Meet the Medical Educators Behind MedStudy––Jordan Karlitz, MD

During our September Internal Medicine Review Course, we met with MedStudy contributor Jordan Karlitz, MD and discussed his passion for medical education and teaching. Dr. Karlitz walks the walk when it comes to helping you prepare for the gastroenterology section of the boards—in fact, he took his gastroenterology board exam in May 2016 and scored in the top 1% of test takers. While speaking with Dr. Karlitz, we could feel his passion for helping our attendees increase their confidence in preparation for their exams.

Medical School: McGill University Faculty of Medicine, Montreal

Residency: Columbia University Medical Center, New York Presbyterian Hospital

Current Position: Associate Professor of Gastroenterology at Tulane in New Orleans

Position with MedStudy: Course Speaker

MedStudy: How/When did you know you wanted to be a doctor?

Jordan Karlitz: In college, I was a genetics major and I was on a Ph.D. track, then the summer after I graduated I worked in a lab and I decided that I wanted to take a few years off and travel around. I traveled through Idaho and Europe figuring out what I wanted to do. I decided that medicine would be a good balance while taking care of people, but, it’s not like from a very young age I knew I wanted to be a doctor.

MS: How did you know internal medicine/gastroenterology was right for you?

JK: I like that in internal medicine you get a wide breadth of specialty exposure. I always thought that I was probably going to be doing a specialty. When I was an intern, one of my staff supervising professors was a gastroenterologist and kind of exposed all of the great things I could do in GI. Also, you can take care of patients for periods of time.

MS: What is the most rewarding part of your current position?

JK: I would say, because I am in a university setting, I have a balance of everything. I get to see patients, I get to teach, and I get to do research. I think I am pretty lucky to get to do each of those things concurrently, and each kind of feeds off of each other. So, I have this synergistic exposure to everything.

MS: What advice do you have for a current resident?

JK: Take advantage of every minute of your training and learn as much as you possibly can in residency and interning. You learn your patterns for taking care of patients during these three formative years. In your core three years of residency training, you really learn how to take care of patients and develop skills to be thorough. You learn you are doing everything adequately and that you have the opportunity to interact with faculty members and ask as many questions as you can to learn. Then, you are out and are on your own. That being said, when you are out on your own there are still opportunities to learn—for example, courses like this. But, those three concentrated years are the bulk of what is going to help you function later on.

MS: What advice do you have for those preparing to recertify?

JK: I think the best thing to do is to stay up to date, over the years, to begin with. There is a 10-year gap between when you first certify and when you recertify. I think that the best thing to do is to stay up to date on literature so that just a few months before the exam there are no surprises. More importantly, [keep]up to date on taking care of patients and up to date on guidelines when they come out. You don’t want to go years and years and not know that guidelines were updated and learn that you were not applying them to patient care beforehand.

MS: Favorite thing to do in Denver while you were here for the course?

JK: My family and I went to Boulder; we went to Chautauqua Park. So, my kids are 6 and 8 and I was kind of surprised at how tough they were in terms of getting to the high elevation. I didn’t think they were going to go very far, but we did about a 3-mile hike at about 6,600 feet, and my son who is only 6 just wanted to keep going. So that was the best part of our trip!