Our MSIC2012 Brochure is here!
About the 2012 team
The 2012 team: Thomas Wu, Lucy Yang, Elaine Tang and Weiang Yan (left to right)
Elaine Tang
Originally from Chongqing, China, Elaine completed her Bachelor of Science in Neuroscience at the University of Toronto. She has traveled around China before, but never engaged very much with the healthcare system there. She is interested in learning about cultural differences in medical treatments between the East and West cultures and hopes to improve her medical Chinese vocabulary during the trip.
Thomas Wu
Thomas was born in Fuzhou, China and lived there until 2003 when he moved to Vancouver. He studied in Engineering Science at the University of Toronto and hopes to integrate his engineering knowledge with medical training. One of his personal interests during this trip is to observe and compare healthcare utilization and resource allocation between the Canadian and Chinese systems.
Weiang Yan
Weiang completed his undergraduate degree at the University of Toronto in 2011, specializing in Molecular Genetics. He hopes to increase his understanding of the Chinese health care system, improve his fluency in medical Chinese, as well as meet many physicians and medical students over the course of this trip.
Lucy Yang
Lucy has developed an early interest in medicine from her mother, who was a physician in China. When she was young, she visited hospitals from a child's perspective. Now, after completing an Honors Specialization in Physiology at the University of Western Ontario and embarking on her first year of medical school, she wishes to travel back to China and re-visit the hospitals from a different perspective. She is hoping to learn about the cultural influences on the healthcare system in China, as well as broadening her medical knowledge and experience.
About the Medical Students' Initiative in China
The MSIC founders, Patricia Lee and Kevin Kwan, in Hanyuan County, Sichuan, 2002.
Jean Chen, Kim-Chi Tran, Avital Harel and Xian Kang (bottom left to right) of MSIC 2007 participating in a mock surgery in Renji Hospital, Shanghai.
Medical Students' Initiatives in China (MSIC) was pioneered in 2001 by Patricia Lee and Kevin Kwan, two first-year medical students at the University of Western Ontario (UWO) in Canada. The organization was born out of their belief in the importance of international health in today's global society and their hope that MSIC would provide an invaluable opportunity for future students of diverse backgrounds to experience and participate in medical outreach in China. MSIC's first trip to China took place during the summer of 2002 and the two students worked on various public health projects for 8 weeks.
The founding objectives are:
- to develop and foster relationships and projects with key individuals and organizations in China
- to gain experience and understanding of the health care system in China
- to generate public health outreach material and participate in public health projects
- to increase our exposure to medicine from a global perspective and highlight international health issues;
- to increase awareness of Chinese culture and China's health issues at the University of Western Ontario and the local Canadian community.
Since then, MSIC has been able to successfully send students to China to visit cities ranging from the cosmopolitan Shanghai, the country capital of Beijing and more rural towns in Sichuan. As China has developed substantially since the first trip in 2002, students have also adapted their itineraries, often borrowing upon contacts established in previous years' trips. Initiatives have included observerships in traditional medicine, workshops on safe sex for adolescents and conversations with doctors to learn about China's medical training program, while always maintaining a foray into rural care and public health.
For more information on previous projects, please visit the Past Projects page.
Funding for the trip comes from a combination of private funds, donations and grants for Global Health initiatives.