Our plan focuses on engaging current, not prospective medical students. We feel that AMSA’s message is diluted by broadening our efforts to try to raise our profile among potential medical students, only some of whom will end up studying medicine. With only limited resources, we need to focus on our members, and not have an untargeted shotgun approach which sets only aspirational non-specific goals.

AMSA Interest Groups (AIGs) is flexible framework for supporting and promoting niche interests of individual medical students around Australia. As outlined in the bid document, the level of support from AMSA, and its role, will be determined by which medical society the students belong to, what the niche interest is, and what the individual member/their medical society feels is an appropriate role for AMSA. This is a true grassroots approach that will help AMSA connect with its members on a far more significant level than in previous years.

Its implementation will also mean that individual medical students have an opportunity to interact with AMSA on a regular basis, in a completely different context from AMSA’s annual events such as Convention or the GHC. Hence AIG will play an important role in raising the profile of AMSA at the very grassroots level, and this will no doubt have positive flow-on effect to rest of AMSA’s activities.