Your First SGIM: A Primer for Students, Residents, and Fellows Attending the SGIM 2024 Annual Meeting

On behalf of the SGIM 2024 Annual Meeting planning committee, we are thrilled to welcome the many students, residents, and fellows who will attend our Annual Meeting: Strengthening Relationships and Valuing Our Diversity, May 15-18, 2024, Boston, Massachusetts (#SGIM24).

While attending a national meeting can be overwhelming at first, we planned this meeting with the needs of students, residents, and fellows in mind. The meeting’s theme is centered on finding strength in the diverse experiences of the members in our Society, especially our trainee members; we are focused on building relationships between peer and near-peer members as well as between senior and junior members. This meeting provides myriad opportunities for trainees to expand their clinical, leadership, research, and advocacy skills and positions them to launch a meaningful and fulfilling career in general internal medicine.

We want to highlight a few of the exciting opportunities for the student, resident, and fellow community. First, we have a new pre-course specifically for general internal medicine fellows. This is the first fellow-directed pre-course since the pandemic and provides a unique opportunity to network with our national community of general internal medicine fellows. The pre-course will allow fellows to receive feedback on scholarship and provides training on transitioning to junior faculty roles, job applications, and engaging with the scholarly community. The pre-course takes place on Wednesday, May 15, 2024, 11:00 AM-5:30 PM, and requires a separate $25 registration fee.¹

Our Society is committed to mentorship, and some of the most meaningful experiences at our meeting are the formal and informal interactions with others in our field. Our one-on-one mentoring program matches trainees and early career faculty with an experienced mentor with shared interests. This year, for the first time, we are also offering mentorship for residents specifically curious about pursuing general internal medicine fellowships. Mentees should come prepared with goals for the mentoring relationship and meet with their mentors at least once during the meeting. Our one-on-one mentoring program operates on a first-come, first-serve basis and mentees must sign up no later than Friday, May 3, 2024.²

Outside of the one-on-one mentoring program, our meeting includes several formal mentoring panels. On May 17, 2024, 11:30 AM-12:30 PM, we will have a career planning session for students, residents, and fellows highlighting the diversity of rewarding and impactful career paths within general internal medicine. This session will intentionally facilitate peer and near-peer mentoring with a brief structured networking period. Additional mentoring panels of relevance to trainees include parenting in medicine roundtables and career panels for clinician educators and clinician investigators. A career fair is also scheduled for May 15, 2024, 5:30-7:00 PM.

First-time attendees have many opportunities to interact and organize with other SGIM members who share similar passions and interests during breakfast and lunch interest group sessions. Interest groups are formed independently by our members and may focus on clinical interests, advocacy goals, or building communities for ourselves within medicine (such as the General Internal Medicine Fellowship, Women in Academic Medicine, or the Minorities in Medicine groups). Interest group sessions tend to be small and interactive, offering more opportunities for forming relationships around a common goal. Feel free to bring breakfast or lunch with you to these sessions!

Poster sessions are another key offering of this meeting for students, residents, and fellows. The poster sessions shine a light on our members’ groundbreaking educational, translational, research, quality improvement, and diagnostic work. Trainees often present their own scholarship in these sessions and meet others with similar academic pursuits by perusing the poster hall. Our senior members relish the chance to talk with early career clinicians about their work.

We strongly encourage our students, residents, and fellows to attend our plenary sessions that occur after breakfast May 16, 17, and 18, 2024. Plenaries will include Dr. Rochelle Walensky’s perspectives on advancing public health, Dr. Rachel Levine’s perspective as the Assistant Secretary for Health on the challenges and opportunities facing our field, and a special session on caring for victims of firearm injury led by experts Dr. Robbie Goldstein, Dr. Eric Gordon, Chaplain Clementina Chéry, and Dr. Chana Sacks. Our morning sessions also highlight some of the most inspirational work being presented by our members at this meeting. There is no competing programming during these sessions so that all members of our Society can have a shared learning experience as a community.

After the plenary sessions, attendees choose between a variety of clinical updates, workshops, poster sessions, oral presentations, and special symposia based on their own goals for the meeting. In clinical updates, content experts provide a curated review of practice-changing new evidence within a specific subfield of general medicine, ranging from primary care to geriatric medicine to perioperative care. Oral presentations and clinical vignette sessions allow for more in-depth discussions of our members’ current research or diagnostic dilemmas. In our special symposia, experts present a topic of special interest to our members. This year, for example, the popular The Clinical Problem Solvers will record a live episode of their podcast on anti-racism in medicine 8:00-9:00 AM on Saturday, May 18, 2024, as one of our symposia.

SGIM24 (#SGIM24) will also offer a variety of workshops aimed at improving clinical, research, leadership, educational, advocacy, and career development skills. Workshops blend didactics with small group activities and thrive with the perspectives of a diverse set of participants, including students, residents, and fellows. The Student/Resident/Fellow subcommittee is curating a list of workshops and other programming that may be particularly applicable to our community, and this will be posted on SGIM social media outlets closer to the meeting—so be on the lookout! This year, for example, we highlight workshops on physician employment contracts, effective teaching strategies for large group lectures, scientific and scholarly writing for beginning researchers, setting boundaries without guilt, and so many more.

Finally, outside of the formal educational and mentoring program at our meeting, we are also pleased to offer Trivia Night once again on Friday, May 17, 2024, 6:00-8:00 PM. During this popular evening event, teams compete on medical and pop-culture knowledge for bragging rights and prizes.

As the Chair and Co-Chair for students, residents, and fellows on the SGIM24 planning committee, we are incredibly excited to welcome this contingent of our Society’s membership to Boston this spring. We are confident this will be a meaningful, inspiring, and fun meeting filled with mentorship, learning, and growth. In the meantime, be sure to download the SGIM24 Online Planner³ to learn more about the meeting’s many sessions and to plan your days. We look forward to seeing you at #SGIM24!