COMMENTS, REVIEWS & TESTIMONIALS
What Students Said
“When I was a first-year student, Dr. Lord inspired me to pursue my goal—at the time—of going to medical school. As I participated in Dining Dilemmas and eventually joined the Steering Committee, I interacted with similarly-driven peers to create a program that nearly every pre-med student has engaged with over the years. Recently, I changed career plans away from medicine, and I have tremendously valued being able to contribute to the Dining Dilemmas discussion as an economics major, and I am looking forward to future discussions with this outstanding group of students and professors.”
“Dining dilemmas was one of those intangible aspects of my resume that was an easy talking point in my dental school interviews. In a pool of applicants with very similar (and well-qualified) credentials, dining dilemmas certainly helped me stand out from the rest. I felt more competent discussing national health care and current issues in medicine, like telehealth and health service trips, because of these discussions. They are also a great way to bring a majority of pre-med students together from across all majors. It’s a great opportunity to share dinner with the peers who are going through the exact same challenges and courses as you are.”
“Dining Dilemmas has helped me in two ways. First, it prepared me for my M1 Medical Ethics course by teaching me to analyze medical ethics from the viewpoint of a provider and the viewpoint of a patient. It was common for many of the students in my class to think as if they were the provider in each situation; however, thinking about ethics from both viewpoints gave me the ability to see where issues in our healthcare stem from, allowing me to excel in the course. Second, it prepared me for medical school interviews. Each interviewer I had asked about medical ethics or healthcare, and learning about these topics through Dinning Dilemmas allowed me to have elaborate and structured responses for these questions.
“Dining Dilemmas gave me the opportunity to step outside of the stressful, pre-med, ‘work, work, work’ bubble and to engage with my peers early on about topics that are incredibly relevant to my medical education. It humanized the work for me and it introduced me to my current roommate and dearest friend.”
“Dining Dilemmas has been the perfect platform to allow for discussion among all disciplines. It has been an absolute pleasure to meet and interact with a variety of students, most of whom I have never met before. Each student brings with them a unique viewpoint to the ethical dilemma at hand which I had never before thought about, thus further stimulating the discussion and opening my eyes to new ways of thinking. It has developed interactions among all grades and even developed communication outside of the event itself. It has been a pleasure and a very valuable experience to be a part of dining dilemmas, as both a participant and a leader.”
“The Dining Dilemmas program was a wonderful opportunity to be introduced to some of medicine’s greatest ethical challenges in a supportive and fun environment. I believe it is an invaluable experience for future healthcare students to be exposed to some of the conundrums they will face in their careers ahead of time, while still a Wake Forest undergraduate student able to take a moment to contemplate these issues more fully than would be possible in later life. Dining Dilemmas provides a wonderful foundation for the development of the critical thinking skills required to approach any bioethical debate.”
“Dining Dilemmas challenged me to think deeply with a creative and philosophical mind as our discussions forayed into the biggest biomedical ethics questions of our time. The program allowed me to debate eugenics, euthanasia, and global contagion. More undergraduate programs should mirror Dining Dilemmas’ conversational approach to active learning, engagement, and critical thinking development.”
“Dining Dilemmas challenged me to think deeply with a creative and philosophical mind as our discussions forayed into the biggest biomedical ethics questions of our time. The program allowed me to debate eugenics, euthanasia, and global contagion. More undergraduate programs should mirror Dining Dilemmas’ conversational approach to active learning, engagement, and critical thinking development.”
“Being part of Dining Dilemmas was what motivated me to start a chapter of the Latino Medical Student Association (LMSA) at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine Greenville. Dinning Dilemmas created an environment where students could discuss the complexity of our current healthcare system. LMSA runs similar to Dinning Dilemmas, we pick a healthcare topic, specifically one that affects minorities in Greenville county, and discuss ethical and medical barriers to solving the problem. Currently we are discussing and doing research on how the current political climate has affected the access and use of the Greenville Hospital system by Latino patients.”
“I still remember going to my very first Dining Dilemmas event as a wide-eyed and naïve pre- med who far too often had his nose stuck so deep in a textbook that he neglected to look around and take in the big picture. The topic of the day was related to “medical tourism” volunteering trips in the context of global health, and in the process of making great new friends and sharing in an eye-opening discussion that night I came to see this issue from countless angles that I had previously never even thought to explore.”
“… to this day I am still grateful not just for the ideas that the events allowed me to contemplate, but for the way I was forced to step outside my comfort zone and consider issues from a variety of perspectives that had previously gone unnoticed to me. Dining Dilemmas exposed me to a handful of critical ethical issues in modern healthcare that I still grapple with today as a medical student, but most importantly it taught me how to think in a way that I had previously not been exposed to. ”
