A day in the life of a medical student from Ukraine

You have just set off from home to attend your placement or to meet your friends for a cocktail or a cup of coffee. Life goes on as usual, until it doesn’t. When you hear the bomb alarm, life as you know it stops. You make your way back to your bathroom at home, your local subway station, or wherever else martial law has dictated is your closest safe place. “You don’t go to medical school: you wait until it ends. It might be 30 minutes; it might be five hours.”

Natalia Pidmurniak is a final year medical student in Ukraine. When she began her studies in Kyiv aged 17, she had an ordinary university experience in “a very European city.”The latter years of her studies have been anything but ordinary.

Before she became a medical student, Natalia was aware of the work of the Ukrainian Medical Students’ Association—even using their example of a large community of medical students to convince her parents to approve of her move to the capital city. She never thought that one day she would be the organisation’s president. She started out as assistant to the organisation’s national exchange officer. In this role “I worked tirelessly to make the path to my dream [international] internship clearer and more straightforward.”

When the national exchange officer’s term ended, Natalia assumed his role and was part of the Ukrainian delegation to the European Regional …