Keio School of Medicine Student Ambassadors (KSAM) – A Roundtable Discussion with the Dean of the School of Medicine and the Director of the Medical Education Center –

2020/07/22

In 2019, a new "face" was born at the Keio University School of Medicine. This is the "Keio School of Medicine Student Ambassadors (KSAM)," a group formed with the purpose of having our medical students act as representatives of the school, such as by introducing the Shinanomachi Campus to guests from Japan and abroad.

KSAM had already taken on major roles, such as interviewing the 2019 Keio Medical Science Prize laureates and hosting distinguished guests from Japan and abroad. Just as they were taking strong steps to actively engage in more international activities, the spread of the coronavirus forced them to suspend all activities, and international exchanges became restricted.

Even under these various difficult circumstances, medical students, including KSAM members, are proactively working on what they can do now. Currently, in-hospital clinical clerkships are restricted to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. To prepare for their resumption and to ensure they learn correctly about infectious diseases, they took the lead in creating the "Infection Prevention Guidelines for Medical Students," developed by volunteer medical students and medical specialists.

These guidelines were highly praised and were revised for all students in healthcare fields, including nursing and pharmacy. Furthermore, in collaboration with the Keio University All Keio Student Council, they launched a special website for all Keio students titled "Keio students' Susume for COVID-19 Countermeasures" (accessible only within the university), which introduces basic knowledge and infection control measures for the novel coronavirus.

In addition, medical students are also earnestly exploring new ways of learning that require rapid adaptation, such as online classes.

Infection Prevention Guidelines for Healthcare Students

In this feature, we will share the story behind KSAM's establishment and its activities, as discussed in a roundtable discussion held before the spread of the coronavirus pandemic. The discussion featured KSAM members, Dean Masayuki Amagai of the School of Medicine, who conceived of KSAM, and Professor Toshiaki Kadokawa, Director of the Medical Education Center, who supervises KSAM's activities. We will also bring you their current voices from amidst the COVID-19 pandemic.

・Masayuki Amagai, Dean, School of Medicine, Keio University

・Toshiaki Kadokawa, Director and Professor, Medical Education Center, Keio University

・Keio School of Medicine Student Ambassadors (in alphabetical order)

Shohei Kamoke (5th-year student)

Sayaka Yoshibashi (5th-year student)

Masayuki Sato (4th-year student)

Asuka Tamura (4th-year student)

*Affiliations and titles are as of the time of the interview.

Amagai: The Keio University School of Medicine is visited by many distinguished individuals from all over the world and from all fields, not just medical sciences, including, recently, Apple CEO Tim Cook. However, until now, there have been very few opportunities for students to meet these wonderful people in person. I also thought it would be good to have a system in place to properly introduce the university to our visitors, including the new hospital building (Building 1).

That's when I came up with the idea of creating a platform for students to play a leading role. As ambassadors representing the School of Medicine, they would welcome guests, give campus tours, and experience lively, person-to-person interactions. I want them to take full advantage of this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to learn here.

First of all, why do universities exist? A university is like a vessel, a place where individual students enroll, learn, think, and grow on their own terms. Teachers support the students, but the students themselves are the main actors in their learning. If that's the case, I thought, why not have a group led by the students? I wanted visitors from outside to meet our unique and irreplaceable Keio medical students face-to-face and have them convey the appeal of Keio from a student's perspective.

Also, this means that a wonderful culture fostered among the students, rather than one taught by the faculty, will be passed down through the generations. My greatest hope was that this would lead to the inheritance of such a culture and the creation of new encounters.

Kadokawa: In 2018, the Keio University School of Medicine received accreditation from the Japan Accreditation Council for Medical Education (JACME), which all medical schools in Japan aim to acquire. According to its evaluation standards, students are the university's primary stakeholders, and it is considered extremely important to include students as stakeholders in discussions when making major policy decisions. For example, having students attend curriculum review committees. Just the other day, the dean and students had a rather heated discussion for about an hour and a half. I hope that the Student Ambassadors will also become one of those channels.

Yoshibashi: We, the Student Ambassadors, are a new organization that has just been established, but we hope to become a bridge between faculty and students, as well as between the university and the outside world, by further disseminating the appeal of the Keio School of Medicine both on and off campus.

Kadokawa: To give tours of the school as ambassadors, they first needed to know the School of Medicine well. It was difficult for them to start giving tours right after being formed, so I initially gave them the necessary lectures.

What I noticed in that process was that the students actually knew very little about the university. In other words, there were almost no opportunities to convey to students what the university was thinking.

Although the Student Ambassadors' activities are externally focused, I also want them to take on the role of sharing what they learn with their peers and communicating the direction the university is heading.

