Clinical lectures

Here is the result of a 1 hour lecture on geriatric endocrine. Not the most helpful whiteboard presentation, although I will forever remember the lecturer picking up the eraser with his left hand to make one swipe and keep writing right over the remaining 97% of the letters he had just written.

3rd year...

All my classmates are getting their schedules worked out for 3rd year... It's kinda going to be rough going into a lab (and there is a requirement for those first few months to be a "learning experience," or in other words, frustrating) while all my classmates go on to learn how to help and heal people... Oh well, I am loving the lab thus far (I sneak in for a few hours a week to analyse data or watch experiments).

I honestly didn't realize what I was getting myself into when applying for medical school, let alone the medical scientist training program. I mean it is a lot of work, but it also is pretty cool how much I've learned in only a year and a half.

Lab decision

In the end, it wasn't too hard deciding on a PhD lab. Funny, I thought it would have been, but knowing that 1) I am under no obligation to continue my mentor's work for the rest of my career, 2) the mentor, not necessarily the project, will ultimately make (or break) my PhD experience , and 3) at the end of the day, it is a job all made the decision finalized in my mind.

M2 year so far

So far, so good. I really enjoy learning about medicine, not just science. The first year was tough since I had to keep myself from laughing out loud when a scientist told us we'd us an equation he was trying to teach us ALMOST DAILY IN THE CLINICS. I mean, don't people become doctors to get away from math?

And I heard another funny comment (though I forget if I published the others about a some med students not being able to multiply 1/2 by 1/2 without a calculator, or one confusing "Nebraska" for "Alaska"). After getting a tour from a rad onc resident of the radiation therapy room and him showing us how the walls were 4+ feet thick concrete to keep the stray radiation from giving the techs cancer, a fellow student asked if the doc stood inside the room while people get their radiation. After hearing that, I decided to change the topic of my PhD research to figure out a better way to screen incoming med students. Ha ha just kidding, although really, I understand why people are hesitant to come to teaching hospitals...

Speaking of research labs, I'm in a little bit of a bind on my research lab. A lab I am thinking would fit me great doesn't have funding, but my 2nd choice lab has funding to burn. So we'll see what happens in a few months when I get around to writing in this more. I stopped blogging since I have a real journal now. It's actually very therapeutic to write, so I encourage you all to stop reading this and go write!

2nd summer rotations

So deciding on a PhD (and ultimately what general field) I'm going to focus on seems like it will not be as hard as I thought it would be. That's probably because I came into this program thinking I'd have to find that lab that would enable me to save the world. Such lofty ambitions...
Now, I am perfectly content with just being a piece in a bigger puzzle--that's how science is these days--working together as a team to figure out some (probably obscure yet hopefully useful) new thing.
Anyways, it seems like stabbing at the dark seems to be working for me--the labs I rotated in were great experiences, but I ended up choosing them not because they were the labs with the most papers I was interested in or the labs with even the coolest projects in my opinion--they were labs other people enjoyed that had pretty cool projects that got better as I worked on them.
So that's my 2 cents on the importance of wasting hours and hours reading abstracts, papers, grants and stressing about what lab to rotate in.

First year finals...

So I have not been diligent at all about posting on this blog, and I don't think it matters too much since no one is getting RSS feeds from this blog, hanging on to every word I type.
None-the-less, I'll do my best to write my feelings so that when people ask, "How was med school?" I'll possibly remember to say something more than "annoying yet exciting."
So this past semester, I have been annoyed a lot on how many basic scientists come to lectures and tell us how we are going to use the Nernst (or any other random) equation every day in the clinics so it is imperative we memorize it like we have our SSN's ingrained into our frontal, ocipital, temporal, and any other lobes of our brains.
Sadly, the teaching of medical biochemistry, for example, is taken on by biochemists rather than teachers. I can't blame schools for doing it this way, but some of those scientists are very removed from applying their science to patient care. Not a problem except that we are at a 'free-standing' medical school.
I have also been excited a few times learing something new and interesting about our bodies. Like that chemicals in chili peppers trigger can trigger heat receptors--so take that whoever told me to say "spicy" and not "hot" when describing food! Same thing with cool receptors and mint. Unfortunately, a good chunck of what I learn will have little to do with what I use other than at dinner conversations or when kids ask "Why?" repeatedly.
So that feels good to get out my beef about medical school.
Now about labs this summer--I finalized two, one kinda on the fly and not super thought out I decided on like in February (not a good idea now that I think about it--I'll explain later). The other I took my time in asking around, and reading a lot. The problem with deciding on the first lab was that in taking my time, asking around, and interviewing, I came across 3 or so labs that I thought would be even cooler than the lab I decided on early. But I'm sure that the labs will work out great for me this summer--I am going in occasionally to practice pipetting and stuff, and it will be fun.
Oh and one story--I skipped out on as much as I could during "orientation week" at school so I could run a few more experiments in the lab, and it turns out that those experiments churned out good enough data that I have my name on a paper, and boy does it feel good!
In summary, don't finalize labs until you've "tasted" more than like 10, and skip out on med school orientation week so you can do more science!

Grades

So I received my first OSCE grade and was slightly disappointed. Subjective grades stink!