Fulbright International Summer Institute in Pamporovo

While many of my university colleagues were going abroad to gain more hospital experience, I jetted off to Bulgaria to gain some less clinical, but not less important, skills-leadership, communication, and negotiation. These were taught at the Fulbright International Summer Institute in Pamporovo, a wonderful mountain resort in Bulgaria. After I had passed a tiring round of questions like, "Why on earth did you choose to study even in your summer holidays?" and "What does this have to do with medicine anyway?" and had travelled for a considerable length of time on an eastern European train, I found myself surrounded by people with different subject backgrounds from all over the world.

STEVE RUARK/AP

E-medicine: high speed diagnosis from afar

The first workshop I attended was on computer mediated communication in international contexts. "But how is this important to medical students?" you may ask. Well, considering that doctors communicate with people from all over the world using computers and create strong professional communities in the virtual world, it is fairly important to be able to communicate effectively. Information technology and the digital era are changing the face of medicine worldwide-welcome to telemedicine and e-medicine.

As tomorrow's doctors, medical students will be increasingly exposed to computer mediated communication to interact with our colleagues or our patients in different racial, cultural, or social settings. This development flags up a wide range of issues. We need to be aware of and understand security and privacy online; offline and online identities; influences of race, culture, and gender online; the digital divide between the poor and the rich countries; and the dangers of interacting and spreading medical information online.

Learning leadership skills is something that is relevant to most medical students and it was the focus of another workshop. Every field has its leaders who set the direction for that field, including students' organisations and councils, medical societies, hospital and research teams. Being an effective leader is not always easy, as it involves dealing with sensitive issues like power, implementing change, motivating and disciplining, and overcoming generation gaps. If you think of becoming a leader in your field, you may need to be aware of all these issues.

Conflict resolution

Conflict resolution and negotiation was the subject of my third course. In all aspects of life and in all professional fields, people sometimes need to negotiate or solve conflicts. And medicine is no exception-there is a regular need to resolve conflicts and negotiate, as medicine involves a great deal of teamwork. Doctors work with other doctors from the same specialty and from different ones. They also have to work with nurses, patients, researchers, officials, and hospital managers-these all provide potential sources of conflict and it is important to know how best to solve them. This course taught me some good ways to do that. We had to play parts and reach agreements from different perspectives and positions. From conflict resolution to cross cultural negotiation, I learnt a lot about listening to the other side, identifying common interests, building relationships, preparing and managing a negotiation, and mediating a conflict within organisations.

Professors from renowned American universities took the workshops. On a personal level, I especially enjoy the American way of teaching, which is more practical, more interactive, and more explicit than what I am used to in Romania. But despite the high quality of the teaching, it was the participants who added the interest to the two weeks in Bulgaria. We created a diverse environment that varied in nationality (from Pakistani to Romanian), culture, profession (from students to managers), studies (from philosophy to business), and age (from 18 to 65). And the diversity added to the whole learning experience.

Being a good doctor requires more than just having good clinical skills, and medical schools sometimes overlook that. This is why this kind of course is something I would recommend to all medical students. I developed a deeper understanding of the skills taught in the workshops, made some new friends, learnt about other cultures, and did some professional networking. Is this all connected to medicine or not? You judge.