Amagai: That's right. We are working hard to improve the educational environment and the student curriculum, but we rarely have the opportunity to specifically explain the reasons behind each measure. I hope that through their position as Student Ambassadors, they will get to know their own university, their teachers, and our aspirations. And then, I hope they will share that with other students. I believe there will be discoveries and learning in that process.

Sato: When we were hosting the guests from OIST, the Dean of the School of Medicine first gave us a model hospital tour. That was the first time I learned that the colors of the walls on the south and north sides of the hospital are different, and that the indirect lighting on the ceiling was designed to evoke the image of sunlight filtering through a forest. I was surprised because I walk through there all the time but had no idea about any of that.

Kamoke: None of us knew at first about the hospital's design, or that the interior has a "Forest" (Keio no Mori) concept.

Amagai: Each floor of the new hospital building (Building 1) has a different theme tree. The floors are so large that it's easy to lose your bearings, so we changed the colors on the north and south sides. Then, because it was hard to tell which floor you were on, we changed the type of tree for each floor. The wallpaper is designed with the theme tree and its leaves. Replacing the wallpaper when it gets dirty is a lot of work, but I think we created something truly wonderful.

Kamoke: We realized we needed to study up on the School of Medicine and the hospital, so we started holding our own KSAM study sessions on topics like the hospital's occupancy rate, the number of daily outpatients, and the history of the School of Medicine and hospital. At first, we held them at conventional times like during lunch breaks or after school, but it was hard to coordinate our schedules, and we kept postponing them. Then, at one point, we decided, "No, let's just do it in the morning." Before the OIST visit, for example, we held study sessions every week starting at 7:00 a.m.

Kadokawa: A major activity after the OIST visit was the Keio Medical Science Prize award ceremony in December 2019. The Keio Medical Science Prize is a world-renowned medical prize. Starting this year, we asked the Student Ambassadors to interview the two 2019 laureates—Professor Hans C. Clevers of Molecular Genetics at the University Medical Center Utrecht, and Professor Tadamitsu Kishimoto, a Project Professor at the Immunology Frontier Research Center, Osaka University—and to host them during their visit.

Sato: The Keio Medical Science Prize is a prestigious medical prize for which Nobel-class researchers have been nominated every year. Normally, students can attend the laureates' lectures, but to be given 20 minutes to talk with them about their research and their lives was a truly wonderful opportunity.

On the day, five of the current ambassadors split into two groups of two and three to conduct intensive 20-minute interviews with each of the Keio Medical Science Prize laureates.

Meeting them in person had a completely different impact than reading materials I had found on the internet or in books. Until then, I had only read interview articles in the small print of the Keio School of Medicine newspaper, so being able to ask them directly what I wanted to know was a great experience.

Kamoke: It was truly a case of "seeing is believing." It was also a surprising discovery to hear Dr. Clevers say that he gets new ideas by sharing his own openly with many rivals, rather than keeping them to himself while reading papers.

Sato: They probably only look like successful people, but they even talked about how they deal with failure, and listening to them gave me a sense of confidence.

Kamoke: It was a real turning point in my life. I feel it had an immeasurable impact on me.

Amagai: The truth is, no one is without failure; life is mostly failure. In short, the people who keep trying until they succeed are the ones who win the Keio Medical Science Prize.

People don't write about their failures in papers; those stories only come out in very close conversations. I would be very grateful if you could sense the countless failures that lie behind their success, and then share that—it's very important not to just keep what you felt to yourselves, but to properly communicate it.

Tamura: As you said, professor, being able to speak directly with the laureates was a very valuable experience. We wrote the interview articles for the Keio Medical Science Prize ourselves, and they were published in the February issue of the Keio School of Medicine newspaper. I had almost no opportunities to be involved in something like that before, so the whole thing, including that, was a precious experience.

The above is from the roundtable discussion held before the global spread of the coronavirus pandemic.

2020 was supposed to be a spectacular year, with the Olympic and Paralympic Games being held in Japan and Keio University Hospital celebrating its 100th anniversary. However, the coronavirus spread across the globe in the blink of an eye, and in just a few months, the state of the world changed completely. International travel was restricted, and it became impossible to hold not only international exchanges but even dinner parties with friends, dramatically changing the way people communicate. Even in such circumstances, the School of Medicine must look forward and act while considering new forms of activity. While KSAM may not have the opportunity to welcome guests from overseas in person for some time, they will continue their activities in a new form, considering the mission they have been given.

Finally, we would like to share a comment from the KSAM members about the future.

The world is changing day by day in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. But it is precisely because of these times that we believe there is something KSAM can do. We will strive with a challenging spirit to be a bridge that communicates the appeal of the Keio School of Medicine and the connections between people, both inside and outside the university.

All members of the Keio University School of Medicine Student Ambassadors (KSAM)

Please look forward to the future activities of KSAM.