American Medical Student Association

Contribute to The New Physician

AMSA's award-winning magazine, The New Physician (TNP), provides comprehensive coverage of issues affecting medical education and health care. Unlike some association publications, TNP is not a house organ. It operates independently within AMSA and has an editorial calendar set a year in advance. Although the publication is produced by a professional staff, there are many ways you can contribute.

Creative Arts Contest

• Our annual Creative Arts Contest runs in our Summer issue, and includes photography, poetry, painting and short stories. 

Join The New Physician's Source List

• Interested in becoming a TNP resource? Want to share your ideas with thousands of other medical students? Join our source list. Individuals on this list have agreed to receive occasional e-mails or phone calls from a TNP writer to comment on the record about a particular topic, share their experiences for a feature or even just offer their help with finding sources for a story. Just e-mail your name, phone number, e-mail address and training status to tnp@amsa.org. Your information will only be used for editorial purposes; nothing will be shared with marketing or advertising representatives.

Opinion and conversation

Letters

• Our Letters section includes letters to the editor about topics we've covered in the magazine, but it also includes short op-ed opinions. Generally, these letters are about 250 words in length. This is a great place to get involved with our magazine and start a conversation. While letters can be presented with minimal editing beyond "style and fit," our staff can also work with letter writers to make sure their argument is presented well.

Perspectives

• This department, which is almost always authored by medical or premedical students, presents and defends a particular opinion or position in a longer form than our Letters section. However, because we have fewer slots for Perspectives pieces, we strongly encourage potential authors to send us a query describing the story they'd like to write and why they are qualified to write it. This will help us see whether the piece is a good fit for the department before the contributor has gone to the trouble of writing the story. Perspectives run between 600 and 1,000 words.

Advice / service departments

Reviews

• This department includes reviews, authored by physicians-in-training, of books, software and other media useful to medical students. If you are interested in becoming a reviewer for us, e-mail tnp@amsa.org for more information.

Academic Tactics

• Intended as a lasting reference and resource, Academic Tactics delivers advice pertinent to success in medical school, advice that you can’t always get in medical school itself. For example, our Summer 2011 issue includes suggestions and resources for improving formal writing skills, and our September 2011 issue has tips on preparing strong presentations. Though many topics in this department will be particularly relevant to preclinical medical students, third- and fourth-years will also find value in its advice.

Career Counselor

• Career Counselor helps readers make long-term decisions about their practices. Some of those decisions might relate to specialty choice, while others might have to do with academic choices that could be useful further down the road.

Case of the Month

• This department challenges the reader to respond to a clinical scenario. Answers and explanations are presented on the following page. The scenarios are provided by popular exam review publishers.

Match Maker

• This periodic advice column will help medical students, especially third- and fourth-years, find and match to a great residency slot—from interview trail to rank list.

Premed Adviser

• Premedical students will find this department in every issue, giving them a consistent and predictable home for advice useful when applying to and preparing for medical school.

The Oath

• This professionalism and ethics column is intended to help medical students sort through some of the challenges and questions they face on the wards. Though it is not an advice column per se, medical ethicists and medical professionalism experts will use this space to ask and answer difficult questions. If you have a question you'd like answered, let us know: e-mail tnp@amsa.org.

Your Wellness

• This department focuses on medical students’ own health. It offers advice and ideas about how to stay sane and healthy despite the rigors of medical training.

News and information on health care and medical education

Features

• TNP’s feature stories cover a broad range of topics. Often, these stories will fit in with each issue’s theme. Most of our features are long-form, magazine-style journalism.

H&P

• As our opening section, H&P (for history & physical, the common and critical opening element of a patient encounter) provides readers with at-a-glance updates and easily digestible information about medical education, health care, and the lives of medical students.

Staff Note

• Authored by a member of the magazine’s staff or Editorial Advisory Board, Staff Note introduces the issue’s theme and highlights particular stories. It can also give readers a glimpse into how a particular story came together or explain a new development in the magazine itself.