
Shihua Chen had a polished answer ready when asked why she wanted to be a doctor in an interview with The News-Letter. After all, she had already prepared for her medical school interviews this past fall. Chen first explained how her father’s doctorate in chemistry encouraged her love of science when she was young, but she became interested in the human mind and behavior as she got older. For Chen, medicine seemed like a way to bridge these two interests together.
What would you do if the island you were living on was sinking? While this is definitely not an easy question to answer, it is a question that those who are living on many small, tropic islands are facing. Inundation is a threat that many islands are now facing due to climate change and rising sea levels. Let’s discuss what rising sea levels mean for island nations (and possibly even larger continents).
Throughout the semester, my conversations with Hopkins medical professionals about the cognitive, emotional and physical impacts of long COVID often left me wondering about the future. What type of support beyond medical treatment exists for individuals whose daily lives continue to be disrupted by long COVID? How are these individuals maintaining employment or keeping up with the demands of school?
Only a couple of weeks ago, the 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference, also known as COP27, convened to discuss major issues around climate change. While these big conversations are great, it is important that smaller conversations on a community or individual scale happen as well. Starting to discuss climate change is undoubtedly difficult. It doesn’t tend to be a light dinner table conversation.
Pranav Samineni, a recent graduate currently working in a stroke lab at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, knew coming into Hopkins that he wanted to be a doctor.
Starting in mid-June of this year, the increased intensity of monsoon rains have led to flooding conditions over certain parts of Pakistan. A monsoon can refer to the rainy season created by a change in wind patterns or a dry season. However, in Asian regions, monsoons mainly refer to the rainy season. But how is climate change connected to these floods?
Sean Carroll is a name familiar to those engaged with the world of science communication. As a physicist, Carroll’s work over the last three decades covered cosmology, relativity and quantum field theory. In addition to his research, Carroll is a best-selling author of five books including The Particle at the End of the Universe, Something Deeply Hidden and his newest book The Biggest Ideas in the Universe: Space, Time, and Motion.
As the COVID-19 pandemic rages on, respiratory symptoms such as fatigue, dyspnea, chest pain and cough are some of the most common post-COVID symptoms among both hospitalized and non-hospitalized patients. As such, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has been working to improve its identification of symptoms and diagnoses experienced by patients with persistent respiratory conditions post-COVID.
Smrithi Upadhyayula, a senior at the University of Texas at Dallas, was already resigned to the fact that her email inbox would stay packed for the rest of her medical school application cycle. Every day, there seemed to be updates from one school or another about transcripts that needed to be updated or rec letters that needed to be resubmitted.
The political side of climate change has been slightly quiet until recently. However while Trump was president, we did see movement — unfortunately in the backward direction. In one of my previous articles, I wrote about how Trump took the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement. This step was not exactly surprising, but it did remove the commitment of the U.S. to reduce its greenhouse gas production. Trump also reduced the Environmental Protection Agency’s funding by a third.
There are still many unknowns surrounding long COVID — also called long-haul COVID, post-acute COVID-19, post-acute sequelae of SARS CoV-2 infection, long-term effects of COVID, chronic COVID, post-COVID conditions (PCC) and post-COVID-19.
When asked what my majors are, I often hear the same response: “Interesting.”
“The satisfaction of seeing something on paper and in my head become a reality, and especially when it does something — for example if it moves, or makes sounds... even if it’s something small... that is what I find most rewarding about mechanical engineering.”
Dear freshmen,
“The mathematical universe is an elegant and structured universe, and using a few axioms we can build up a rich foundation which can be applicable to many fields,” Director of Undergraduate Studies for Applied Mathematics and Statistics (AMS) Donniell Fishkind said.