Iam a Third-year medical student at McMaster, and the first person in my family to step into medicine. That meant there was no older sibling, no parent, and no close family to tell me what an OSCE actually looked like, which guides were worth reading, or how to think about clinical reasoning when everything felt like an avalanche of information.
Most of what I learned, I learned the slow and hard way: by piecing together notes, asking a lot of small questions, getting things wrong, and finding mentors generous enough to walk me through what they wished they'd known earlier. Some resources existed, but they were scattered, often locked behind paywalls, or written for someone who already knew the landscape.
That gap stayed with me. So I started taking the notes I made for myself and rebuilding them in my own way. Structured. Designed. Edited until I'd actually want to read them. Not because medicine is short on study material, but because good material, openly available and relevant, still feels rare for students who don't already have someone in their corner.
Scaffold.guide is the place I'm putting that work. It's free, it always will be, and it exists because I believe the disparities I noticed coming into medicine shouldn't be the price of admission for the next student walking in.