Interview – Amsterdam Medical Student journal

Interview: Prof. dr. L. Vermeulen

Prof. dr. L. Vermeulen

In October 2017 Prof. dr. Louis Vermeulen became
the youngest professor ever at the AMC. He received a lot of media attention from outlets such as Medisch Contact, RTL and many others. Meanwhile,
he is still in training to become a specialist in internal medicine. We were keen in interviewing the just 33-year-old professor about his success in research, his view on the medical curriculum and the future of medicine in general. But of course, we had to ask one question first:

Interview: dr. N.W.C.J. van de Donk

dr. N.W.C.J. van de Donk

Area of expertise

Multiple Myeloma, Monoclonal gammopathy of undetermined significance (MGUS), Smouldering multiple myeloma and immunotherapy.

Interview: prof. dr. U. Beuers

Area of expertise Cholestatic and autoimmune liver and bile duct diseases. When did you decide to become a physician? As a child, I had grown up on a ‘Zauberberg’ (Thomas Mann) next to a hospital for pulmonary diseases - my…

Interview: prof. dr. J.A. Romijn

prof. dr. J.A. Romijn

Area of expertise

Neuroendocrine diseases and diabetes mellitus.

Current position

Chairman, Board of Directors, AMC and dean of AMC.

Interview: dr. N. van der Velde

dr. N. van der Velde

My first job was at the department of clinical geriatrics at Slotervaart hospital. Your first job is always exciting. It is a lot to take in, an exhilarating experience. During my final internship at the clinical geriatrics department, I learned that this was the domain I wanted to pursue. I felt that geriatrics reflected what I thought the essence of being a doctor. In geriatrics, the patient is observed holistically, opposed to addressing a single organ system. We look from the somatic, psychiatric as well as the functional and social perspective.

Interview: dr. M. Muller

dr. M. Muller

Looking back, I made a detour in my career to become an internist-geriatrician. I have always liked working with elderly. For example, during high school I already had a summer job in an elderly home. Nonetheless my interest in working with the elderly patients came much later. After high school, I initially started studying in the field of Human Movement Sciences. I enjoyed classes in neurology and the musculoskeletal system. I found that I did not only want to know about these subjects but also treat patients, therefore I switched to studying medicine, after my master.

Interview: prof. dr. S. Middeldorp

prof. dr. S. Middeldorp

Looking back at my career – hopefully I can still look ahead as well!

At the age of 14, I already knew I wanted to study medicine and since then I luckily never doubted that choice. I studied medicine here in Amsterdam at the AMC. It was during clinical lectures that I found out about my interest in internal medicine and my enthusiasm for this specialty was confirmed during my clinical rotations. My dream was to become a really good internist and work in a large, peripheral hospital, like the OLVG.

Interview: prof. dr. L.J. Gunning-Schepers

prof. dr. L.J. Gunning-Schepers

How did you benefit from being raised abroad?

Living abroad, for any period of time, is a rewarding experience. By seeing other cultures and their way of life, you discover your own preferences. And of course you develop an understanding for other ways of life. As for my personal career, my degree from Johns Hopkins gave me an advantage and lead in Europe, probably more than I realized at the moment.

Interview: prof. dr. T. de Vries

prof. dr. T. de Vries

I was trained as a medical doctor at the University of Groningen. This was also the place where I was trained in general practice and clinical pharmacology (PhD) and was appointed as lecturer in clinical pharmacology in 1980, later combined with work in general practice. In 1996 I accepted a professorship in Pharmacology and Pharmacotherapy at the department of Medical Pharmacology at the VU University Medical Centre in Amsterdam.

Interview: prof. dr. Y. Smulders

prof. dr. Y. Smulders

‘Am I going to die?’, was my first reponse when I was asked to write an In Retrospect. I feel too young to write this.

Anyway, don’t expect me to ‘look back at my career’, as I truly feel as if it has just started. As a docter, I sense that my skills are improving every year still. To find the optimum between knowledge, experience, intuition and communicative skill has been a much more formidable challenge than I ever imagined when I started my career in medicine.